Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers (Women in Translation)

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and Potent For Those Who Have Experienced Korea
Review: Having spent 1988-1993 in Korea with IBM, I began the collection of short stories with a strong cultural understanding. The stories vary from prostitution and the US Military (rate 5) to the very well crafted "A Room In The Woods" (definite 10) which uncovers the generation gap in modern Korea. "A Room In The Woods" is well worth the price of the book. A must for those interested in Korean culture.

Rating:
Summary: Depicts the social issues conflicting many younger Koreans
Review: In Kang Sok-Kyong's short story, Days and Dreams, she is able to delineate an entirely new society that exists within Korea. A society that formed as a result of blatant geopolitical decisions imposed by a foreign country. She describes the lifestyle and culture of the female Korean prostitute communities that have developed around American military bases. Kang accurately depicts the nothingness that many of these women, such as the main character have come from, and the equally poor and yet more dehumanizing lifestyle they live out now. The narrator of the story came from a family ravaged by the war and ironically makes a living now by exploiting herself to these soldiers, apparently keeping peace and security for her country. Yet for many of these women in the story, that individual sense of security is what is lacking from many of their lives. Even one of the characters, Sun-ja goes to extreme circumstances to pose as a lesbian just to marry an American woman to relieve herself of her the situation she was currently in. Kang accurately describes the inhumane treatment that many of these women are put up, sometimes even by their own family members in order to pay a sibling's tuition or something of the sort. The narrator describes the tragic rape and murder of a friend who was killed by a Korean man. When upon asking what his motives were in the killing, he simply said that "she'd lived it up with the GIs and then give him leftover sex." All she essentially gave him was some leftovers by foreigners. Kang basically centralizes her story on the notion of Korea, being a country dependent upon "living off other countries' leftovers." And ultimately the lifestyle's that many of these women lived was to sustain themselves economically, while in the meantime exploiting their bodies in order to fulfill this requirement. Meanwhile the foreigners there, such as Overton, the playmate of the narrator, was a womanizer and philanderer, and at the same time was apparently married back in the US. Kang is able to bring to the reader the harsh rituals that many of these women must endure in order prevent themselves from becoming fully impoverished, but in the meantime, selling their souls out to the hearts of the foreigners. In Kang's novella, A Room in the Woods, she is able to depict a modern day Korean family influenced by neo-Confucian doctrine, yet each individually upholding different social values and had different notions of thought of their roles within society. The story focuses on the differing behavior of three daughters within the household of a clearly patriarchal family. The father is a successful businessman with an educated and intelligent wife who acts as homemaker. They have four children, the three daughters, and the youngest being a son, who is never mentioned, but as a signification favor he must endure being the only male child, and also the youngest. Amongst the three daughters, the older, the narrator of the story is the typical Korean woman. She graduated majoring in piano, plans to get married and not even work, yet she seems practical enough to always be looking after herself and her sister. Hye-Yang, the next eldest sister is the proverbial daughter, studying to go to medical school, she is smart and intelligent. The youngest of the daughters is So-Yang, the street-savvy and rebellious daughter who had just dropped out of college, she was sick of Korean standards of social qualms and was never afraid to speak against Korean society. Since the story focuses on the whereabouts and concern of So-Yang, since we she has left college, Kang muddles the reader with excerpts from her diary that her oldest sister falls upon. We learn through her diary of the possibility that she could be a manic-depressive. She also seems slightly suicidal, yet what seems to worry her sister the most is her tenacity at being sexually active and possibly promiscuous. Unlike the situation of the women in Days and Dreams, So-Yang uses sex as an instrument to her advantage, not as a means of economic power. Sex for her is a means of empowering herself, since she seems to have nothing else to fallback on. Yet she isn't the conventional Korean daughter, a product of a middle-class family. She is an active social demonstrator, smokes blatantly outside in public, serves as a hostess in a bar, but all the while does not submit to the languid and crass behavior to the men she encounters. She quits her job out of disgust when a man tips her down her shirt. What also complicated her situation were the stark differences she had with her father, a man clearly dependent upon Confucian thought and traditional behavior of the family. Her failure to enroll in college as well as her nightly prowling and partying enraged her father who out of frustration became abusive. Meanwhile her mother played the role of the silent, submissive type well by not being active in disciplining her children, but merely watching her husband do it all. Kang describes these tensions that assumably are evident in many Korean households as a potentially dangerous environment in which an outcome may be similar to that of the So-Yang's.