Orphan-consciousness in Writing

An essay on Korean literature, Yi Gwangsu, and me

While proofreading the interview with Catherine Moscatt before it got published, what caught my attention was that I did not mention any Korean writers. The same thing inside me expressed to the outer world in another manner bugged me a bit during the years in which I wrote only in Korean.

I was sometimes asked which Korean writers influenced me. Each time, I could not find the answer. In earnest, even though I have been reading, writing, and thinking in Korean for over thirty years, I cannot think of a single Korean writer who had an impact on the way I write when it comes to fiction.

As I majored in Russian at university, it is true that I have more to say about Russian literature than Korean literature. This, however, does not mean that I have not read many works of Korean writers. One of my part-time jobs for years was teaching middle school and high school students Korean literature, after all. If someone asks me which Korean story writers are good, the first one that comes to my mind is O Jeonghui. I regard her as the best Korean short story writer alive, and possibly the best in the whole history of Korean literature. Pak Kyongni, Jeon Sang-guk, and Kim Seungok are talented too. Further back in time, Yi Hyoseok is the dandy of the colonial era I fancy (to my dismay, his most famous short story happens to be set in an idyllic background and most Koreans tend not to know how great he was at depicting the twentieth-century city life), and it is my firm belief that Yi Gwangsu deserves a reappraisal as a short story writer that surpassed the limits of his times. Yi Gwangsu was the first Korean to write modern novels and the de facto creator of the contemporary Korean language for writing, and the way Koreans write would drastically differ had it not been for him; nevertheless, frankly speaking, his novels simply suck in the way I see them while some of his less famous short pieces from his youth are surprisingly good and problematic at the same time.

I could keep writing about which Korean writers I like and what I admire about them. Still, I cannot in good conscience acknowledge that they influenced the themes or styles of my writing (again, Yi Gwangsu could be an exception, but then I would also have to credit King Sejong as he invented the Korean alphabet). Neither can I say that reading their works made me the person I am. This was somewhat troublesome, since deep down, even when trying to establish myself as a writer in Korea, I sometimes felt I had no place of my own in Korean literature. Although it is not necessary to have a Korean writer who directly influenced you to become another Korean writer, this sense of literary rootlessness was the cause of uneasiness.

The records of Yi Gwangsu’s public and personal life read as if they were straight out of Frantz Fanon’s case study. Scholars of Korean literature have often used the term “orphan-consciousness” to describe Yi Gwangsu’s psychology and its impact on his writing. He was orphaned in several senses, in that his parents had already passed away when he was eleven and he had no country to call his fatherland. Japan had annexed Korea before he turned twenty. Now that he no longer had a fatherland, he had to choose a new one: once involved in the struggle for Korean independence, he later actively collaborated with Japanese colonizers. Due to his collaboration with the Empire of Japan, Yi Gwangsu is still controversial to this day. He is the founding father of modern Korean literature, yet he proudly announced that he was a subject of the Japanese emperor and that his heirs would also live as one. In addition, he was very literate in Japanese and I consider his works in Japanese much more outstanding than his well-known novels in Korean.

To some extent, I sympathize with Yi Gwangsu. I prefer to call him Chunwon, which is his ho. Calling him not by his real name but Chunwon entails a certain mixture of empathy, affection, and reverence. When I say I sympathize with Chunwon, what I have in my mind is not that I consider myself colonized or orphaned by the Other, just as he was; rather, I was orphaned by Korean literature itself and also chose to orphan myself by cutting ties with it, if there had been any. No empire of colonizers, whether a political entity or a figure of speech as in the notion of linguistic imperialism, took my homeland away by force. It was the literature of my mother tongue that rejected me, which I wished to be part of, leading me to give up writing in Korean, pack up, and consciously and willingly leave for the land of English, figuratively speaking. I can grasp what Chunwon had in mind through this experience of mine.

In his autobiographical short story Wandering (彷徨), Chunwon writes:

I tried hard to think that Korea was my lover. However, my love for Korea did not burn so much, and neither did Korea seem to answer my love. Thus, shortly before, to Mr. Kim,

“No, I am solely alone,”

answered I, and that was it. Indeed I am alone.

Wandering was published in March 1918. This was before he began to openly propagate for Japan, and he would work for the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea based in Shanghai until 1921. My reading into this story is that, Chunwon already felt rejected by Korea, to which he had wanted to devote himself, before he sought the approval of the Japanese authorities.

English is the language of the contemporary transnational empire which abides even in people’s heads, including those who do not speak English. Even China, the government of which is trying to cut down English education, is the second biggest market for Hollywood movies, only next to the US. I would say that we, the non-Americans, are still American, or Westerners to some degree. Some consider such phenomena problematic, and I understand their reasoning.

But what do you want me to do, then? Keep writing in the language of the literature to which I have not felt the necessary connection, the literature of those who did not let me be one of them?

Go say it to Chunwon.