Forays Into Korean Literature

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy reading. I’ve written about my love of reading literature by Anne Tyler, and I’ve focused on my enjoyment of autobiographies, including those of John Kerry and Madeleine L’Engle. Lately, I’ve been reading literature with ties to Korea. This probably isn’t surprising, given the interest I have in the country after having lived there for a year on a Fulbright grant. Ever since then, I’ve been intrigued by Korean history and culture.

One of the books I’ve read recently with a focus on Korea is Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung by Min Kym. This book is an autobiographical memoir written by a former child prodigy violinist who was born in Korea and raised in the United Kingdom. In it, she deals with her upbringing and professional career, touching on the role Korean culture played in her life and her conflicted feelings about her talent.

A major event that occurred in the book was the theft of her beloved Stradivarius violin. I had never known the intimacy of the relationship between leading violinists and their instruments, but apparently, it’s quite profound. As a result, Kym suffered from grief and loss when her violin was taken.

In the aftermath of her loss, Kym tried to raise funds to re-purchase her stolen violin. She described her feelings at that time, writing: 

What had I got to show for my life? It was gone, and had been gone for two and a half years. Meetings were mirages of hope, fading into nothing when decision time came; no one was interested. And the more you’re turned down, the more you start to panic. You start to think you’re unclean, untouchable, that there’s a mark on your head, or a placard around your neck, failure in your eyes and the way you stand. (182)

The hopelessness and despair she felt is palpable in this quotation. It seemed to her that her life was pointless and that she was displaying this pointlessness for all to see in her expression and her posture. This passage illustrates the feelings of panic she experienced as she was thrown into repeating cycles of disappointment when others denied her the ability to achieve her hopes.

How many of us have felt similar rejection and sorrow? I know I have, and this is what makes her book so relatable. Even though I’ve never been a prodigy, never played the violin, never been lauded by the world press, I can relate to her human feelings in her time of distress.

Another book with Korean ties I recently read was The Court Dancer by Kyung-Sook Shin. This book is set in the final years of the Joseon Dynasty at the end of the 19th century, and it tells the tale of an orphan girl who becomes a dancer at the royal palace. I didn’t live in the 19th century, I’ve never been an orphan, and even though I loved dance classes when I was young, I never rose to the level of being selected as an elite dancer. So, like Min Kym’s book, there are differences between me and the main character that would make it seem I couldn’t relate. However, I did.

One reason why I related to the book is its description of how one of the characters was treated despite a disability. Yi Jin, the orphaned palace dancer, was raised along with Yeon, a fellow orphan. Yeon was as close as a brother to Yi Jin, although he also harbored feelings of romantic affection for her, so when she became old enough to stay at the palace permanently, he became a daegum player in the royal palace to stay close to her (a daegum, also spelled daegeum or taegum, is a large Korean flute made of bamboo). 

Daegeum player. (Wikimedia/Badagnani)

 

Yeon was unable to speak. This perhaps could be due to the trauma he suffered in the time he roamed alone as an orphan before he was taken in by the woman who raised him along with Yi Jin, or perhaps it could be due to a congenital defect. The reason was never made clear, but no matter the reason, his disability did not affect his ability to play the daegum.

At one point in the book, the French legate to Korea, Victor, remarked to Bishop Blanc, a French Roman Catholic missionary to Korea, about Jeon’s acceptance in the royal palace. Bishop Blanc replied, “Korea’s treatment of the disabled has that in favor of the French. They do not particularly discriminate against or exclude them. Not even as royal court musicians” (134). These sentences in particular stood out to me because they resonated with an experience I had in Korea.

When I lived in Korea, I taught in a boys’ middle school. One of the boys in this school was unable to communicate verbally. He was able to grunt and laugh, but he did not form words. Yet, he was integrated into a mainstream classroom rather than placed in a special education classroom as I had seen previously in the United States.

I volunteered in the special education classroom as part of the gifted and talented program I was enrolled in when I was in elementary school. I remember helping a girl named Vicky hold her pencil while she completed addition problems on a worksheet. This girl must have been a teenager at the time, but here she was, in a classroom in the basement of an elementary school being tutored by an elementary school student. Despite how she may have felt about me (I confess I don’t know, as she didn’t speak much), I considered Vicky a friend, and I made sure to always spend some time with her when our times on the playground overlapped.

I’m not sure which system is better—integrating students with developmental delays into mainstream classes with their age group peers, or separating students with developmental delays based on their cognitive abilities. It does seem that, as Bishop Blanc suggested in the book, there could be some benefits to the integration approach when it comes to the way people with developmental differences are treated by society. On the other hand, it could be that some more specialized attention paid to that middle school boy I remember from my time in Korea could have helped him learn to communicate more effectively. What’s the right solution? I don’t know, but this book resonated with me as I pondered the situation.

I’ve read a few other books with Korean ties lately, including The Calligrapher’s Daughter and The Kinship of Secrets by Eugenia Kim. Like The Court Dancer, these are pieces of historical fiction, meaning they are fictionalized accounts of real historical periods. They are also based in the author’s family history, so while not autobiographical to the extent that Min Kym’s book is, there are also some overlaps with that literary tradition.

The Calligrapher’s Daughter tells a story of life in Korea during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1910 to the end of WWII, while The Kinship of Secrets focuses on the life of a family of Korean immigrants to the United States during and after the Korean War. Both of these books focus on family relationships, including generational differences; the role of women in society; and racial and ethnic tensions. Both contain themes that, despite the differences between me and the books’ characters and their circumstances, allowed me to identify with the characters’ emotions.

Next up in my reading list is Everything Belongs to Us, another piece of historical fiction by Yoojin Grace Wuertz. It tells a story of college students in Korea during the democratization movement of the 1970s. I’m hoping it’s as enjoyable as my other forays into Korean literature, of which I’ve just scratched the surface in this entry. What do you most enjoy reading?