by Cho Se-hui
“You’re going to tell me again you don’t like me anymore?”
“No, it’s just that you scare me. And the thing that scares me is your state of mind.”
And when he looked at Squatlegs, Squatlegs was shivering all over. The water he’d poured over himself at the amusement park had left his clothes wet. There was also the dampness from his perspiration, and the night air lacked warmth. Insects sang in a weed patch to their right. Except for the insects that lived in the weeds, nothing was safe.
Humpback jumped over the drainage ditch beside the highway and the cries of insects abruptly stopped. He pulled out two signposts standing among some little pine trees. He set down the posts and plank signs in the ditch and broke them with rocks. He gathered the pieces, poured kerosene from the lantern onto them, then put a match to them. Squatlegs scooted to the fire. They heard a lone car. The car sped toward their fire. Humpback ran out onto the asphalt and hailed it. The small car swept by.
Squatlegs retreated from the fire and sat back. Steam rose from his body. The pocket on the right side sagged limply. In it were wire and the sharpened blue steel of his knife. Together with these were the three thousand wŏn in emergency money that he carried with him. He had added a zipper to the pocket. “No matter what happens,” he would say, “I have to head for the little ones and their mom.”
“Sure,” Humpback would say.
Next to speed up was a bulky refrigerator truck. Humpback removed his shirt and waved it. The truck had just passed Humpback when it changed lanes and came to a stop. Humpback ran to the truck and knocked on the driver’s door, hopping up and down in agitation. Squatlegs clenched his teeth ferociously.
The driver, exhausted from driving at night, stuck his head out the window. He saw a hunchback with a horribly bent spine waving toward a small creature scooting over the asphalt. The driver was spooked. He barely heard the knocking on his door as he drove off.
“Son of a bitch!” Squatlegs shook his fist at the bulky truck.
Again they could hear insects.
“Look at that!” Humpback suddenly shouted.
“Look at what?” said Squatlegs. “What do you see?”
“It flew into the woods.”
“How do you know? Your night vision’s no good.”
“I saw the light!”
“You mean a firefly?”
“Yeah, a firefly.”
“Your eyes are playing tricks on you,” said Squatlegs. “Fireflies are extinct.”
“How come?”
“The people in this world have ganged up and killed them
off.”
“They must have missed one.”
“I said your eyes are playing tricks on you.”
“And I’m telling you I saw it.”
“Shit,” grumbled Squatlegs. “No cars coming. And now fireflies—what the hell. We can’t let The Boss get away. I’ve got to cut that son of a bitch’s stomach open, then get back to the baby rabbits. Got to buy a rabbit hutch.”
“Come here.”
“Cut it out.”
“Maybe my night vision’s no good, but I can see that.”
As Humpback had said, it was quite visible. There below them, alongside the river’s outline revealed in the starlight, stood a large building. It was at a distance, but its numerous lights made it seem as if the building had bored a hole in the darkness.
“A factory, isn’t it?” said Squatlegs.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“You mean it’s not?”
“It’s a penitentiary.”
“You mean a jail?”
There were still no vehicles on the expressway.
Now it was Humpback who asked. “You know who was in there?”
“Huh?” Squatlegs didn’t catch his friend’s meaning. And so he sat back. All he could think of was the knife in his pocket.
“Remember that midget in Felicity Precinct?” Humpback asked.
Squatlegs nodded. “The one who died in the brick factory smokestack?”
“That’s right. Well, the midget’s elder son used to be in there.”
“How come?”
“He killed a man.”
Squatlegs said nothing.
“The midget was always bragging about that son of his.”
“Yeah, he bragged quite a lot.” Then Squatlegs hesitantly asked, “You said he used to be in there?”
“He’s out.”
“How can he be out if he killed somebody?”
“He came out dead.”
“He did?”
“He was different from his father.”
“Completely different death.”
“The midget’s wife came here with her boy and girl and claimed the body. They were beyond tears. They sat for a while beside the water, then left.”
“It shouldn’t have happened.”
“So you ought to get rid of that knife in your pocket right now.”
Quite a long time passed, and still no vehicles appeared. The expressway was still concealed in darkness. There was no way to tell the time. The two friends were sad. Just then Humpback discovered a small living thing that was sending out light in the darkness. It flew low over the asphalt. “Look!” he shouted. And then, by the sheerest coincidence, Squatlegs heard a vehicle. He saw Humpback run onto the asphalt. He braced his hands and pushed against the ground. “Look! A firefly!” came his friend’s voice. “How did it survive?” But Squatlegs couldn’t be seen. Humpback was running toward the center strip. The approaching vehicle was a tanker truck. To make it stop, Squatlegs rolled himself into its lights and stuck up his hand. The truck driver momentarily closed his eyes, stepped on the emergency brake, then released it. He couldn’t stop the truck all at once or pull it to the side. He was impartial. The tanker regained speed and drove on. The two friends were motionless. Nor did the insects sing. When they started singing again, Squatlegs lifted himself up. With one hand he scooted toward his friend, whom he had seen in the truck’s headlights. “Look!” Humpback was sprawled on his side next to the center strip. Squatlegs pointed. Tail glittering, a lone firefly flew toward the woods on their right.
The teacher rested his hands on the podium. He spoke to his charges.
“I wanted to write something I could share with all of you. But I couldn’t write a single line. Obviously I’m disappointed. I’m very sad at having to give up mathematics, and I wasn’t able to finish a single line. I wanted to write about the very first humans, who came down from the trees, and about animals, which get their nutrients from eating plants and other animals because they don’t have the ability to manufacture organic substances from inorganic substances the way plants do. And if I still had some time left, I was going to write about the people who are trying to smother the creativity of you gentlemen. They don’t want the slightest detail of our present circumstances to be revealed for what they really are, and they don’t want reform. A pot of coffee, a barrel of liquor, and I couldn’t write a decent word; all I could do was cry—understand me. But you shouldn’t feel sorry for me. I’ve decided to leave on a space voyage for a small planet you gentlemen haven’t heard of.”
This set the students buzzing. “Have you ever met an alien?” a student asked.
“Yes,” said the teacher. “I’ve met them on a mountaintop I often visit. This small map I’ve just taken from my pocket, which I got from them, is an HR map. The planet I’m going to is located midway along a diagonal line from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. The beings who live there have the ability to manufacture organic substances out of inorganic substances the way plants do. Have you gentlemen ever heard of anything better than this?”
“I have a question,” said a student in the very last row.
“What is it?”
“I once heard that sightings of aliens or flying saucers are a defense mechanism appearing at a moment of societal stress. How are we to understand your case, sir?”
“Believe me when I
say I will leave with the aliens for that planet, and that when I do, sparks will soar up and brighten the western sky. A long explanation is out of the question. The only thing I don’t know yet is what I’ll encounter the moment I leave. What will it be? The silence of a public cemetery? Maybe not. Do outcries come only from the dead? Time is up. Whether we live on Earth or another planet, our spirit is always free. I pray that all of you get good grades and succeed at the college of your choice. Why don’t we just leave it at that and skip the thank-yous and goodbyes.”
“Attention!” shouted the class monitor as he sprang to his feet. “Salute!”
The teacher returned the students’ bow and stepped down from his platform. Then he left the classroom. The way he walked was peculiar. Maybe that’s how aliens walk, thought the students.
The winter sun was already slanting downward and the classroom grew dark.
Afterword
Cho Se-hŭi and The Dwarf
When the Republic of Korea (South Korea)’s first five-year economic development plan was launched in 1962, the nation’s economy was one of subsistence agriculture. Within four decades, South Korea had become one of the most high-tech countries in the world. This rapid transformation was made possible in part by President Park Chung Hee’s long-range economic program of export-led development, which in turn was predicated on the transformation of South Korea from an agrarian to an industrialized nation. Park, a former military man, was able to expedite this transformation after assuming dictatorial powers in the early 1970s. Industrialization during the Park regime (1961–1979) was gained at the cost of civil, labor, and environmental abuses of the sort that attracted the attention of muckraking journalists in the United States in the early 1900s. The cast of characters in this national drama included a huge number of laborers, many of them recent immigrants to Seoul from the countryside; an incipient urban middle class suddenly faced with civil and social issues larger than those encountered in the hometown village; and the crony capitalists who headed a few powerful conglomerates.
Cho Se-hŭi’s purpose in The Dwarf (Nanjangi ka ssoaollin chagŭn kong) was to describe, without running afoul of Park’s strict national security laws, the societal ills caused by industrialization. His solution to this daunting challenge was to inject a subtle irony in his narratives and at the same time, in order to reach the widest possible audience, to write in syntax simple enough to be understood by any Korean with a rudimentary education. The result is a book whose basic message—the human costs of reckless industrialization—is evident but whose deeper meanings—the spiritual malaise of the newly rich and powerful and the confusion of a working class subject to forces beyond its control—await discovery by the careful and deliberate reader. Cho succeeded admirably in his undertaking: In his native Korea the book is approaching its two hundredth printing and has sold almost a million copies since its publication in 1978. Ch’oe Yun, who cotranslated the novel into French and who was a graduate student when the novel was first published in book form in Korea, notes that South Koreans in the 1970s tended to view the world in terms of white and black. Readers of The Dwarf were thus already receptive to the notion of a contest being played out between powerless laborers and the corrupt families who led the conglomerates, and it is likely that the book was read by the great majority of college students in South Korea in the 1980s. Outside of Korea Cho’s works have been translated into English, French, German, Bulgarian, and Japanese.
The Dwarf is a linked-story novel—a collection of stories that can be read independently but are all linked by character, theme, and setting. The characters are in turn a laboring family, a family of the newly emerging middle class, and a wealthy industrialist’s family that looks for inspiration to German big business. The twelve stories are written in a lean, clipped style that features abrupt shifts of scene, time, and viewpoint. Long paragraphs of narrative alternate with stretches of terse dialogue. Reproductions of bureaucratic forms and an extract from a working family’s budget book give us a taste of a dwarf’s life—the dwarf epitomizing the “little people” on whose backs the South Korean economic miracle took place. These details of life in South Korea in the 1970s are juxtaposed with snippets of information on science past and present and allusions to the workings of the universe. Two stories, “The Möbius Strip” (Moebiusŭ ŭi tti; 1976) and “The Klein Bottle” (K’ŭllain sshi ŭi pyŏng; 1978), are built on the concept of spatial form, their titles referring to objects whose inner and outer surfaces are interchangeable. This notion of interchangeability and the references to the history of science and space exploration suggest to us that the dualities, contradictions, and anomalies of industrialization described in The Dwarf are not unique to Korea but result in large part from global economic forces that have accumulated over the centuries.
Ch’oe Yun has also observed that although writing by and about the working class predated The Dwarf, it tended to be political and ideological. In comparison, The Dwarf focuses on the concrete detail of the lives of three major groups of people. The minutiae of workplace conditions are particularly vivid, giving us an almost tactile sense of factory life: In “The Cost of Living for a Family of Ŭngang Laborers” (Ŭngang nodong kajok ŭi saenggyebi; 1977) we learn that Yŏng-hŭi’s job requires her to walk seventy-two hundred steps in an hour; that the decibel level in her workplace is deafening; and that the nighttime temperature inside the factory is a hundred and two degrees. Environmental degradation is especially vivid in “City of Machines” (Kigye toshi; 1978), and indeed The Dwarf is one of the first contemporary Korean novels in which concern for human and natural ecology is evident throughout.
Abuse of power is a vivid presence in The Dwarf. Typically power is exercised through intimidation and violence, as in “Knifeblade” (K’allal; 1975) and “A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf” (Nanjangi ka ssoaollin chagŭn kong; 1976), and through sexual domination, evident also in the latter story. Violence begets violence—as when in the penultimate story a captain of industry is assassinated. Here the author is obliquely critiquing the authoritarian leadership that has plagued much of modern Korean history, as well as questioning Korea’s traditionally patriarchal social structure.
South Korea’s spate of industrial accidents and economic troubles in the 1990s—as well as the more desperate environmental degradation and food shortages in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)—have reinforced the contemporaneity of The Dwarf and confirmed its status as the most important postwar Korean novel. If Cho Se-hŭi had written nothing else, he would remain one of modern Korea’s most important writers on the basis of this work alone. In the new millennium, as South Korea continues to develop into one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, The Dwarf stands as a constant reminder of the millions of nameless people who made possible the industrialization of their society.
About the Author and Translater
Cho Se-hŭi was born in 1942 in Kap’yŏng, Kyŏnggi Province, and graduated from Kyunghee University with a degree in Korean literature. If he had written nothing else besides his linked-story novel The Dwarf, he would remain one of modern Korea’s most important writers. Such is the significance of that work in the history of modern Korean letters. After making his literary debut in the Kyŏnghyang shinmun, a Seoul daily, in 1965, Cho published but a single story during the next ten years. But then in short order, from 1975 to 1978, he published the twelve stories that would form The Dwarf. Two books have appeared since: Time Travel (1983) and The Roots of Silence (1985).
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of several volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently Hwang Sun-wŏn’s novel Trees on a Slope (2005). They are the recipients of several translation awards and grants, including the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship given for a translation from Korean literature. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia. He is the
co-translator, with the late Kim Chong-un, of the award-winning A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction (1998) and is co-editor with Youngmin Kwon of Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (2005).