In 2003, Hwang Sok-yong wrote Shim Chung, a novel based on an old Taoist tale about a girl who is sold to Chinese merchants so that her blind father can regain sight. Seeing a similarity between Chung and the “girls and women workers of South Korea who went up to Seoul to seek jobs in factories and end up eventually ruining themselves during the period of modernization in the 1970s,” Hwang used this well-known Korean folktale about filial piety to illustrate how the body and soul of a young woman changed during the imperialism of East Asia in the nineteenth century.
Mr. Hwang followed with another strong and globe-trotting female protagonist in his bestseller Princess Bari in 2007. Named after a famous Korean folktale about a princess who saves her world, Hwang Sok-yong’s Bari loses her family to famine in Korea in the 1990s, travels to London as an illegal migrant worker, and weds a Muslim man. Amid global violence and conflict, such as 9/11 and the July 7 terrorist attack on London, Bari sets out on a quest for true reconciliation that transcends nationality, religion, race, culture, and ideology.
In an effort to connect with a younger generation of readers, Hwang Sok-yong wrote his next novel entirely on the Internet.
I want to tell young people not to be too disheartened by all this pressure. They should not be afraid to break the mold, to break out of this system and find their own way of life.
From February to July 2008, he serialized The Evening Star on his blog. The site received over 2 million visits and hundreds of comments each day. The printed novel went on to sell over 500,000 copies, and its success prompted other renowned writers to do the same.
Today, Hwang Sok-yong is working on a new grand plan: to set up a peace train that will travel from Paris to Seoul in July 2010, passing through Ulan Bator and Pyongyang for the sixtieth anniversary of the onset of the Korean War. He has recruited an international team including the great North Korean novelist Hong Seok-jung (winner of the prestigious Manhae Literary Prize in 2004) and Nobel laureates Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio of France and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey.
This train that will run from the European continent to the Far East will be a symbol of the end of the Cold War and a bond between the two Koreas after more than half a century of hostility.
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1 In Korea, it is a custom for a just-released prisoner to eat tofu. They say this will prevent him from going back to prison again.
2 A neighborhood in Seoul.
3 The word “Jun Woo” means a fellow soldier or a “war buddy” in Korean. The Hwarang cigarette was a brand of cigarette specifically supplied to the military. There is a famous song from the fifties that ends with the following lyric: “My dear fellow soldiers [jun woo] who disappeared into the smoke of Hwarang cigarette.”
4 In Korea, some elder women are referred to with the name of her hometown, not by their own names. Soonchun is the name of a small city in South Korea.
5 A letter from Rosa Luxemburg to Sophie Liebknecht, dated February 18, 1917.
6 A poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, quoted in a letter from Luxemburg to Mathilde Jacob.
7 Ibid.
8 A traditional Korean grave is a dirt mound with grass growing on it. The fancier the grave, the higher and larger the mound.
9 Chun Doo Hwan, the army general who became the fifth president after the Kwangju Incident, held an election by committee and an inauguration at a gymnasium. Hence, he was nicknamed Gymnasium President.
10 A neighborhood in Seoul where the Anti-Communist Department of Public Safety Division was located.
11 There is a Korean folk tale about a green frog who never listened to his mother.
12 In March 1982, protesting the US support of the Chun military regime, three student activists (two of them women) set fire to the American Cultural Center in Busan, the second largest city in South Korea. Inadvertently, another South Korean student was killed, and three were injured.
13 A Russian word meaning “spark.” It was the title of a political newspaper published by Russian socialists.
14 Many cafés or teahouses in the rural area (called Da Bang) double as brothels. Such practice became prevalent in the eighties.
15 An establishment for men where they can play the game of Go.
16 Chun Tae Il (1948-1970) was a factory worker and a labor activist who set himself on fire in protest of working conditions at an industrial complex. He is considered to be a pioneer of the Korean labor movement.
17 Kwon In Sook was a young college student who was arrested in June 1986 for using a fake ID to work at a factory near Boochun. While in custody, she was sexually harrassed and physically abused by the police. In July, she was able to get her story out to a group of lawyers, who pressured the government to prosecute the police. In 1989, Moon Kwi Dong, the policeman who was the principal offender, was sentenced to five years in prison.
18 There is an old Korean saying that men are not allowed in the kitchen.
19 In 1990, a rally for the reunification of the Korean peninsula was held in the North with attendance by Koreans from around the world. The South Korean government refused to recognize the event and went on to arrest hundreds for their suspected involvement.
20 Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1989), p. 586.
21 Ibid., p. 693.
22 Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (David R. Godine: Boston, 1976), pp. 72-73.
Copyright © 2000 by Hwang Sok-yong
English translation © 2009 by Seven Stories Press
English translation rights arranged through agreement with Zulma.
Published and translated with kind support from the Korean Literature Translation Institute.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hwang, Sog-yong, 1943-
[Oraedoen chongwon. English]
The old garden / by Hwang Sok-yong ; translated by Jay Oh.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-609-80038-3
I. Oh, Jay. II. Title.
PL992.29.S6O7313 2009
895.7’34--dc22
2009018095
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