There a Petal Silently Falls offers polished English translations of three works of fiction by the acclaimed South Korean writer and critic Ch'oe Yun. An intellectual author with a penchant for allegories and a keen appreciation for the indeterminacy of language, Ch'oe has been called heir to the tradition of experimental writing begun in Korea by the likes of Yi Sang, and yet, even at its most abstruse and self-referential, Ch'oe's fiction has maintained a close link to contemporary social reality and historical critique that one expects more readily of realist fiction. Indeed, a sustained theme in Ch'oe's works concerns the weight of collective, often anonymous, violence on individual lives and identities. In her early fiction, such a concern is tethered to specific aspects of Korea's modern history, including Korean division, the antigovernment student movement, and the 1980 massacre of civilians in Kwangju, while her later works increasingly probe the banality of violence inherent in everyday life. At a time when it has become commonplace to posit a sharp break between the literary sensibilities of the 1980s and the 1990s in South Korea, Ch'oe Yun's fiction occupies a unique place from which conventional oppositions structuring that break—oppositions, for example, between such oft-encountered terms as grand narratives and trivia, militancy and disillusionment, and collective and individual—find sophisticated and formally innovative complications.
The present volume gives us three distinct examples of Ch'oe's creative range. The title piece, Ch'oe's first published work of fiction and arguably her most famous, unravels the trauma of the Kwangju Massacre through the figure of a little girl victimized by that violence. Cryptic and powerful, the narrative weaves in and out of the consciousness of the orphaned child devastated by incomprehension and guilt, and expands outward in order to ponder how a society that cannot avow its own complicity ends up turning the victim simultaneously into an object of desire and the unbearable abject. Deranged, wasted, and monstrous to behold in her tattered Sunday best and “chaos of purple lipstick” (p. 4), the girl wanders country roads in search of her lost brother. As she gathers upon her body even more traces of gendered violence during her wanderings, the narrator addresses the complicit reader with piercing irony: “Walk away with downcast eyes as if you hadn't seen a thing” (p. 3).
In “Whisper Yet,” the division of Korea provides the historical background for a moving tale of personal loss and unlikely friendship. A convicted leftist intellectual on the run finds shelter with a family of anticommunist refugees from the North. He forges a deep bond with the young daughter of the family, who is then enlisted to help him maintain intermittent contact with his own family. Having grown up as an unwitting witness to the man's pain-filled life, the girl, now a mother herself, recounts her memories of the man who became her “uncle” in this fashion. In framing this recounting as a silent conversation the woman has with her own daughter, the author suggests that although the story of Korea's division has so often been shouted out as a call to arms, as recrimination, or as commemoration, the story is also one that ought to be “whispered” tenderly, as it is in these whispers that we can hope to preserve fleeting moments of truth regarding the imprint of history on personal experience.
“The Thirteen-Scent Flower” parts ways with Ch'oe's earlier interrogations of history: in a radio interview, Ch'oe described the piece as a story that “reflects on beauty in contemporary society by considering the status of the arts” (PRI, “The World: Inevitable Dissident”, June 10, 2008). The plot revolves around two young misfits who, after finding love in each other, embark on creating a new variety of flower, one endowed with an irresistible, almost magical scent. The tremendous success of their venture leads to occasions in the text for a satirical critique of the follies and greed rampant in corporate Korea, the academy, the art world, and consumer society at large. Compared to the other two stories in the collection, “The Thirteen-Scent Flower” has a noticeably lighter, more playful tone. In fact, the translators' afterword characterizes the story as a “bravura piece that displays Ch'oe's familiarity with postmodern writing” (p. 190), but in a slim volume in which thematic unity rather than representative range may provide the sounder criterion for selection, I found the inclusion of “The Thirteen-Scent Flower” ultimately distracting despite the story's many charms. Even though the translators have done an admirable job of capturing the speed and wit of the original prose, more fastidious readers may also question the translators' choice of readability over fidelity in certain instances. In terms of literal meaning, for example, the title of the piece would be closer to “The Flower Scent with Thirteen Names.”
But these are minor complaints that should not dampen the reader's overall enthusiasm for the book. For Koreanists, any literary work dealing with Kwangju would be of historical interest of course, and There a Petal Silently Falls represents the most famous of such works. Beyond Korean studies, however, the book should also be read widely by scholars engaged in trauma studies. Any reader, academic or not, who finds himself or herself meditating on the relationship between gender and violence will encounter much material of interest in the pages of Ch'oe Yun's book, and come to appreciate why the publication of its English translation has been a long and eagerly awaited event.
