I wrote this novel in the summer of 2009.

On the 20^th of January that year, the South Korean administration murdered evictees in Yongsan, central Seoul. In the course of a mass demonstration, a huge conflagration broke out and six people died in the flames. It was an illegal mass operation in which service workers (civilians) were employed. The day before the incident, police called these service workers inside the police line, which they were not legally supposed to cross, and sent them inside the building where the evictees had gathered. In the over eight hours that the service workers spent inside, they forced the evictees up onto the roof where they would be cut off, lit a fire on the stairs and sent the smoke up to the roof. Though several fire engines were sent out during this process, the service workers who had remained outside the building threatened to throw the firefighters out. Later, a firefighter who was present in the courtroom said in testimony, ‘even though we requested the police to collaborate, they did not accept our request, and each time we went back unable to extinguish the fire’. The fire broke out on the 20^th January, as soon as police special forces were deployed onto the roof. The entire process was broadcast live via an internet news channel, and many people witnessed the moment of the fire breaking out. I was one of those people.

After the incident, the incident itself became known as the ‘Yongsan Disaster’, and the site of the conflagration as ‘Namildang’. Families who had lost their loved ones and had the corpses taken from them by state bodies gathered at Namildang. They stood isolated there for over 300 days, demanding an apology from the government and the truth about the incident. Hundreds of police were constantly surrounding the building, cursing and attacking the bereaved families. There was also a court case centred on those who had died in the fire. In the case, the victim was the government authority and the assailants were the evictees. I attended the trial and wrote a five thousand word essay on it, titled ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ (this is the same as one of the chapter titles in One Hundred Shadows, but the content is different). Through the process of the trial, the circumstances of this disaster were revealed, in which money (capital) egged on evictees, service workers, and policemen to fight. Though the issue of who gave the order to suppress the evictees’ protest is extremely important, ‘no-one is the person who gave the order’ was the police executives’ consistent answer. The Lee Myung-bak government did not make public the 3000-page report investigating the police executives. The phrase ‘Yongsan disaster’ became a sensitive one for the duration of the Lee Myung-bak administration. Wherever you happened to be in the streets, if you were holding a picket with the words ‘Yongsan disaster’ written on it, a dozen police would rush over and encircle you.

And yet, such wretched scenes do not appear in this novel. People who have died through great violence, burning buildings, smoke, people who cannot come away from the place where their father or husband had been at the last, the attacks and isolation that they would experience as everyday occurrences, are not mentioned in this novel.

Over the course of the summer of 2009, I wrote One Hundred Shadows by day and at night I held a one-woman protest at Namildang. Because that place and the things that had happened there were so grim and miserable, I wanted to make something warm. It seemed at the time to be all that I could do. And so I wrote this story, and it became my first novel. There will be many readers who read it as a warm love story. Even in Korea, there were many readers who read it this way. But I was not constructing a love story while I was writing this novel. I thought of it as a novel about shadows. A story to do with despair and death and powerlessness, which, like shadows, exist universally throughout the human world. I thought that I had to write something in a place where people were crying every day, I wrote with the earnest wish for even a scant handful of warmth, and then, as I completed the final sentence and looked back at what I had written, I saw that it was love, that it was a song. I surprised even myself. Each time I am asked to talk about this novel, I find it difficult. And it is still more difficult to talk about it briefly. In general, I give two short answers: ‘One Hundred Shadows and ‘A Mouth That Eats A Mouth’ are twins with their backs to each other’, and ‘This book could also be titled The Night Before’. Before things at the electronics market come to a head, the way they did that night in Yongsan, seven years ago.

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Jung Yewon, is published by Tilted Axis Press. Find out more and order the book here.PEN Presents helps literary translators to champion exciting books from around the world to be published in the UK. Submissions are now open for PEN Presents… East and South-east Asia. The deadline is Monday 5 December 2016.

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ALR: Korea is described by the media as the hippest country in Asia, but ‘hell’ by many of its young people. Why does this contradiction exist?

Cheon: In the term Hallyu, the ‘Korean wave’, there are undertones of imperialistic aspirations and an aggressive kind of nationalism. It’s like propaganda. Maybe it comes from a sense of inferiority. But it is mainly a media label. The entertainment industry, with well-trained stars and musicians, and engineers and composers from countries like the USA, has a lot of influence on the population. The production values are dazzling. However, consumers of the product are hardly dazzling at all. The lives of K-pop stars are dream-like, while their fans’ lives are tragic. This contrast is grotesque.

Han: I sometimes question whether the wave even exists. Yes, many tourists visit Korea because of it. And Koreans know how far ‘Kangnam Style’ has reached around the world. But I mainly see people who work hard for no output. So I don’t feel any contradiction – it’s more like an illusion. Koreans are good at creating these cool and chic images at a fast pace. The government encourages this because it sells, but real people ignore it because they’re disconnected from it.

ALR: Is the success of K-pop and K-drama aspirational or troubling to you?  

Cheon: [laughs] You know, Psy studied music overseas. Perhaps novelists may now be expected to live abroad to get a similar broad experience and perspective. When I travelled in France and mentioned that I was from South Korea, many people responded, ‘Oh, Kim Ki-duk!’ [a Korean film director]. At least the wave is good in that way. When I visited Thailand, people frequently asked if my novel The Whale would be made into a TV series – because Jewel in the Palace, the massively popular TV series, had a spin-off novel that became a bestseller.

ALR: How do the extreme competitive pressures and expectations faced by ordinary citizens, especially young people, feed into your writing?

Han: I see competition and stress every day. The country has developed unevenly, and the younger generation have been forced to think about how to step over each other in order to win. And Koreans don’t know not to be ashamed when they trample each other in this ruthless way. Every Korean writer is definitely affected by this social phenomenon to different degrees. For me, such topics are embedded in the tone of my sentences.

Cheon: In my opinion real competition happened during the thirty years of the 1970s to 1990s. Before then, most people were poor and undereducated, so competition wasn’t necessary. With industrialization came ‘dragons born out of a stream’ – people who made a name for themselves out of nothing. Now, competition doesn’t even exist because your destiny is decided when you are born. For instance, kids from the Kangnam district in Seoul have a higher likelihood of entering a good university than anyone else. Most stories written by authors tend to focus on people who win, but I find myself more drawn to those excluded and left behind.

ALR: Is the international recognition of Han Kang and Shin Kyung-sook giving other Korean novelists a larger platform?

Han: The authors’ popularity shows that there is interest overseas in more than just music and drama. The very fact that we are here in London is evidence! I’m curious to know how my books are being received internationally. The level of interest fluctuates in France and the USA, but it’s definitely rising.

Cheon: Yes, I believe so. I was able to visit the USA because Modern Family was published there. Writers now have more opportunities than the older generation. Maybe the rising number of successful writers can build a new wave.

Cheon Myeong-kwan worked as a screenwriter prior to becoming a fiction writer. His literary debut, the short story ‘Frank and I’, won the Munhakdongnae New Writer Award (2003). His first novel The Whale received the Munhakdongnae Award for Best Novel in 2004. His novel Modern Family was published in English by White Pine Press in 2015.

Han Yujoo has written three short story collections and the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. She has been a translator of several notable foreign works into Korean, and teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Short fiction pieces by Han Yojoo and Cheon Myeong-kwan can be read in the Spring 2016 issue of the Asia Literary Review. www.asialiteraryreview.com

Find out more about Han Kang and her latest PEN-supported book, Human Acts, on English PEN’s World Bookshelf.

Read pieces by Han Kang and Deborah Smith about The Vegetarian on the PEN Atlas.

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This is especially the case for a novel like The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s brutally poetic triptych of taboo and transgression. It’s not so much the main character Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat (though in South Korea this is still rare enough to be subversive in itself) as her refusal to explain herself which provokes such varied, and often violent, responses in those around her – a salaryman husband, a video artist brother-in-law, a dutiful older sister. By filtering her central character through these multiple lenses, Han allows Yeong-hye a radical passivity which challenges Eurocentric notions of what a ‘protagonist’ ought to be – precisely the notions which have long seen Korean literature criticised as ‘lacking agency’. Just as Yeong-hye acts as a vessel for her family’s own fears, preconceptions, and repressed desires, so too the book itself invites widely divergent interpretations as to its overall attitude and ‘meaning’ – between individuals, but also between cultures. But if this is part of the reason that The Vegetarian has already proved such a successful crosser of borders – having already been translated as far afield as Poland and Vietnam, Argentina and Portugal – it also poses certain challenges for the translator.

How, then, at the same time as leaving room for this diversity of interpretation, to ensure that the translation gives English readers an experience as close as possible to that of the book’s original audience? Luckily, The Vegetarian gives the translator plenty of non-culture-specific features to be ‘faithful’ to. First was the considerable poetry of the writing – one of the distinctive features of Han’s prose, unsurprisingly so given that she’s also a published poet (and previously wrote on ‘My Literary Forms’ for PEN Atlas). It’s probably due to this double life that the mood of a given piece by her is always distilled for me into a specific image, which is a particularly useful thing for a translator to latch onto. In the case of The Vegetarian, originally published in South Korea as three separate novellas, each section of the triptych has its own distinct mood: clipped and matter-of-fact, a starched white shirt buttoned all the way to the top; fevered desire undercut with pathos, and experienced at one crucial remove; finally, bleached exhaustion, the blurred outlines of stark trees glimpsed through a grey wash of rain.

But if this combination of style and tone forms a core that can hopefully ensure a unity of experience for readers otherwise separated by language, what about the diversity of interpretation? During the editing process, in which Han was a meticulous and humble participant, I learned about some of the ways the book had already been interpreted by translators into other languages. Some of these were fairly obvious – that Vietnamese publishers had felt the patriarchal family dynamic would form an easy point of identification for their market; or that the sexual content, unusually explicit for a South Korean novel, had been received as fairly sensational by that original audience (something which the director of the Korean film adaptation later played up in his promotional materials, much to Han’s chagrin – she felt that this focus on the sexual element was misleadingly reductive). Other readings were surprising and hadn’t occurred to me, though I could instantly see the logic behind them. When I was stuck on how to translate the epithet ‘May Priest’, in which ‘May’ refers to the May 1980 massacre in Han’s home city of Gwangju, Han wondered if the Polish translator’s choice of ‘Santa Maria’ might work for a UK audience. This led into a discussion of how a historically Catholic country like Poland would likely see Yeong-hye’s renunciation as a self-sacrificial mortification of the flesh, starving herself into some kind of near-religious and saintly ecstasy. Buddhism, on the other hand, which has deep roots in Korea and still flourishes there today, would see it as a quieter attempt at sloughing off the violence inherent in the human animal (without privileging her own interpretive framework over any other, Han mentioned to me during our discussion that she herself is a Buddhist).

Our thoughts turned to how the book’s reception might differ in the UK, where, for example, readers would be unlikely to have an automatic appreciation of the rigid, Confucian hierarchy of social relations. As much as possible, I chose to retain the Korean practice of using relational titles (e.g. ‘my sister-in-law’s husband’, ‘Ji-woo’s mum’) rather than referring to people by their names. Given the surge of interest in feminism here in the UK, it seemed both inevitable and problematic that The Vegetarian would be seen as ‘representative’ of Korean women’s writing in particular – something Han experienced first-hand at last year’s London Book Fair, where she was lumped on an all-women panel discussing ‘Families and Relationships’ (the men got to talk about Politics and Art). A feminist reading will see Yeong-hye as a young woman asserting absolute control over her own body, a radical renunciation of the role South Korea’s conformist, patriarchal society has carved out for her. Which, of course, is no less right or wrong than any of the other possible interpretations, but which does run the risk of simplification, of reading the book as more of a socio-anthropological report than as literature. In the second section, where she allows her video-artist brother-in-law to paint flowers onto her body, Yeong-hye nevertheless seems to exert an uncanny power over this disturbed, fevered man. The question this invites – how far Yeong-hye is using those around her to effect her own transformation – is as troubling in its context of mental illness as it is in that of sexual politics; were more of Han’s work available in English, Anglophone readers would be more likely to read her explorations of desire and passivity as an exploration of the elision between artist and artwork. This elision could stem equally from her long-standing preoccupation with the figure of the artist and the nature of the artistic process as from her ‘Koreanness’ or gender.

Of course, my translation choices have to respect the author’s intentions, and the gulf between how English and Korean work, which meant a lot of time spent finding syntactical/semantic options that would have the same effect, using a completely different feature of the original language. In the first section, for example, I chose to insert a number of adverbs (‘completely’, ‘naturally’, etc) that would hopefully make Yeong-hye’s husband sound both pedantic and self-exonerating, while the main challenge for the middle act was getting the sexual language right – not too purple, but not too clinical either. But my longest exchange with Han was prompted by the final page, where Yeong-hye’s older sister says to her ‘surely the dream isn’t all there is?’ Han was anxious that the speaker’s uncertainty comes through here, and I had to explain why, unlike in Korean, in English ‘surely’ gives the impression more of the speaker trying to convince herself than of any actual assurance.

Above all, Han Kang wanted her book to provoke, to disturb, to ask questions that each reader will have to answer for themselves. I can only hope my translation does the same.

The subject of the piece,  Han Kang, was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She has published collections of short stories including Love in Yeosu, A Yellow Patterned Eternity, and The Fruits of My Woman as well as novels including Your Cold Hand, Black Deer, Greek Lessons, and The Vegetarian.

• The Vegetarian, just published by Portobello Books is her first book translated into English.
• You can read a Q&A with Han Kang at the British Council website.
• You can buy The Vegetarian through our bookseller partner Foyles.

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