(NOTE: This post is a Valentines’ Day post that changes from time to time, so any feedback or additions are welcome)

Some time back, regular reader and man of international mystery “Charles” (the other) asked me about Korea love stories. And it brought me up a bit short, because I had a bit of difficulty immediately conjuring up names of what I would call “love stories” in the modern western sense.

I could think of stories in which there was plenty of love, but I really couldn’t think of the many that had the Western arc of love declared, love blunted, then love happily ever after. Or the even newer Western arc of two people who don’t like each other becoming lovers despite their differences.

As I type that I think of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and have to reconsider how “new” that arc is.^^

In any case, even in what small samples of classic Korean literature I’ve read (Yi-Saeng Peers Through the Wall), love may pop up, but it is very certainly extinguished quickly.

In general, I identify four general threads (the latter two of which sometimes intersect) of romance stories.

• Young Love Lost
• Blunt Love Unexpressed
• The “Anti-Love” Story
• Real love?
• Love made impossible by (commodified and patriarchal) society

And very occasionally, what we in the West would call a love story (returned romantic love) ending either tragically (love lost) or happily. At the end of this post, I’ll suggest an “all-in-one” book that can be picked up from Amazon on the cheap, and that contains three superb stories about love.

First, though, the standard approaches.

YOUNG LOVE LOST
The “Young Love Lost” story is a Korean favorite, in which true love, often extremely young, either never flowers or flowers briefly and is then cut down. Perhaps the most famous example of this thread can be found in Hwang Sun-won’s Sonagi (Sonagi means a brief, intense, shower of rain).  Novels often contain stories like this within them. A stock character in Korean modern novels is the young widow who never remarries and essentially stays wed to the image of her lost husband until she is old and worn. Of course there are strong social pressures that create this character, but nonetheless it is a common one. This theme is expressed by other authors including an excellent job of it in Kim Yong-ik’s Love in Winter.

BLUNT LOVE UNEXPRESSED
The “Blunt Love Unexpressed” is often a story based on class differences, or inability to express love across the gender gap. This is the love of a married couple that somehow survives horrible circumstances and often horrible mistreatment. A great example of this is  Hyon Chin-gon’s The Lucky Day in which the male protagonist is revealed to truly love his wife, even though he treats her horribly. Similar stories include absentee or cheating husbands, husbands who beat their wives, yet all of whom profess to love them. Another great example of this is Kim Yu-Jeong’s The Camellias, which is a s a “first-love” story in which a rather bumpkin-ish boy confronts Jeomsun a rather higher class girl who loves him. The tone is rough and humorous as Jeomsun is only capable of showing her interest through aggression, but the love is there, even though it cannot formally be stated. Hwang Sun-won’s Descendants of Cain, while also dealing with the agonies of political separation and civil war, also features a central love story that has to struggle to be expressed.

THE ANTI LOVE STORY
The “Anti-Love” story is often a proto-feminist one and sometimes masquerades as “Love Expressed With Blunt Objects.”  This is the love of a married couple that somehow survives horrible circumstances and often horrible mistreatment. A great example of this is  Hyon Chin-gon’s The Lucky Day in which the male protagonist is revealed to truly love his wife, even though he treats her horribly. Similar stories include absentee or cheating husbands, husbands who beat their wives, yet all of whom profess to love them. … a story in which “love” is revealed to either be a purely social construct – in fact it is more fair to say the construct is marriage than love – or one in which love is entirely and brutally absent from a relationship. Two early examples of this kind of story (though, obviously with other themes as well) are Kim Dong-in’s Potato and Hyun Jin-geon’s Fire.

Potato (1925) is probably Kim Dong-in’s most famous short story (I read somewhere that it is the second most anthologized story in Korean modern literature.

“Potato” offers a portrait of a woman destroyed by her wretched environment. The  heroine is Pongnyŏ, a diligent and forthright girl whose personality undergoes a gradual  transformation under circumstances of extreme poverty. Her downward trajectory is expressed  sexually: sold into marriage to a man too lazy to make a living, Pongnyŏ is driven into the  slums, where she begins selling her body to make a living. Pongnyŏ’s sexual commodification is  paralleled by her moral deterioration. Drawn into a vicious cycle of twisted sexual lust and  vulgar appetite for material gain, Pongnyŏ ultimately meets a tragic death. (20^th Century Korean Literature, Page 10)

In Fire, Suni is a 15 year old “bride,” in a miserable marriage in which her husband is her “enemy” and rapist. In Korean traditional fashion, she is also at the beck and call of her evil step-mother. Suni is crushed by this life, and Hyun displays this in a minor but horrifying scene in which Suni kills a minnow at the stream. Everything is horrific, and even when her husband expresses compassion (his attempt at “love”), Suni is too terrorized to recognize it. Suni characterizes the problem as her “room” in the house. So she burns her house down to get rid of the room.

So, you know, not that much hearts and flowers stuff.^^  To this list, in more recent publications, I might include Broken Strings by Gang Gyeong-ae and  Bunnyeo by Yi Hyo-seok, both of which are available free online

LOVE MADE IMPOSSIBLE BY (COMMODIFIED AND PATRIARCHAL) SOCIETY

Park Wan-suh began to kick this can down the road with her Identical Apartments (90’s I believe) which posited that the uniform, keeping-up-with the Jones’ Korean society made actual love so impossible that a wife could literally enter any uniform apartment building, make a generic meal, sleep with the man of the house, and it would be no different than any other experience she might have with any other man.

This has now become an oldie but a goodie to which I would add the Bae Suah “Alienated Middle Class Woman who just feels too much Ennui to love.” (Eun Hye-kyung did the best of these with Poor Man’s Wife and My Wife’s Boxes, |Christmas Specials by Kim Ae-ran” is similar, and Green Apples by Bae Suah,. Also, special notice must be made of love either faked or destroyed by society… Han Kang’s Vegetarian being the most awesome and brilliant example of that kind of fiction with its brilliant premise and layer by layer unpeeling of what a loveless society means.

REAL LOVE?

Tends to be in the older works.

The Scorching Heat (by the previously mentioned Kim Yu-jeong) is a story of tragic love. A loving husband carries his ill wife on his back, to a hospital that he believes will cure her. The story is a detailed pointillist achievement of encroaching despair. When, at the end, the husband and wife walk back to their home, the wife crying on her husband’s back,  outlining her final wishes, the deep love the two share is nearly heartbreaking. The last sentence, a brilliant concoction of multiple short phrases, and cascading punctuation, puts the tragic message of the story home: This love may not end, but one life assuredly will.

A Wanderer in the Valleys (also by Kim Yu-jeong) features a wandering woman who enters a small settlement, revitalizes a drinking establishment, and marries the son of the owner. On her wedding night she reveals where her true love lies and at the stories’ end Kim gives us a vision of a world threatening and closing in on the narrator, “From all around the howling of wolves drifted down, echoing among the valleys and hills”

Finally, Ch’oe Yun’s brilliant The Flower with Thirteen Fragrances, is an attack on commercialism and a brilliant fairy-tale story of two lovers escaping a world that attempts to commoditize erverything

Anyway.. enjoy your roses before they wilt.

And they will.