In Yi T'aejun's story "Unconditioned," the narrator witnesses a peasant woman filling up a small creek, pebble by pebble. Later, he learns that the spot was once a lake where the woman's son once drowned, closed off now by a dam. Little by little, the woman fills the remaining water with stones to make it vanish, hoping to free her son's spirit from where it lingers in the lake. In the very next story, "Before and After the Liberation," the author's stand-in, Hyon, quotes the paragraph of the story he's just written. Hyon is a moderately successful writer who struggles with the climate of censorship and intellectual repression that marks the Japanese occupation of Korea: his fellow writers take Japanese names, sprinkle their speech with Japanese words, and write in Japanese. Hyon yearns for freedom, and it eventually comes, but the political uncertainty and division of "after the liberation" brings its own contradictions and difficulties. Where can the writer go to write? Where can one go to be free?
The stories in Dust are all about these contradictions, and the competing social orders that constrict full life and self-expression. Yi (according to the back of the book and the scant information I can find on the internet) is known in Korea as "The One Who Went North," having moved from U.S.-occupied South Korea to Soviet-occupied North Korea, where, far from liberation, he was viewed with suspicion and sent into exile, where his fate is unknown. The title story of the collection is a superb piece of anti-U.S. and anti-South Korean propaganda about a Pyongyang book collector who travels to see his daughter in Seoul. It's a highly anticipated trip, and he brings with him a small nest egg to buy books--something that should be easier in the more literary south--but ends up almost immediately hustled into a prison cell by soldiers under the command of Syngman Rhee. Strings are pulled for his release, but he finds himself at a party with a boorish American general whose main characteristics, hilariously, are his love for steaks and whisky, as well as his enormous gut. It must be said: He got us. Americans rule this not-yet-officially-South Korea, buying up everything with their powerful dollar--including Hyon's beloved books--while inflation keeps basic necessities out of the hand of Koreans.
So, propaganda. It certainly explains a great deal about Yi's choice to flee the South for Pyongyang. And yet, like all great propaganda, there's a deeper truth that may go unnoticed by those whose agenda is propaganda only: where, exactly, is Hyon supposed to go in a divided Korea, where people have become increasingly pressed between two sides? The tragic final ending hardly seems to absolve the Soviet-sponsored North Koreans; any hope of return, or appreciating the North more, is closed off to the ravished writer.
Yi's stories are subtle things. There's a few murders and grisly deaths, but for the most part, there's little drama or melodrama. Resentments and verbal violence bubble up in ways that show us they were always there, beneath the surface of a Korea under the thumb of a foreign power, and then under the thumb of itself. I appreciated the smallness and subtlety of the stories, though I didn't always feel as if I understood the larger history that comes to bear on the characters. One of my favorites was "Tiger Grandma," a story about a stubborn old woman who is the final holdout in a program to increase literacy in her small Korean village. Many of the stories in this collection deal with small people: peasants, local clerks, fishermen, etc., all caught up in the upheavals of Korean history. In their small way, they struggle against the deadening forces of imperial occupation and political repression, but it's not possible to fill the ocean back up by moving pebbles.
With the addition of North Korea, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 108!
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