Chinatown

‘’The moon kept us company, and after a while my little brother shook his fist at it: ‘Stupid moon, where are you goin’?’’

In Oh Jung-hee’s stories, human relationships take a rather ambiguous form. Korean villagers seeking a better life in the city find shelter in the marginalised Chinatown. Others are tormented by the most ferocious emotion of all: love, in all its vicious forms. Mothers are concerned about the course of their lives, disturbed by bourgeois values or terrified that the waves will swallow their hearts.

‘’The bell from the Catholic church behind us kept tolling. That tolling had been tugging at us ever since - no, even before - we’d thrown the cat into the sea. Producing endless waves of sound at show more precise intervals but confined to a single tone, simplifying every desire and state of mind into an elemental monotone, the tolling evoked in me the awesomeness of a peal of thunder you hear on a summer evening when it wakes you from a dream, the mystery of train wheels rumbling through the deep of the night.
‘A nun must have died.’

Chinatown: a young girl comes of age in a filthy street where people are trying to survive extreme hardships, lacking the bare minimum. Written in raw, yet sensitive language, this is a chronicle of early teenage years in a world of prostitution and struggle, of living hand to mouth and trying to understand the universe of adulthood.

‘’It was the dead of night, but the moon lit up the grid of the window frame. Intermittent periods of darkness followed, which I marked up to the clouds. There was the occasional flash of light from the carbide lamps used by the fishermen on the river. I rose, went to the window and opened it, but saw only darkness lurking below.’’

Running Man: A young man tries to fight the leanings of his heart and overcome a bitter loss. Beautiful writing, quite moving at times, but I don’t think this story is particularly interesting.

‘’The deeper the night, the closer the waves sound’’

Mermaid: A woman takes a trip to the seaside with her daughter. She has decided to tell her she is adopted, yet life has its own plans. A story which deals with the ever-complex bond between a mother and a daughter, with an incredible ending, steeped in folklore.

‘’Ah ah, the dreams are gone, the dreams are gone. Merrily, merrily went their songs about lost youth and vanished dreams and new friendships forged by drink. The singing and merriment would continue through the night. How heartwarming the distant songfest; how seductive the distant lights.’’

The Garden Party: A poignant story of frustrating suburbia, where the soft lights of a night garden party and the cooling breeze of the late summer can’t hide the sadness of a woman seeing her aspirations walking away from her, her disappointment in her husband, and her insecurity about being a mother. An atmospheric, yet deeply melancholic story.

In these stories, the windows open at night to reveal the darkness that exists inside bedrooms where dreams are born and thwarted, where the light of the soft caramel lamps on a summer’s night cannot chase away the furies born of suffocated wishes and bitter disappointment.

‘’Life is…’ I murmured. But I couldn’t find the right word. Was there a single word for today and yesterday, with their jumble of indistinguishable, all too complicated colours, a word to embrace all the tomorrows?’’ show less