Posts featuring Cho Nam-Joo

Daily, Unforgiving, Incessant: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Stories of Ordinary Repressions

November 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Throughout the collection, we realize that there is nothing easy in the effort towards collective liberation…

Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories by Cho Nam-Joo, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, House of Anansi, 2024

Cho Nam-Joo, author of the bestselling novel Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, has returned with Miss Kim Knows, a collection of eight short stories featuring an intergenerational array of characters and their struggles in a contemporary South Korea. The first story follows an elderly woman named Dongju as she visits her older sister, Geumju, who is housed in a care home for Alzheimer patients. Geumju’s health has devolved to the extent that Dongju is reminded of her son, whose life she had begged the doctor to save: “it didn’t matter if he had to lie in bed unable to talk or open his eyes.”  As she compares the two, she wonders about the meaning of her life, and eventually, as the story goes on, we are made to learn that Dongju has also lost both her husband and her younger sister. The truth, that “death is so close and so common,” is brought to close regard. This opening tale then sets the tone for the rest of this collection, wherein we must reckon with what it means to live, what kind of life is worth living, and what it means to sacrifice one’s life—or to give up on it.

In “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a young woman moves to Seoul and dates a man for ten years before he makes a casual proposal of marriage, upon which she is forced to contemplate being bound even more inextricably to him. She asks for time to think and writes a long letter in response, taking us from their first interaction to the announcement that she is breaking up with him and moving to a place he shouldn’t try to find. She expresses gratitude for all the help he has offered since her arrival in Seoul many years ago, but her letter unveils the suffocation she felt—that despite her appreciation for his clear and insistent instructions when she first moved to Seoul, she does not want to continue to relinquish control to him. “There’s so much I want to do,” she says, “I can’t give up on my own life.” The longer the letter goes on, the more insufferable this male character becomes—a caricature of the archetype he is supposed to represent; he even expresses to the narrator’s friend how much he appreciates that she “isn’t like other girls,” and when the friend doesn’t take it well, he turns on her, calling her a bitch (classic). The most compelling element in this story came from its disturbing ordinariness—that a reader is able to understand the exact trajectory of the relationship, as well as all the little seemingly benign phrases (“be careful”; “let me”) that culminate in an unbearable cage and a watchful eye she cannot be rid of. In light of her apology in the beginning, the partner’s “care” is revealed as a desire to be obeyed, in control, and never doubted—especially as that is the only form of love he offers. He does not want the narrator to be “corrupted” or to make significant decisions on her own, but also wants her to be socially “capable” and successful. In clear, compelling prose, Cho demonstrates how “daily” this relationship is, how casually it chips away at her narrator’s sense of self, how she is unable to name or pinpoint her discomfort as her boyfriend gaslights her. Her friends (sometimes unknowingly) re-ignite her initial feelings of dissatisfaction, but ultimately agree that her gnawing unease should not be brushed under the rug, and it is these friendships that allow her to “see [herself] for who [she is].” READ MORE…

Weaving the Intangible into the Concrete: An Interview with Mattho Mandersloot

March 27, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Matt Turner

I tried to let her poetry do its work. That is to say, by trying not to explain anything, but to convey her words in their purest form.

The Korean poet Choi Jeongrye once wrote: “As you can tell from my poems, memory is both my deficiency and my mind’s ruin . . .” A powerful assertion of the poet’s battle against the intangible, Choi’s work speaks to the formless, the absent, the incoherent, and the hidden. We were proud to publish a selection of her vivid writings in our Winter 2023 issue, and in this following interview, Assistant Editor Matt Turner speaks to the translator, Mattho Mandersloot, about his process, his relationship with the poet, and the universality of these poems. 

Matt Turner (MT): First, let me say how much I enjoyed these poems by Choi Jeongrye from the Winter 2023 issue; your translations conveyed the eye of the author very clearly. It was as if the poems, to paraphrase Zhuangzi, used their language in order to forget their language, and pointed towards something else—the particulars of the world maybe, or maybe the stray feelings that such particulars evoke. This gave me a sense, at least in part, of the author as a person.

One lingering question I had was about Choi Jeongrye’s place—and her poetry’s place—in the world around her, and in the literary community of South Korea. Could you say a little about that?

Mattho Mandersloot (MM): Thank you for your kind words! I think your comment about the poet shining through her work as a person is very accurate, and it is this aspect of her poetry that drew me in from the very start. The way she writes off the back of her own experiences and observations, while simultaneously touching on the world as a whole, really gets to me. Somehow, her work is both personal and universal at once.

As for her place in the literary community, I am fortunate enough to have met her several times while I lived in Korea. We had this weekly ‘poetry exchange’, where she would walk me through her version of the history of Korean poetry, and I would help her—as best I could—with some English poems that she was reading and translating at the time (something in which she took a great interest, given that her translation of James Tate’s prose poetry collection, Return to the City of White Donkeys, was published by Changbi in 2019). During these meetups, which soon turned into my favourite moment of the week, she did not hide her preference for poetic realism as she explained which Korean poets influenced which. She herself greatly took after Oh Kyu-won (1941–2007), who was known for his attempts to deconstruct language and look at ‘naked reality’. To me, Choi’s collection Kangaroo is kangaroo, I am I (2011, Moonji) always brings to mind Oh’s collection Tomatoes are red, no, sweet (1999, Moonji).  READ MORE…

Am I Really A Woman?: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs

November 19, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Darren Huang

Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be?

Two East Asian authors, whose debut English-language translations were published this year, have been hailed for their bestselling feminist works: South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, whose novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 tells the story of a woman that gives up her career to become a stay-at-home-mother; and  Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, whose novella Breasts and Eggs recounts the lives of three women as they all confront oppressive mores in a patriarchal environment. Both works give voice to female protagonists and explore female identity in their respective societies. In this essay, Asymptote Editor-at-Large Darren Huang considers how both of these texts offer explicit critiques of male-dominated societies and argues that these authors are ultimately concerned with the development of female selfhood. 

In Han Kang’s acclaimed 2007 South Korean novel, The Vegetarian, translated into English by Deborah Smith, Yeong-hye, a housewife who is described as completely unremarkable by her husband, refuses to eat meat after suffering recurring dreams of animal slaughter. Her abstention leads to erratic and disturbing behavior, including slitting her wrist after her father-in-law force-feeds her a piece of meat, and a severe physical and mental decline. She becomes more plant-like (refusing all nourishment except water and sunlight,) turns mute and immobile, and is eventually discovered soaking in the rain among trees in a nearby forest. Increasingly alienated from her family and society, she is committed to a remote mental hospital and supported only by her sister. Kang’s disturbing parable is characteristic of a number of South Korean feminist novels for its portrayal of a woman suffering from a form of psychosis that is incomprehensible to others, as well as its pitting of a protagonist against the oppressive mores of a rigid, patriarchal society.

Kang has disputed the characterization of her novel as a direct indictment of South Korean patriarchy and has preferred to focus on its themes of representing mental illness and the corruption of innocence. But two recent East Asian debut novels—Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by South Korean screenwriter-turned-novelist Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang, and Breasts and Eggs by the Japanese songwriter-turned-novelist Mieko Kawakami and adeptly translated into English by Sam Bett and Asymptote Editor-at-Large David Boyd—employ similarly oppressed middle-aged, female protagonists to form more explicit critiques of male-dominated, conformist societies. One of the defining qualities of both novels is that their protagonists attempt self-actualization by liberating themselves from traditional gender roles. These novels, which can both be characterized as bildungsroman, are ultimately concerned with a woman’s development of selfhood in opposition to societal conventions about motherhood and middle age. Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 22, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Hodna Nuernberg, Quyen Nguyen, and Sarah Moore

Catch up on this week’s latest news in Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France!

This week, our editors are bringing you news from Morocco, Sweden, Vietnam, and France In Morocco, changes to the ministry of communication are affecting book imports. In Sweden, the announcement of the August Prize has brought excitement, whilst the awarding of the Tucholsky Prize to Swedish-Chinese writer Gui Minhai has been met with indignation in China. In Vietnam, the sales of a much-anticipated translation of bestseller South Korean writer Cho Nam-joo have not been as expected. In France, the centennial of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop was celebrated. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Last month, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI ordered major bureaucratic reform, slashing the government’s thirty-nine member cabinet to just twenty-four—the smallest ever—and doing away with the ministry of communication. While the official line was that the ministry was no longer necessary to regulate the kingdom’s newspapers (a convincing argument, given the state of Morocco’s oppositional press), the abolition of the ministry has had a perhaps unintended side effect: all book imports have been blocked in customs since early October.

The first article of Morocco’s 2003 Press Code guaranteed the freedom of domestic publications. Foreign books, on the other hand, were subject to the ministry of communication’s control. Prior to the October reform, this control was carried out by the foreign publications bureau of the ministry’s public relations division. As such, the bureau was responsible for “analyzing the content of foreign publications” and delivering (or not) the visas necessary for importation. Although Morocco does not officially practice state censorship, this process allowed the king to uphold his three red lines (the monarchy, the kingdom’s “territorial integrity,” and Islam), which were enshrined in article 29 of the Press Code. READ MORE…