| Hwang Sok-yong | |
|---|---|
| Hangul | 황석영 |
| Hanja | 黃晳暎 |
| Revised Romanization | Hwang Seok-yeong |
| McCune–Reischauer | Hwang Sŏgyŏng |
Hwang Sok-yong (born January 4, 1943) is a South Korean novelist known as a longtime dissident against the South Korean government.
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He was born in Hsinking (today Changchun), Manchukuo, during the period of Japanese rule. His family returned to Korea after liberation in 1945. He later obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dongguk University(동국대학교).
In 1964 he was jailed for political reasons and met labor activists. Upon his release he worked at a cigarette factory and at several construction sites around the country.
In 1966–1969 he was part of Korea’s military corps during the Vietnam War, reluctantly fighting for the American cause that he saw as an attack on a liberation struggle:
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What difference was there between my father’s generation, drafted into the Japanese army or made to service Imperial Japan’s pan-Asian ambitions, and my own, unloaded into Vietnam by the Americans in order to establish a “Pax Americana” zone in the Far East during the ColdWar? |
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In Vietnam he was responsible for “clean-up,” erasing the proof of civilian massacres and burying the dead. A gruesome experience in which he was constantly surrounded by corpses that were gnawed by rats and abuzz with flies. Based on these experiences he wrote the short story “The Pagoda” in 1970, which won the daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo’s new year prize, and embarked on an adult literary career.
His first novel The Chronicle of a Man Named Han, the story of a family separated by the Korean War, was published in 1970. The novel is still topical today after Kim Dae-jung’s visit to North Korea and meeting with Kim Jong-il led to reunion programes for separated families, and talk of reunification. The Chronicle of a Man Named Han was translated into French by Zulma in 2002.
Hwang Sok-yong published a collection of stories, The Road to Sampo in 1974, and became a household name with his epic, Chang Kil-san (also spelled Jan Gilsan), which was serialized in a daily newspaper over a period of ten years (1974–84). Using the parable of a bandit from olden times (“parables are the only way to foil the censors”) to describe the contemporary dictatorship, Chang Kil-san was a huge success in North as well as South Korea. It sold an estimated million copies, and remains a bestseller in Korea fiction today.
Hwang Sok-yong also wrote for the theatre, and several members of a company were killed while performing one of his plays during the 1980 Kwangju uprising. During this time Hwang Sok-yong went from being a politically committed writer revered by students and intellectuals, to participating directly in the struggle. As he says:
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I fought Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship. I worked in the factories and farms of Cholla, and I took part in the movements of the masses throughout the country . . . in 1980, I took part in the Kwangju uprising. I improvised plays, wrote pamphlets and songs, coordinated a group of writers against the dictatorship, and started a clandestine radio station called “The voice of free Kwangju.” |
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The 1985 appearance of Lee Jae-eui's book Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age (English translation: Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Age, 1999) brought new trouble: Hwang Sok-yong originally agreed to take credit as the author in order to help market the book, and both Hwang as the assumed author and the publisher were arrested and sent to prison.[1] Hwang Sok-yong's substantial and award-winning novel based on his bitter experience of the Vietnam War, The Shadow of Arms was published in 1985. It would be translated into English in 1994 and French in 2003. In 1989 Hwang Sok-yong traveled to Pyongyang in North Korea, via Tokyo and Beijing, as a representative of the nascent democratic movement:
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When I went to North Korea I realized that writers from the North had read poems and novels by progressive writers from the South. The main reason for my visit was to promote exchange between the Association of South Korean artists and the general Federation of North Korean literature and arts unions. I suggested starting a magazine that would feature works of Northern as well as Southern writers. That was how the Literature of the Reunification magazine was born, and how many works from Southern novelists and poets were introduced to the North. |
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This crossing of the divide was illegal, and the South Korean criminal investigation service regarded Hwang Sok-yong as a spy. Rather than return to South Korea he went into voluntary exile in New York, lecturing at Long Island University. He also spent time in Germany, which he found transformational:
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My world was turned upside down by the fall of the Berlin wall, which taught me that similar things were happening the world over. This made me abandon formal constraints to write more freely and in a more traditionally ‘Asian’ way, but with new content. |
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In 1993 he returned to Seoul—because “a writer needs to live in the country of his mother tongue” — and was promptly sentenced to seven years in prison for breach of national security. While in prison, he conducted eighteen hunger strikes against restrictions such as the banning of pens, and inadequate nutrition.
Organizations around the world, including PEN America and Amnesty, rallied for his release and the author was finally pardoned in 1998 as part of a group amnesty by the then newly elected president Dae-jung. When asked whether the regime that had freed him, recognized his work and even sent him on an official visit to North part of a policy of opening up and promoting dialogue was a democracy, he replied:
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The government is still in transition to being a true democracy. But I am very optimistic about our future because unlike in Japan, there is a lot of commitment to democracy here. Plenty of NGOs are fighting for human rights . . . which means that I no longer have much to do in that arena, so I can get on with writing! |
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Hwang Sok-yong published his next novel, Garden, a decade later (in 2000). Though melancholic in tone, this “requiem inner experiences of the 1980s generation, who dreamed of a better has been highly successful, and won the Danjae Award and Yi Literary Award. It was published in German in Fall 2005 by DTV, French by Zulma. The English-language edition, called The Old Garden, was published in September 2009 by Seven Stories Press, and will be published subsequently in England by Picador Asia. The early chapters of the book are currently being serialized online.
The Guest, a novel about a massacre in North Korea wrongly attributed to the Americans that was in fact a battle between Christian and Communist Koreans, was published in 2002. It would be translated into French in 2004 and Seven Stories brought out the English-language edition to critical acclaim in 2005. The "guest” is a euphemism for smallpox, or an unwanted visitor that brings death and destruction.
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What is known as globalization is in fact Americanization: need to stop following the American model and build a movement that will close the gap between the rich and the poor give more purchasing power to the developing world. |
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