Korean Literature Review – Human Decency
By Elton LaClare
For those Koreans who came of age during the fervent activism that followed the appointment of Chun Doo-hwan as the country’s 11th President, the early 1990s represented a critical crossroads – a time when they were obliged to choose between remaining true to their youthful idealism or joining the ranks of a rapidly expanding middle class. Like the characters she writes about, Gong Ji-young seems condemned to endless rumination over the meaning of her role in the student and labour movements and the sudden loss of purpose that resulted from abandoning the principles that spurred her actions for the better part of a decade.
Both of the stories contained in Gong’s book, Human Decency, feature single professional women – writers, no less – struggling to find meaning in a changing society. The tension between honoring the sacrifices of the past and longing for a future in which people are no longer bound by tradition is evident throughout both narratives, though it is arguably more forcefully put in the title story.
In Human Decency we are presented with a narrator who is all but haunted by the betrayal of her activist past implied by her decision to accept a position with a woman’s magazine owned by her uncle. Her internal conflict is played out in a dispute with her editor as to which of a pair of pending articles should be featured in the magazine’s next issue. The articles, both interviews, represent opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the type of individual they profile. On the one hand, there’s Gwon Ogyu, an intellectual and orchestrator of student demonstrations who spent the better part of the 70s and 80s as a political prisoner, while on the other there’s Yi Min-ja, an artist and advocate of spiritual meditation whose privileged background has allowed her to live much of her adult life abroad.
Although the narrator professes an aversion to the likes of Yi Min-ja, whom she feels has shirked her duty to assist in the establishment of a civil society, she cannot help but view her as a model of how to exist outside of matrimony and the conventional roles of women. Her various rationalizations for the attraction she feels toward Yi give rise to the bizarre notion that attempting to improve one’s lot in life, trying new things and being happy are, in effect, renunciations of one’s Korean identity.
As with the narrator of Human Decency, the central character of Gong’s second tale, Dreams, is afflicted by a sense of loss that no amount of time seems able to dispel. Having lived through the activism of the 1980s, she finds herself stumbling toward an uncertain future – one devoid of the moral certainties that had sustained her through her student days. Along with a pair of old comrades (a failed composer and out of work movie director) she embarks on a weekend road trip. Although the ostensible reason for the excursion is to do some fishing, it soon becomes apparent that the three have convened out of a shared sense of hopelessness. By the end of the story, it is clear that the ‘dreams’ of the title refer not to hopes for the future but nightmares that enable the past to endlessly recur.
The stories contained in Human Decency offer us characters who are not so much broken as incomplete. Stripped of their idealism, they cannot fully come to terms with who they are or what they want to be. The unintended casualty of democracy, it seems, has been the sense of purpose of an entire generation of activists. Although this irony is no doubt lost on some, her body of work makes it clear that the same cannot be said of Gong Ji-young.
An English translation of Human Decency is available in the GIC library.