Novelists From South Korea

"I’ve always wanted actors to simply and purely feel the emotions rather than feeling like they have to express them. During the film shoot, I tried to have as much conversation with them as I could about the characters and their circumstances. Having conversation was a more effective way of communication than simply giving directions, and I believe it allowed much more freedom for the actors."

"I have to wonder how much obvious messages like ‘justice prevails’ would affect our lives, which leads me to make films that ask questions."

"It’s very different between writing a novel and making a film, in a novel you’re using language to bring a story to life, so through this you’re speaking of it. Film is not a medium that is carried through with language, but something else. A film can tell a story very strongly, and a film’s great asset is that it can depict characters very well. For the most part, telling a story from a novel is very strong, but I feel that films have more power to do that."

"To me it seems that films these days are becoming more and more simple, and the audience seems to desire simpler stories. Of course, films sort of shape the desires and the demands the audience makes, so I kind of wanted to go against this trend and see if a film can sort of throw endless questions at the audience. Endless questions about a larger mysterious world."

"Poems are about things and occurrences that we don’t see visually, it’s the needing of beauty and meaning, that’s what poetry can be. In a natural way there are many stories that interweave throughout the film, and the film’s big scene is not just about the tragic event, but it also meets with what poetry is about, they interweave together."

"When I used to write novels, I always wrote for one person, for this person who thought and felt the same way as I do. It almost felt like I was writing a love letter to this very specific person who would understand what I’m writing and share the same feelings and thoughts."

"I’ve never made films that delivers messages, nor have I ever felt the urge to make such pieces. I just like to ask questions."

"To be honest, it’s very difficult to explain what stories I see fit to become a film or not. I have several people I regularly work with — producers, actors, crew members — and it’s always very difficult to explain why this story can or can’t be a film. It often puts me in trouble, as well. I can find it hard to explain myself. Whether the story is fun or moving or might receive good reviews is honestly not that important to me. It’s a very intuitive feeling that I have — mainly about whether the story is worth reaching out to the audience to communicate with them at this point in time. Is the story worth the effort of bringing it to the audience? It’s sort of a very sensitive and intuitive decision-making process that happens within me."

"To me, it seems that the world we live in continues to become more and more sophisticated, convenient and cool on the outside, but there are so many problems underneath that we can’t really discern — and that’s the nature of this post-modern world and its problems."

"Literature is different from cinema in that, when I’m writing it, I’m thinking of one reader who will go through a range of emotions with me, whereas with film I’m addressing a larger audience. For me, writing fiction is like writing love letters."

"For me, to write is to endlessly question what is life, what is death, what am I. When I write, especially when I’m writing novels, I’m exchanging one, two, three, sometimes four years for that book. So when I feel that I’m going forward as a writer, when I see that I explored what it means to be human in a certain way in this book and I went another way in another book, that’s when I’m glad that I became a writer."

"Humans will not hesitate to lay down their own lives to rescue a child who had fallen onto the train tracks, yet are also perpetrators of appalling violence, like in Auschwitz. The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child. You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence."

"I believe that trauma is something to be embraced rather than healed or recovered from. I believe that grief is something which situates the place/space of the dead within the living; and that, through repeatedly revisiting that place, through our pained and silent embrace of it over the course of a whole life, life is, perhaps paradoxically, made possible."

"I don’t see a single concept of ‘national’ or ‘literature’. Rather, I’ve always been fascinated by language. I enjoy contemplating the great depth, complexity and delicacy of the layers of a culture in which a single language is in-built. I owe a great debt to poetry and fiction written in Korean, as I spent my adolescence immersed within these."

"Writing is a way of questioning for me. I don’t try to find an answer, but to complete the question, or to stay within the question as long as I can. In a sense, writing fiction can be compared with pacing back and forth. You go forward and then come back again, pondering questions that both sears and chills you internally."

"No. I have run away from a lot of publicity. I have tried my best to come back to my desk again. I needed a peaceful corner of my own for my next work. But it took time. Now I am adjusting myself to these new circumstances. I will try to write my next book as soon as possible."

"I spent the autumn and winter of 2014 in Warsaw. Every day walking the unfamiliar streets of that city, tenaciously reconstructed after 95 percent had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, the thought came to me to write about a person who resembled the city. And one day I realised that this person had to be my older sister – a baby who left the world within two hours of being born into it. I wanted to make her live again through lending her my senses, my life. Writing this book was a form of prayer intending to make the things I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted, all with the warmth of my living flesh, into 'her / your' things. And, as is always the case with our prayers, at a certain point it occurred to me that I was not writing for 'her' alone."

"Even though each country has different cultural backgrounds and social traditions, the word “Mom” can evoke universal emotional responses. Additionally, the behavior of children is very similar across borders. Children’s attitudes toward Mom and their tendency to forget her are similar all around the world…"

"I was very young, and those events affected me deeply. I feel the time given to me doesn't belong only to me. In everything – my writing, my travelling, my happiness – I live partly on behalf of those who weren't able to survive. I feel I'm living their share of life."

"She is like a great writer, with the power to read people; I was influenced by her. But hers wasn't a life where you could sit indoors with books."

"People have lost something important they took for granted, and that loss leaves them devastated."

"In the United States we have two competing mythologies about immigration. On the one hand, we believe that different kinds of races make up an American person. On the other, a deep nativist strain keeps resurfacing. Nevertheless, there has also been strong resistance to nativism. Frederick Douglass, for instance, called the United States a “composite nation” when he argued against the Chinese Exclusion Act [of 1882]."

"Political novels can be boring to read unless written effectively with the powerful tools of fiction; I was trying to do this. I want my books to be pleasurable and edifying. Though Frederick Douglass didn’t write fiction, his speeches have great narrative power because he integrates storytelling tools elegantly with his political analysis."

"(is a master class on dialogue:) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Really it’s a masterclass of everything. I always tell people that I am the president of the Pachinko fan club. It is one of my favorite novels of all time and gave me insight into a part of history, and a part of the world, from perspectives I had never encountered. A must read."

"My point of view of Korea is a child’s point of view. Because I left when I was seven and a half, there was an enormous amount of innocence. While I was growing up, a lot of horrible things happened politically in South Korea, and yet, I had a mother who was teaching piano at home. I remember things like getting ice cream as treats if we had some extra money, or how my father always wore a suit to the office; that’s sort of what I remember as a child. And that innocence is really nice because, now that I learned the historical aspect of what was really going on, I think, gosh, they must have been terrified in some ways. They must have been terrified sufficiently to say, “We would like to immigrate to another country and start all over again being essentially working class.”"

"“History has failed us, but no matter” serves as my thesis statement. I believe history has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world, not just the Korean-Japanese, who are the subject of Pachinko. I am also arguing that the discipline of history has failed. It is not that historians aren’t doing their jobs but rather that the memory of history has been reconstructed by the elite, because the overwhelming majority of ordinary people rarely leave sufficient primary documents; they do not have others recording their lives in real time. The phrase “but no matter” is a statement of defiance. It doesn’t matter that history has failed us because ordinary people have persisted anyway. This idea gives me an enormous amount of strength and hope as a writer because I am an ordinary person. Those of us who may be women of color, immigrants, or working class aren’t often meant to be people who write novels about ideas, but no matter."