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| A candlelit protest calling for the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye is held in Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul, in this Nov. 12, 2016, photo. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
Author Hwang Jung-eun soul searches to find true meaning of revolution
By Park Han-sol
The wounds are still fresh in people's memory. Question after question has been raised since the passenger ferry Sewol tragically sank to the bottom of the ocean in 2014, taking hundreds of lives with it, many of whom were school children on an excursion to the scenic Jeju Island. But where was the president when people were dying?
The mystery of President Park Geun-hye's whereabouts for a seven-hour period at that critical time eventually pushed millions of people to take to the streets and gather for the Gwanghwamun rallies in 2016 and 2017, calling for Park's resignation.
There was one common theme they were all hoping to address: Change. And in 2021, years after the political turmoil, people are asking again if that very change has truly come.
In her two-storied novel "DD's Umbrella" (2019), author Hwang Jung-eun revisits different moments of the recent protests in Gwanghwamun Square to present the revolution as an unfinished business for many.
Having taken part in many of the street rallies herself, she suggests that such progressive movements can still coexist with the exclusion of the socially marginalized. How can we then push ourselves to move forward from here?
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| 'DD's Umbrella' (2019) by Hwang Jung-eun / Courtesy of Changbi Publishers |
Hwang's core message about the nature of the true political revolution and, simultaneously, its treatment of the socially underprivileged, resounds even more strongly in the next novella "No Need to Say Anything."
This story deals more directly with the history of revolutions, which include not only candlelit protests but also the June Struggle in 1987 against the authoritarian Chun Doo-hwan regime and the 1996 Yonsei University Struggle, where students' allegedly pro-unification, pro-North Korea rally led to a series of police raids.
But instead of taking us into the middle of the protests filled with explosive emotions and hopes, the narrative takes a step back and follows the introspective journey of Kim So-young, who is sitting alone at home in an early afternoon of the day when President Park's impeachment was announced.
Kim's identity as a lesbian who is slowly losing her vision serves as a catalyst for readers to examine how women, LGBTQ persons and people with disabilities can become excluded from the larger narrative of political revolution.
Present at the scene of the 1996 Yonsei University Struggle, the narrator Kim recalls how a group of students, surrounded by police blockades and clouds of tear gas, were locked up inside the campus building for days without access to food, drinks or hygiene products.
This forced one student named L to keep her pants on smeared with her menstrual blood the entire time, but her traumatic experience goes largely unnoticed; after the incident, she is even considered "oddly sensitive" for being absent from classes for several days each month.
When the protesters were finally hauled away by the police, female students were subject to double layers of violence ― physical abuse as members of student protesters as well as sexual and verbal abuse fixated on their genitalia as women.
But such misogynistic treatment seemed to remain an invisible, perhaps inevitable, part of the political struggle. It was one of the sacrifices that had to be made for the "greater cause."
The most evident case takes place during the candlelit protest scene when Kim passes by a man holding up a sign with the phrase "Evil Woman OUT," with the word "woman" written in red based on the superstitious belief that it will bring death or bad luck to the person.
To Kim, this immediately strikes as an offense. "The person who witnessed this phrase wasn't the president in seclusion inside the Blue House; it was me, the woman right in front of the sign," she thinks to herself. "Why did he choose not to see all of these women present in the square alongside him?"
But in the end, she doesn't ― or can't ― do anything about it. In an arena where millions came together with a unified goal in mind, taking issue with such a "trivial, secondary" matter would have sidetracked them from achieving the greater good.
And this happens time and time again with other groups of social minorities.
"Women can't marry each other. They can only marry men," Kim's young nephew says out loud, parroting back his teacher's words. Thus, the very real relationship between Kim and her partner Seo Soo-kyung becomes erased in the eyes of a five-year-old child and furthermore to people in Gwanghwamun Square.
Behind such discriminatory rhetoric lies "common sense," defined by the narrator as the hasty judgment made not based on critical thinking but on habitual customs passed down for generations. When people say something is "common sense" they are often unconsciously reproducing an ideology that tends to marginalize certain social classes, ones who deviate from the norm and are therefore not "common."
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| Author Hwang Jung-eun / Korea Times file |
"It took me four and a half years to come all the way here (and finish writing the book), and the world seems to have changed in one way but also remains unaffected," Hwang writes in the book's epilogue.
"DD's Umbrella" then leaves us with the task to turn our attention to the unchanged part of history ― the continued exclusion of the socially marginalized. For them, the revolution, both big and small, is far from being over.
Since her debut in 2005 with the short story "Mother," Hwang has made her name known in the Korean literary scene as one of the writers who represents the literature of the 2010s with her unhinged imagination and simple style. Some of her books available in English are "One Hundred Shadows," "I'll Go On" and "Kong's Garden." The 45-year-old author has also been the recipient of a number of prestigious prizes such as Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, Lee Hyo-seok, Daesan and Kim Yu-jeong Literary Awards.
