For the Anglophone fans of Lee Chang-dong’s profoundly moving films, it is no secret that he was once a highly accomplished novelist before pivoting to filmmaking. Sadly, his short stories remained largely a mystery in the English-speaking world as none of his literary outputs were available in English, save for “The Leper,” which was reprinted in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s translation in The New Yorker last year. That is about to change with the publication of Snowy Day and Other Stories, the first collection of short stories from Lee to be available in English via Penguin Press. This major new publication introduces readers not only to Lee’s illustrious literary career, but also to some of the finest works of Korean literature from the 1980s.
Revisiting Lee’s stories, this time in Fenkl’s and Yoosup Chang’s excellent translation, reminded me of how much I cherished them as a teenager. My first encounter with him was through Secret Sunshine (2007), which I saw at a local multiplex theater in Seoul. Thirteen and underage for the film, I had to be accompanied by my mother’s friend, a middle school teacher who studied Korean literature in college. Jeon Do-yeon’s breathtaking performance and the film’s unflinching examination of human nature left me completely dumbfounded. Leaving the theater, she said, “If you like this film, you will love his books. Did you know that he was once a famous writer?” The following week, I stopped by a bookstore after school and picked up There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon (1992), his second story collection, simply because of the word “shit.” Mother’s friend was right—I devoured the book that evening.
His stories often revolve around ordinary citizens whose family and friends met tragic ends during South Korea’s many social upheavals. In addition to offering gripping narratives and astute insight into human vulnerability, they double up as a crash course on the country’s political history—the Korean War and subsequent anti-communist campaigns, the Gwangju Uprising, and events leading up to the June Democratic Struggle of 1987. At the same time, these are extremely personal stories drawn directly from the writer’s own life and the lives of those dear to him. For instance, “Fire and Dust” is directly inspired by Lee’s own experience of losing his five-year-old son to a car crash in 1984.
In the author’s note from Nokcheon, Lee writes that he wishes to be reborn and write something completely new. In the early 90s, he was busy working on a manuscript for what he was sure would become his literary masterpiece. But alas, a malicious virus infiltrated his computer and wiped out everything. Despite his prodigious effort to restore the file, the years of hard work were permanently gone. Despair soon turned into an epiphany that this might be a divine intervention instructing him to leave literature behind. Thus, he was born again as a filmmaker. The rest is history: Green Fish (1997) Peppermint Candy (1999), Oasis (2002), Secret Sunshine, Poetry (2010), and Burning (2019).
I interviewed Lee via email to discuss his short stories, what he deems to be the responsibilities of a writer, and the relationship between literature and cinema.
Jawni Han: Congratulations on the publication of the long-awaited Snowy Day and Other Stories.
I’d like to begin with a question about whose points of view you choose to tell your stories from. More often than not, your protagonists are indecisive. For instance, Shinhye from “Lamp in the Sky” is not fully committed to the labor movement like her friend and comrade Sooim, but upon getting arrested, she does not switch sides to save herself, either. What draws you to characters without strong ideological leanings, as opposed to pro-democracy activists or conformists?
Lee Chang-dong: The 1980s in South Korea was a decade in which military dictatorship, resistance, and the intensifying contradictions of capitalism were intricately entangled. It is true I could have dramatized it through conflicts between those who resist and those who conform. But the reality is not in black and white. It is far more complicated and layered. Characters who stand somewhere in the middle, I thought, would render the depiction of people caught in the whirlwind of history more three-dimensional. Characters in my stories may seem powerless and pathetic, but despite their circumstances, they struggle against the meaninglessness of life in their own ways.
JH: Your stories are in dialogue with major political events from South Korea’s recent past. Instead of being the center of the drama, they usually appear as backdrops for the stories of those who have survived them. Perhaps relatedly, your protagonists are always absent when a major narrative event occurs. Is there a reason for their absence?
LCD: The stories included in this collection do not directly grapple with major historical events mainly because these are short stories. By their nature, short stories are not very suitable for sweeping narratives, so they instead focus on smaller details that allude to bigger stories. I was more interested in revealing the totality of life through the quotidian than through historical events. That is the methodology I chose as a novelist and now as a filmmaker, I still operate the same way.
You could say the characters’ absence from important narrative incidents is part of my storytelling form. I believe that “those who were not there” have more stories to tell than “those who were there.” And that is because these stories belong to ordinary people who are no different from me.
JH: In 2015, you gave a special lecture for creative writing students at Chung-Ang University where you said that writers and filmmakers should think of themselves as people in the front line of a protest. I was very struck by your remark. In the preface to Snow Day and Other Stories, you recite Adorno’s famous quote about Auschwitz. Clearly, you believe that literature has political and ethical responsibilities to fulfill. What would you say were your responsibilities as a Korean writer in the 80s, and are they still relevant to you now that you are a filmmaker?
LCD: [Three] years before I published my first story in 1983, the military junta controlled by Chun Doo-hwan, who had just seized power through a coup, killed hundreds of civilians in a city named Gwangju. It felt as though Adorno’s maxim—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism”—was addressed directly to me, then an emerging writer. I asked myself, what does it mean for me to write novels in the face of this historical reality? What could my prose contribute to a collective effort to make a more just world? Such were the painful questions that weighed on me at the time.
I am now an old filmmaker and still grappling with the same questions. The world has gone through a lot of change, and so have I. Yet, I can’t help but agonize over how literature or cinema should relate to the world and how they should reflect reality.
“I am now an old filmmaker and still grappling with the same questions. The world has gone through a lot of change, and so have I. Yet, I can’t help but agonise over how literature or cinema should relate to the world and how they should reflect reality.”
Lee Chang-dong
JH: During the same lecture, you also said “the youth has lost all of its energy.” I believe that’s something you explore in Burning as well. Almost ten years have passed since your lecture at Chung-Ang University, and young people in Korea, especially women in their 20s and 30s, are taking to the streets to demand Yoon Suk-yeol’s impeachment. Do you sense any change among the Korean youth?
LCD: The political divide between young men and women in South Korea probably has something to do with the fact that Korean society is one big rat race. Confronted with cut-throat competition, young men tend to suffer from greater existential anxiety than their female counterparts. Girls outperform boys in schools and on a social level, lots of changes toward gender equality have taken place. In the meantime, men are feeling increasingly more threatened by the competition from women, and their anxiety and victim complex have manifested in reactionary politics.
On the other hand, young women are still faced with gender-based discrimination and doing their best to overcome the social injustices. Their lived experience under the culture of patriarchy and structural sexism has inspired them to voice their opinions that much louder. The fact that many young women attend pro-impeachment rallies and engage in feminist movements shows how desperately they would like the status quo to change.
JH: In the 80s, the division of Korea was the most important issue for writers to grapple with. You did not experience the Korean War directly but came of age in a world shaped by anti-communism and state violence enacted by your parents’ generation. Many of your characters have family members who are branded as “commies,” and treat the fact of being a “commie” as a matter of hereditary transference. In Burning though, Ben calls the radio broadcast coming from the DPRK “interesting” as if it has nothing to do with his reality. What do you make of the relative indifference among younger Koreans towards the division of Korea?
LCD: I understand that for the younger generations, the division of the peninsula may seem like a thing of the past that is irrelevant to their lives. Although it may not be so obvious, the truth is that so many problems that plague Korean society can be traced back to the division system. Everywhere we look in our everyday life, there is always a dividing line that may not be perceptible to our eyes. The far-right groups that have been spreading the messages of hate and discrimination could not exist without the foundation of battlefield mentality shaped by the country’s division. I would like the younger generations to recognize that the growing economic polarization, inequalities, and social injustices that suffocate them all have their roots in the division of Korea.
JH: In 2016, you joined Hou Hsiao-hsien and Hirokazu Kore-eda for a panel discussion on the topic of “solidarity in Asian cinema” at the Busan International Film Festival. You stated that solidarity can be something as simple as Asian filmmakers watching each other’s work and rooting for one another. Does your solidarity towards your fellow Asian filmmakers extend to Asian writers?
LCD: Although we all come from different backgrounds, solidarity among Asian filmmakers naturally emerges due to our shared struggle of working within impoverished national film industries in opposition to the dominant influence of Hollywood films.
My solidarity extends to Asian literature. Before becoming a writer myself, I read and took inspiration from the great works of Lu Xun, Osamu Dazai, and Kenzaburō Ōe, all of whom I felt deeply connected to. Among the contemporaries, I would like to mention Yan Lianke. The questions Yan raises about the Chinese society in his works are not that different from the ones I raise about Korea. And that makes me realize we are all grappling with universal questions about humanity.
A still from Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018).
JH: We find film adaptations of literary works in every culture. But in the case of Korean cinema, so-called “literary films,” which proliferated before democratization, are often treated as a distinct genre. Starting in the 90s, many accused Korean cinema of leeching off literature, and “literary films” were subject to harsh reevaluation. Some critics go so far as to exclude Lee Man-hee’s The Road to Sampo from the list of his masterpieces, just to cite one famous example. You began making films in this cultural climate that was rather hostile to literature. Did you consciously try to distance your novelist identity from your filmmaker identity?
LCD: The real reason behind hostility toward literary adaptations has more to do with how the fascist government stifled and controlled the film industry in the 70s for political reasons than the aesthetic issues you bring up. Back then, the government granted foreign film quota—usually Hollywood pictures—to studios that received top prizes including the Best Anti-communist Film award at [the government-sponsored] Grand Bell Awards. You have to remember that imported films were guaranteed cash cows in the 70s. Unsurprisingly, the studios wanted to produce something that would likely win awards and more often than not, these tended to be literary adaptations. As a result, everyone was in the business of producing “literary films,” and this unfortunately led to the depletion of creativity in the national cinema and in turn, the decline of the industry as a whole. Since “literary films” were a product of the fascist-era movie industry, they came to be the object of much derision. As for me, it is true that I transitioned from literature to filmmaking. But these two identities never clashed with each other. Whether I am writing a novel or shooting a film, the question I grapple with is always this: how do I honestly represent reality in my work?
JH: Is there anything you believe to be only possible in the novel? What would you say is a special quality unique to the medium?
LCD: The novel presents itself to the reader as something undetermined. Only in the reader’s imagination does Sennaya Square from Crime and Punishment take shape and fully come to life. On the other hand, film presents fully-formed images. In other words, depending on what the director puts in or takes away from the screen, the spectator may not see beyond what is in front of them.
The novel drives the reader to think and imagine on their own accord. The reader becomes an active participant in completing the text in their imagination. These are unique to literature and what makes it powerful. What about cinema? I tell myself that I shall never make a film that restrains the spectator’s imaginations and stunts their thinking, to the point where all they can do are passive sensory reactions.
JH: Can we hear a little bit about your next project?
LCD: I am finalizing a new screenplay, but that’s all I can say about it at this time.
JH: Could you share a book and a film that impressed you lately?
LCD: Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout and The Brutalist by Brady Corbet.
