Korean Short Stories 1: Why Do the Stories Write Money Down to the Last Jeon?

Volume 10 of Minumsa's World Literature series is not a foreign novel but nineteen Korean short stories collected as Korean Short Stories 1. Read the stories from the 1920s to the 1940s one after another and one thing keeps catching the eye: sums of money. Eighty won, thirty jeon, five won: money in these stories is almost always written down exactly, to the jeon, the hundredth of a won. By the end of this guide you will be able to explain, through the endings of four stories, why those sums had to be so exact, and you will know what to mark while reading the other fifteen.

What kind of book is it?

The editor is Lee Nam-ho, and the Minumsa edition came out in August 1998. Its 480 pages hold nineteen stories by twelve writers: Kim Dong-in's "Potatoes" and "The Toes Look Alike", Hyun Jin-geon's "A Poor Man's Wife" and "A Lucky Day", Yi Kwang-su's "Darkness", Na Do-hyang's "The Water Mill", Choe Seo-hae's "Red Flames", Kim Yu-jeong's "Camellias" and "The Scoundrels", Chae Man-sik's "Constable Maeng" and "My Idiot Uncle", Yi Sang's "Wings", Yi Hyo-seok's "The Mountain" and "When the Buckwheat Blooms", Yi Tae-jun's "The Night Road" and "A Rabbit Story", Jeong Bi-seok's "The Shrine", and Yeom Sang-seop's "Deathbed" and "Two Bankruptcies". The English titles here are descriptive translations; published translations sometimes use other names.

The publisher presents the book as following the modern Korean short story from its beginnings in the 1920s to the mature literary scene it had become, little more than a decade later, by the 1930s. As the number in the title suggests, Korean Short Stories 2, by the same editor, follows as volume 20 of the series.

READING NOTES

The nineteen stories of Korean Short Stories 1

Twelve writers, in the order of the book

• Kim Dong-in · Hyun Jin-geon · Yi Kwang-su

  • Potatoes; The Toes Look Alike
  • A Poor Man's Wife; A Lucky Day; Darkness

• Na Do-hyang · Choe Seo-hae · Kim Yu-jeong

  • The Water Mill; Red Flames
  • Camellias; The Scoundrels

• Chae Man-sik · Yi Sang · Yi Hyo-seok

  • Constable Maeng; My Idiot Uncle; Wings
  • The Mountain; When the Buckwheat Blooms

• Yi Tae-jun · Jeong Bi-seok · Yeom Sang-seop

  • The Night Road; A Rabbit Story; The Shrine
  • Deathbed; Two Bankruptcies

Edited by Lee Nam-ho · Minumsa World Literature 10 · 1998

Why the sums of money?

Most of the people in this book are poor. A rickshaw puller, tenant farmers, a wife in a slum, an unknown writer who earns nothing from his manuscripts appear one after another. Write only that someone is poor, and the reader nods and moves on. Write down the sum, and things change. How much a day brings in, what that money can buy and what it falls short of start to add up. The reader begins to count along with the character, and the moment the count no longer works is the ending. In the four stories below this method is at its clearest. Quotations and sums were checked against the public-domain texts on Korean Wikisource.

Reading four endings by their sums

Kim Dong-in, "Potatoes" (1925). At fifteen, Bok-nyeo is sold for 80 won into marriage with a widower twenty years older. His idleness pushes the couple into the slum outside Chilseong Gate in Pyongyang, and Bok-nyeo, caught stealing potatoes from the field of a Chinese farmer, Wang, becomes his mistress. In the last scene, after Bok-nyeo's death, three men sit together. Wang hands her husband three ten-won notes and the herbalist two. The next day, with the herbalist's diagnosis of a cerebral haemorrhage, she is carried to the public cemetery. The story ties both its beginning and its end to a price: a life that starts at 80 won is settled for 50.

Hyun Jin-geon, "A Lucky Day" (1924). The rickshaw puller Kim Cheom-ji earns 30 jeon and then 50 jeon in the morning, and talks a passenger bound for Namdaemun Station into paying 1 won 50 jeon. At home lies his wife, who has been coughing for more than a month and has asked for seolleongtang, beef-bone soup; that morning she begged him not to go out. In this story each sum measures his luck and, at the same time, his distance from home. The more he earns, the longer he puts off going back, and over drinks he shouts that he has made thirty won, a figure far from the truth. When he comes home with the soup, his wife is already dead. Counted in money, the "luck" of the title is real; counted in people, it is the opposite.

READING NOTES

Four stories whose sums tell the ending

Who hands how much to whom

• Kim Dong-in, Potatoes · 1925

  • Bok-nyeo is sold into marriage at 15 for 80 won.
  • After her death: 30 won to the husband, 20 to the herbalist.

• Hyun Jin-geon, A Lucky Day · 1924

  • 30 jeon, 50 jeon, 1 won 50 jeon...
  • The better the fares, the farther from home.

• Kim Yu-jeong, The Scoundrels · 1935

  • After rent and loans, the harvest leaves nothing.
  • Eung-o steals the rice from his own paddy at night.

• Yi Sang, Wings · 1936

  • His wife's silver coins pile up by his pillow.
  • He puts the unspent 5 won in her hand.

Sums checked against the public-domain texts on Korean Wikisource

Kim Yu-jeong, "The Scoundrels" (1935). Here the point is that no sum is left at all. Eung-o, a hard-working farmer, will not cut his ripe rice. The year before, after threshing at the landlord's gate and paying the rent, the grain loans and the other shares, he was left with almost nothing. Then someone steals the heads of rice from his paddy. His drifter brother Eung-chil keeps watch all night and catches the thief: Eung-o himself. Only by stealing it can he make his own rice his own. Eung-chil offers to get him the money and asks him to come along, but Eung-o shakes him off; Eung-chil beats him, then carries him down the hill on his back.

Yi Sang, "Wings" (1936). Unlike the first three, the narrator of this story does not know how to spend money. The silver coins his wife gives him pile up by his pillow; he drops them into a coin box and in the end throws that into the privy. One night he goes out into the streets, cannot bring himself to spend the five won he has saved, comes back and puts it in his wife's hand, and for the first time falls asleep in her room. He has copied exactly what her visitors do, and he is satisfied without knowing why. Through the eyes of a man who does not know what money buys and sells, the reader learns what is really being traded in that house.

What else to mark

The questions asked of these four work on the other stories too. The unknown writer and his wife in "A Poor Man's Wife" pawn their clothes to buy food, and a new pair of shoes brought by her elder sister causes a small stir between them. In Choe Seo-hae's "Red Flames", Mun, a tenant farmer who has moved to western Jiandao in Manchuria, cannot pay his rent and loses his only daughter to his Chinese landlord: the moment a debt becomes the price of a person.

The other thing to watch is who does not know what. Chae Man-sik's "My Idiot Uncle" is told by a nephew who works for a Japanese shopkeeper and sneers at his uncle, a socialist back from prison, while proudly announcing that he plans to save exactly a hundred thousand won. Hearing him, the reader ends up suspecting the nephew more than the uncle. In Kim Dong-in's "The Toes Look Alike", M, who cannot father children, says that his wife's baby has toes just like his, and the narrator, a doctor who knows the truth, goes along with that belief. Mark the places where what a character believes and what the reader knows part ways, and a short story reads much longer.

READING NOTES

Four things to mark while reading

Questions that work on any of the nineteen

1. 01

   The sum

   • Circle every won and jeon.
   • Ask what is missing, not only how much.
2. 02

   The hand that pays

   • Who gives to whom?
   • What does the one who takes it lose?
3. 03

   Title against ending

   • The luck in A Lucky Day
   • Where the title and the ending disagree
4. 04

   Who does not know what?

   • The nephew in My Idiot Uncle; M in The Toes
   • Where what a character believes and what you know part

Reading guide · try it on one story

A suggested reading order

A first reading can simply follow the book's order, but if you read the four stories above ("A Lucky Day", "Potatoes", "The Scoundrels", "Wings") first and circle every sum, the rest are easier to compare. Then turn to "My Idiot Uncle" and "The Toes Look Alike" to look at where the narrator stands, and leave for last the stories where money recedes, such as "When the Buckwheat Blooms" and "The Mountain", to see another face of the same period. "Constable Maeng" and "Two Bankruptcies" are set after liberation in 1945, a different time from the earlier stories, so read them with that in mind.

Each time you pick a story, write three lines: what the first sum in the story is, who hands it to whom, and what was missing at the end. Fill those three lines and you can explain the story's ending in your own words.