A Life of Literature

The entire nation was saddened on May 5, 2008 by the news of the passing of Korea’s literary legend, Park Kyung-ni. She left an indelible mark on Korean literary history and the hearts of countless Koreans who were moved by her writing for generations. What has made Park a literary legend, still commanding a tremendous influence on Koreans’ lives long after her death?

Born on October 28th in the southern city of Tongyeong, 1927, Park’s real name was Park Geum-i. Her journey from the ordinary girl named Park Geum-i to the highly admired writer Park Kyung-ni was long and rocky.

When Park was 18, her father left her mother and remarried. Park’s childhood was fraught with domestic discord and loneliness, and her only solace was reading. After graduating from Jinju Girls’ High School, she married Kim Haeng-do, but her happiness was short-lived. Her husband was killed during the Korean War and her son died after the war was over. She moved to Seoul and worked at a bank while raising her daughter by herself.
Her life was changed forever when she met novelist Kim Dong-ni. She began her career as a writer when Kim recommended her short story, “Gyesan (Calculation),” to be published in the monthly literature publication Modern Literature. Using her penname “Kyung-ni” from then on, Park rose in the literary standings with her life-inspired works such as “The Age of Mistrust,” in remembrance of her son, and “The Age of Darkness,” a story about a woman who was widowed during the war and had to support her children and aged mother.
Park was known to highlight Korean history through her own personal life, but she began a new chapter in her career with the publication of “The Daughters of Kim Yak-guk” in the 1960s. She moved away from incorporating personal experiences in her writing and began to write from an objective perspective. Instead of using writing as a form of therapy to ease her own tragedies and pains, she expanded her view to become more aware of social issues and published a series of novels of grand scale. But it was “Toji (The Land)” that put her on the map as an undisputed literary great.

“Toji,” a defining work in Korean literature

She started writing “Toji” in June 1969 and finished it in August 1994. The five-part epic begins with a celebration in Hadong in 1897 and ends with a celebration of liberation on August 15, 1945. It is a dramatic saga of some 700 characters, whose trials and tribulations, as well as triumphs, represent the unbreakable ties between personal fate and history.

To complete this grand work, Park devoted 25 years of her life, writing even on the day she was discharged from the hospital after breast cancer surgery in 1971. Even the incarceration of her son-in-law, resistance poet Kim Ji-ha, for his involvement in anti-government activities in 1974 could not keep her away from writing.

Park made a confession that she wrote “Toji” as if she was a prisoner in the writing cell for 25 years, which is telling of the hardship she had to endure in order to complete the 40,000-page narrative. Depicting in detail human desires, resistance to the Japanese colonial regime, and respect for life, “Toji” was applauded as the greatest literary work in Korean history and translated into English, Japanese, and French.

Comfort at Last

After completing “Toji,” Park cut down on her work load, just writing a few newspaper columns and publishing a poem collection. In 2008 she published a set of new poems in the April issue of Modern Literature. In “That House of the Old,” a poem reminiscing about her life in Wonju, Gangwon Province, she writes about how comforting it is to put the hard past behind her and how unburdened she feels about her old age.

This poem turned out to be a portent of her passing. Park suffered a stroke and passed away on May 5th, 2008 at the age of 82. Although she is gone, her works, especially “Toji” still resonate in our hearts and define an era in Korean literary history.