Speaking of triumphs, we’re particularly pleased to salute the increasing visibility of queer writers in Korea with a selection edited by star translator Anton Hur. As Hur notes in his exuberant introduction, Korean literature has long had queer undercurrents, but only recently have writers felt free to be explicitly out. Highlighting the work of four contemporary voices, Hur brings us some of the freshest, most exciting work we’ve published.
Lee Jong San’s novel Customer is the first of a trilogy that takes place on a future Earth. The narrator, Suni, comes from a desert region whose residents are known as “worms.” Selected for a scholarship to a prestigious school in a well-to-do city, she begins a romance with her roommate, an androgyne, and encounters the subculture of “customers,” people who undergo a variety of body modifications, or “customs.” In Customer Lee creates a world where people can mutate and enhance their physical forms to match their emotional make-ups.
The body looms large in Lee Hyemi’s poetry, as well, which is characterized by fluidity and immersion. In “The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” Lee contributes an erotic ode grounded in lush metaphor. Lee has spoken out on sexual harassment, both within Korean literary circles and the global #metoo movement; as with her activism, her poetry recreates and holds space for agency and queerness in female sexuality.
In counterpoint to the work of Lee and Lee, Kim Hyejin’s novel About My Daughter and Kim Bong-gon’s “College Folk” confront the shaming and rejection faced by many who identify as queer, often by those closest to them. In an excerpt from About My Daughter, a widow invites her underemployed daughter to move in, but is less hospitable to a third party. The mother, a caregiver in a nursing home, struggles to accept her daughter’s sexuality and her partner; the younger women, in turn, fight poverty and sexual discrimination. In her portrait of the resistant mother and the stubborn couple, Kim draws a nuanced portrait of a clash both generational and social.
A student saves a professor from scandal, then finds himself in a position to embroil them both in a new one in Kim Bong-gon’s “College Folk.” In an interview with the Korean Literature Institute, the author notes that the story was his first in which he both took his time and included his own experiences, and declares, “it contains my three favorite elements: queer, liberal arts, and romance.”