Life, Literature of Park Kyung-ni

A view of Toji Culture Center, which is located in Maejiri 570, Heungeop-myeon, Wonju, Gangwon Province.

By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter

Park Kyung-ni, one of the nation's most respected writers, left a landmark legacy in the local contemporary literary scene in a writing career spanning more than 50 years.

Park was born in 1926 in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province. After graduating from Jinju Girls' High School in 1946, she married Kim Haeng-do. But she experienced the personal misfortune of him going missing during the Korean War and losing her baby son right after the war.

Living with her daughter, Kim Young-ju, she debuted on the local literary scene in 1956 with the publication of two short stories, ``Calculations'' (Gyesan, 1955) and ``Black is Black, White is White'' (Heuk heuk baek baek, 1956).

Park's fictional works from the 1950s have been acknowledged for employing a female protagonist who was widowed during the Korean War.

``The Age of Distrust'' (Bulsin sidae, 1957), ``The Road Without a Guidepost'' (Dopyo eomneun gil, 1958) and ``The Age of Darkness'' (Amheuk sidae, 1958) reflect the dark days marked by the war on Korean society through the eyes of the bereft, particularly for women who find themselves with neither material nor spiritual support for their existence.

Her novel, ``Drifting Island'' (Pyoryudo, 1959) also captures pervasive loneliness and uncertainty, which turns human beings into flotsam upon the turbulent waters of life. The novel depicts the psychological wanderings of a lonely woman trapped in a hard life, which reveals the vivid reality of the post-war Korean society.

But in 1962, Park tried to shift away from her early works' viewpoint, setting, subject matter and technique through the serialized novel, ``The Daughters of Pharmacist Kim'' (Kim yakgugui ttaldeul).

However, Park returns to the tragic subjects of the Korean War again in the acclaimed ``The Marketplace and the Battlefield'' (Sijang gwa jeonjang, 1964).

Instead of focusing on the perspective of one central character, ``The Marketplace and the Battlefield'' traces two different kinds of characters ― one that seeks to maintain an everyday existence and the other engaged in the ideologies of the war.

Such multi-layered development of history through diverse characters peaked in her masterpiece, ``Land.''

Land, Park's representative work

Of all her works, Park is best known for ``Land'' (Toji, 1969-94), a monumental epic novel, which boasts of grand scale and literary artistry, consisting of sixteen volumes depicting the turbulent history of modern Korean through a single clan.

Her landmark epic novel, ``Land,'' regarded as a masterpiece of contemporary Korean literature, has been included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.
Park devoted 25 years to write ``Land,'' which was started as a serial publication in the September 1969 issue of ``Modern Literature.''

The first volume opens in a rural village in South Gyeongsang Province, and as the story expands to Manchuria, Primorsky Krai, Seoul, Busan, Jinju and Tokyo, it reveals the lives, destinies and desires of the Korean people during tumultuous times.

The novel describes the ups and downs of five generations of the Choi families who are wealthy landowners in Hadong, South Gyeongsang Province, spanning the final days of the Joseon Kingdom to Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule.

As the novel's title suggests, it retells Korea's eventful and sadness-ridden modern history through the love of the vast ``Mother Earth.''

The novel also depicts the major changes in Korean society from the dissolution of the traditional sociopolitical hierarchy and family system, to the influx of Western materialism, and finally to the reality of colonial domination and concomitant struggle for independence.

The novel has significant literary artistry in its style, native folk language and diverse character portrayals.

It also shows her excellence in keeping in sight both the minute and the grand, to relate events of personal importance to the national context in which they occur, as well as to intimate philosophical insight regarding human nature itself.

Toji Culture Center

Park stayed in Toji Culture Center, which opened in 1999 in Wonju and where she wrote her works from 1980-1997, until she was moved to hospital. She lived in her personal residence within the center.

Park also served as chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Toji Culture Foundation, which was established in 1996 to promote and preserve active literary thought, as a means of fostering and nurturing creative attitudes and lifestyles among today's youth.

chungay@koreatimes.co.kr

Site Map E-paper Subscribe Register LogIn
Site Map E-paper Subscribe Register LogIn