Realities of the Confucian past

Maija Rhee Devine borrows from her personal experience in “The Voices of Heaven,” which revolves around the story of a couple and their secretly adopted daughter in the days leading up to the Korean War. Their quiet life begins to split at the seams after a mistress moves in with the family to bear a male child, which was deemed necessary in a society dictated by Confucianist culture. / Yonhap

Author offers poignant and absorbing story of war and family

“The Voices of Heaven,” Maija Rhee Devine, Seoul Selection, 305 pages

By Kim Young-jin

Korea’s past is often presented in a redacted form, focusing on the story of its dazzling rise from the ashes of the Korean War (1950-53) and glossing over the complex, often dark, changes it has undergone to become an economic force.

In many ways, the life of author Maija Rhee Devine is a product of the less recounted history of this period. Her birth family relinquished her because society favored sons over daughters. She recalls the horror of the war, but also the perseverance that saw people through it. After she emigrated from Korea to the United States, her writing compassionately points to the persisting problems caused by patriarchy.

That breadth of that experience is captured in Devine’s first novel, “The Voices of Heaven,” which plumbs the turbulent years leading up to the war, when women lived in constant subjugation due to strict Confucian mores. By tapping into her memory, the author paints a vivid, warts-and-all picture of a society in which ordinary people lived with honor despite extreme duress.

Originally a memoir, the book derives from the personal experiences of Devine, 70, whose poetry and nonfiction has been published widely.

It focuses on blue-collar worker Gui-yong and his wife Eum-chun, whose love is as “sweet as sticky rice.” But the family, including secretly adopted daughter Mi-na, is challenged when a mistress moves in, in hopes that she will bear a son for Gui-young.

At the time, most Korean brides and grooms were married without having seen each other. Having a son was paramount because they would provide for the family and offer ancestral rites so the dead could live in eternal happiness, not as “starving ghosts.”

For Devine, the book is a labor of love, and one that aims to provide a realistic snapshot of Korean society.

“I would like (readers) to know the lives of common people in Korea,” she said in an interview at Seoul Selection, the publisher, in downtown Seoul. “Their principles were about living honorably no matter the circumstance, even if they were thrust into a household with one man and two women. The Korean War brought difficult circumstances, but they tried to live according to commandments from heaven.”

Devine takes the voice of each family member in turn, including the mistress, Soo-yang, as her arrival approaches. Tension rises because the man and his two wives show monogamous instincts. It falls upon Mi-na to figure out how to keep her parents love alive, as well as to make sense of her own past.

Devine’s own life, spanning Korea and the United States, reflects the turmoil of that transitional period.

Like Mi-na, she grew up unaware she had been adopted. She only learned of her past after graduating from Sogang University, as she prepared to attend graduate school at St. Louis University.

After receiving her Masters’ in English Literature, she took a teaching post at Soodo Women Teachers' College in Seoul, which later became Sejong University. There, she met her husband, a Peace Corps volunteer, and she returned with him to the United States in 1970. Suffocated by the male-dominated society in Korea and grappling with her past, it was decades before Devine came back.

“It was a tremendous struggle,” she recalled of discovering her adoption. “I went into complete denial.”

In 1995, however, Devine took an opportunity to teach for a semester at Sogang. She met with her birthmother and three brothers, including her twin. It wasn’t the first time, however: growing up, she had known them as family friends.

“They knew who I was the whole time, even as I was growing up. I was the only one who didn’t know,” she said.

“That was the traditional way of dealing with adoption in Korea. If the children were adopted outside the family circle, they never told the children.”

Her characters’ predicament points to a persisting gender divide, she said.

“The utmost virtue that (women) sought was obedience. Obedience to their mother-in-law, husband, and when their sons grew older, they obeyed their sons. And they obeyed everyone older than them. Men (obeyed) too but they had some leeway; they would be forgiven,” she said.

“Korea has changed a lot, particularly economically. But in terms of gender gap, it hasn’t been closed to the point of being proud.”

“Voices” is laced with Korean folk sayings, an example of how Devine’s firsthand experience lends itself to powerful storytelling. The love between Gui-yong and Eum-chun, for example, is as “sweet as sticky rice.”

The expressions may sound awkward at first to those unfamiliar, but Devine said she persisted in order to present Korea’s authentic culture.

“On the general level, this is a book about the common people of Korea, their common language,” she said. “For instance, if someone is very precious to you, you would say he is ‘like the tongue in my mouth.’ My hope is through the common people’s language, I introduce Korea.”