By Brother Anthony
Emeritus professor at Sogang University
Probably it is safe to say that no modern Korean writer is more deeply and widely venerated in Korea than Park Kyung-ni. Veneration is surely the right word. That might be because, more than almost any other novelist, her life and her work have always been a unity, and both give expression to the essential Korean value of suffering yet unbowed humanity.
Before writing her stories, we can safely say, she lived them herself. Her first short stories, and many later works as well, focus on a young woman who has lost her husband during the Korean war and who is obliged to care single-handed for her wounded, fragile family. For she herself, born in 1926, lost her husband during the war. It is as a war widow that she writes about widows.
Like other women writers of her generation, the stories she told were inseparable from her own life story. Sometimes, the result of that autobiographical centering leaves the non-Korean reader confused, unclear if what is being read is a factual documentary record or a fictional work of the imagination. Koreans feel no need to make that distinction and simply see in the works of Park a towering monument of Korean literature.
She wrote a vast number of works. The ``Collected Works'' published in 1979 already comprised 16 volumes, and at that time she had only published a few of the 16 volumes of her most celebrated novel, ``Toji'' (Land), that she began in 1969 and only completed in 1994.