The quiet fire of Lee Chang-dong

In this May 2010 photo, director Lee Chang-dong poses during the photocall of "Poetry" (2010) presented in competition at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in Cannes. AFP-Yonhap

Korea has no shortage of celebrated literary voices: Kim Young-ha, Hwang Sok-young, Shin Kyung-sook and Pyun Hye-young among them. Few have garnered as much international recognition as Han Kang, rightly praised for her emotional scalpel, dissecting the body and soul of both the nation and the Korean female in books like "The Vegetarian." However, for those of you like me who found her recent exploration of tragedies in Jeju and Vietnam underwhelming, ambiguous and missing the meaty bite of earlier works, another writer offers a more compelling vision of Korea’s post-authoritarian psyche.

Lee Chang-dong’s reputation rests largely on his acclaimed films, most notably “Peppermint Candy” (1999), “Secret Sunshine” (2007) and “Burning” (2018). However, his recently released English-language version of “Snowy Day” offers stark, unflinching visions of society that linger in the mind, unsettle the heart and ask difficult questions. And like his films, his writing refuses to give you the comfort of answers. His work probes the wounds left by military dictatorship yet doesn’t seek to fill the void with rage or nostalgia. Instead with silence, memory and moral ambiguity. You don’t read Lee to feel better. This is not a cathartic release of emotions or what locals might call “sin-pa” (a term used to describe dramas, films or novels that rely heavily on tragic tropes and sentimentality; emotionally manipulative stories designed to make you cry). You read Lee Chang-dong to feel unmoored and implicated. Complicit, even.

Beyond dictatorship

Lee’s stories carry the residue of dictatorship. And while blockbuster movies highlight the bloody brutality of state violence, Lee’s writing points to the quiet collaboration of neighbors. It references the inner tremble of those who chose survival over resistance. The psychological violence that people commit on each other over the course of a lifetime. Laying bare the ethical scars that remain long after physical ones disappear.

As Lee himself put it in an interview, “The 1980s in South Korea was a decade in which military dictatorship, resistance and the intensifying contradictions of capitalism were intricately entangled … The reality is not in black and white. It is far more complicated and layered.”

Thus his characters don’t fit neatly into boxes of hero or villain, victim or perpetrator. They stand awkwardly in the middle, often paralyzed by guilt, fear or simply the weight of history. “Powerless and pathetic,” he calls them. “But despite their circumstances, they struggle against the meaninglessness of life in their own ways.” Existentialism takes on a whole different meaning when you live in a military dictatorship and you are told your life is merely the product of the state.

To me, this kind of writing is Korean. Specific. Embedded in the unresolved psychic terrain of a country that went from authoritarianism to hyper-capitalism in the blink of a generation. It’s the memories of murder.

Take no heroes

Lee Chang-dong poses after winning the Best Director Award of the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, March 17, 2019. AP-Yonhap

This kind of nuance, where history isn’t reduced to heroes and villains, where individuals are simply seeking survival, is more important than ever. It makes you rethink modern North Korea. Historical Japanese colonization. Contemporary politics. Professors trying to stay afloat in academia.

In an age of social media, there’s a powerful temptation to flatten complexity into digestible, polarizing soundbites: good vs. evil, left vs. right, oppressed vs. oppressor, black vs. white, and so on. Our platforms amplify this by rewarding moral certainty. But life is rarely that simple. That’s what Lee reminds us of.

People’s choices during dark times, under dictatorships, in economic collapse and in divided nations, can’t always be judged with the clarity of hindsight. And certainly not with ideological purity. People conform, resist, suffer and survive in ways that often defy categorization. I know one elderly Korean gentleman who spoke Japanese during colonization, sang North Korean patriotic songs in Seoul when the communists invaded, was shot by the South Korean military during the April revolution, and now spreads joy by singing in a choir. Lee’s work insists on sitting with the psychological contradictions created by the systems people inhabit. It asks us to look again. To not be so sure. Of ourselves, and of others.

And that’s why Lee’s voice matters. Because complexity is not a weakness; it’s the essence of truth. I couldn’t help but feel in Han Kang’s recent work “I Do Not Bid Farewell” she avoided any confrontation with the truth and instead allowed her work to be swallowed by interpretation. To allow the reader to decide. Thus everything was a postmodern allusion, but what truth was being suggested was up to the reader. Democratic, yes. But ultimately very comfortable.

Division bell

Lee doesn’t just want us to remember history, he also asks us to question how it still shapes our lives. “Although it may not be so obvious,” he says, “the truth is that so many problems that plague Korean society can be traced back to the division system.” But this isn’t just nostalgia or the historical anxiety of a man who saw a little too much. It’s a recognition that the ideological battle lines of the Cold War didn’t vanish with time. Instead, they morphed, multiplied and migrated into the structures of everyday life we see around us today.

He sees those lines not just between North and South, but between rich and poor, urban and rural, insider and outsider. He sees them in the hate speech of far-right YouTubers, in the injustice of housing markets, in the quiet despair of the elderly and the exploited. Between those born in Gangnam, and those who clean its high-rise windows. “Everywhere we look in our everyday life, there is always a dividing line that may not be perceptible to our eyes.”

Lee once said, “We must express what we cannot express. That is the duty of art.” That burden, heavy and thankless, is one he still carries, even if fewer are watching.

His recently published English-language collection, "Snowy Day," is more than just a literary offering. It’s a memory. It speaks to a Korea beyond the glow of K-pop. Of lives lived in the shadows of the past, touched by dictatorship. Poisoned by grief and social fracture. These stories don’t dance. They ache. In a world of headlines and hashtags, it’s easy to miss the whisperers. But perhaps that’s the point. Some fires burn quietly.