[53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards] Fiction Grand Prize: The Beginning of Winter

Cover of Kim Ae-ran's "Summer Outside," which includes short story "The Beginning of Winter" / Courtesy of Munhakdongne

Written by Kim Ae-ran
Translated by Graham Hand

It was after midnight when my wife suggested we redo the wallpaper.
― Right now?
― Yeah.
I stayed hunched over on the sofa for a moment before I said, "Okay," and got up. It had been a long time since my wife suggested we do anything. I went out onto the veranda and got it out of the storage cabinet. A roll of do-it-yourself wallpaper we'd bought at a nearby big box store a while back. It was about as wide as my shoulders, but the roll was more than ten meters long and it felt heavy in my hands. I started reading the instructions without putting it down, but I felt something weighing on me and I glanced at the light in the living room. Without taking my eyes off the instructions, I shouted.
― Are we really going to do this now?

Last month my mother stayed with us for a while. She said she knew neither one of us would have the wherewithal to deal with things, so she'd come take care of the housework. Starting the day she arrived, she swept and scrubbed the entire apartment. She organized the mail, disassembled the dusty fan to wipe the blades one by one, and watered the wilted rubber tree. She mixed together pork and quail eggs and boiled them in soy sauce, stir-fried anchovies with ggwari peppers and filled the entire place with the smell of spice. She marinated perilla leaves and cleaned out the refrigerator. Sometimes my wife stared at her lethargically as she worked. And she put up with the old woman's well-intentioned interference and nagging without a word. More than put up with it; she didn't even seem able to pay it any attention, or else she simply didn't pay it any attention. I don't know the right expression, but it didn't seem to me like the signals my mother was sending so energetically with her body language were getting through. My wife was hurting too much for that.

53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation AwardsFiction Grand Prize winner Graham Hand

2022-11-24 08:19 | People & Events

53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation AwardsJudges' Report

2022-11-24 08:18 | People & Events

It was about ten days after my mother came to stay with us. In the middle of the night there was a huge BANG! in the kitchen and when I ran to check my mother was sitting on the floor covered in dark red liquid. Like a lamb that had been caught standing next to the site of a terrorist attack and was now crouching there stunned, covered in blood and bits of flesh. She was holding a bottle. Unprocessed black raspberry juice that the kindergarten in front of the house had sent us some time before. We hadn't touched it because we were going to send it back, and it looked like when my mother opened the bottle it exploded and sent the content shooting out. The dark red liquid had not only sprayed all over her white undergarments but also the dining table and floor, the rice cooker and electric kettle. The dining table and the wall facing it were in especially bad shape, and the chaotic stains covering the tidy olive-green wallpaper looked like graffiti someone had scribbled as an insult to their neighbors.
― Oh dear, what a waste. What to do, what to do?
My mother was looking around bewildered.
― I just, I was just thirsty… And you didn't drink any of it…
I hurried to help her up.
― Are you okay, Mom? You aren't hurt?
She kept repeating, "I'm getting old," "These people should sell something you can actually drink, how can they do this?" "There must have been gas built up in the bottle." And instead of going into the bathroom she rolled up a paper towel and started wiping down the floor. Ordinarily she would have scolded me to just use a mop instead of wasting paper.
― Leave it, Mom. I'll do it.
I glanced over at my wife from where I was still hunched over. "Right, honey? We can take care of it, can't we?" I was trying to signal her to agree. But when my wife, who up until then had been standing motionless at my side, answered in a low, coarse voice, what she said wasn't what I'd expected.
― Goddammit…
My mother stopped wiping the floor and looked up at her. For a moment there was silence. The sticky liquid was still dribbling down the walls, leaving long, vertical tracks. My wife kept going, not paying any attention to the awkwardness.
― What the hell is this?
― Mijin.
I grabbed hold of her forearm to try and stop her. From the look on her face I didn't know whether she was angry or whether she was asking for understanding.
― Everything is completely ruined!

We moved here last fall. The apartment had a total area of eighty square meters including public areas and fifty-six square meters of living space, in a building that was twenty years old. Everyone said it was crazy to go into debt to buy our own place these days, but it came up for cheap in an auction, so it hard to pass up the opportunity. A lot of time there wasn't a big difference between the sale price of an apartment and the deposit for an annual jeonse rental, plus it difficult to find a jeonse apartment that suited us, and on top of that we were getting sick of having to keep moving. We agonized over it for a long time and finally decided to buy. More than half of the money came from a loan. My heart would get heavy when I thought about how many decades we would have to spend paying off the balance and interest. Still, the thought that I was putting the money into a space of my own instead of someone else's pocket took the edge off my distress. Even when someone I knew said the apartment wasn't really mine, that the money was just going into a different someone else's enormous pockets, there was nothing I could do about it. My wife was happy that Yeong-u wouldn't have to keep switching kindergartens any more. She said that for her that was the best part. That not only were there plenty of convenience facilities in the area, but she liked that the air was cleaner than in Seoul.
― Yeong-u likes it here too.
When Yeong-u was playing with blocks by himself or reading a picture book he always tried to butt into the grown-ups' conversations. That was what he was doing now.
― Why's that? Why do you like it here, Yeong-u?
Around that time Yeong-u always had something surprising and off-the-wall to say, and my wife's voice was filled with expectation. She wanted to feel like she'd done something for him as a parent, and before she even heard his answer her face beamed with pride. As Yeong-u worked his scarlet tongue to reply his mouth was filled with clear saliva, the same as always.
― Um, there's lots of vroom-vrooms. It's super cool.
He was looking out the window at the rush hour traffic stretched out along the 8-lane road below.