Yang Gui-ja (born 1955) is a South Korean writer.
1. Life
Yang Gui-ja was born in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province, and graduated from Wonkwang University with a degree in Korean Literature. Yang made her literary debut in 1978 when her short story "Dasi sijakaneun achim" (다시 시작하는 아침 Starting a New Morning) won the New Writer's Contest hosted by the monthly Literature & Thought. In 1987 she achieved popular success with the release of her collection of linked short stories Wonmidong saramdeul (원미동 사람들 A Distant and Beautiful Place), for which she is still most famous. This collection was a painstaking depiction of the lives of people on the periphery of industrial culture. Yang is the recipient of the Yu Ju-hyeon Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Hyundae Literary Award.
2. Writing
Yang's fiction from the 1980s was informed by the prevailing spirit of social protest. Even though she did not adopt specific ideological positions, the belief that collective action can affect positive changes in people's lives still underpinned much of her works. As the prevailing mood of disillusionment began to supplant the earlier decade's fervor in the consumer culture of the 1990s, Yang's fiction underwent change as well. Her works written in the 1990s reflect the author's agonizing search for new hope after the dissolution of her former ideals. "Sumeun kkot" (숨은 꽃 The Hidden Flower), in particular, offers a semi-autobiographical account of a writer setting out to find her way out of confusion and cynicism. In Cheonmachong ganeun gil (천마총 가는 길 The Road to Chenmachong), the protagonist searches for a means to come to terms with unforgotten memories of past trauma and the sense of powerlessness that dominates her present life.
Mosun (모순 Contradictions), Yang's most popular work from the 1990s, is a coming-of-age tale that explores the paradoxes and contradictions of the human condition and delves into the meaning of personal happiness. The book opens with an epiphany as the protagonist realizes that her entire energy must be devoted to her own life. She struggles over whom to marry with an awareness of consequences gleaned from her mother and her aunt, twin sisters. A host of binary oppositions is also presented in the lives of the men around her: a wannabe gang boss brother, an Ivy League cousin, an alcoholic schizophrenic father, a steadfast but rigid uncle, and her two suitors. Yang skillfully develops these characters in increasingly complex threads as the novel unfolds in a series of surprises.
A Distant and Beautiful Place, Yang's most representative work, is a critically acclaimed collection of stories based on the author's own experience of living in Wonmi-dong. Populated by disaffected, discontented people—failed poet, neighborhood grocers who engage in price war, a factory worker exploited by the management—Wonmi-dong is no longer a rural community bound by neighborly love and agrarian ethos, nor an urban town bathed in optimism, but a mere breeding ground for petty jealousies, hypocrisies, and vain desires. It is Yang's observant prose filled with humorous and at times poignant sketches of the people at the margins of urban glitter and industrial boon that established her reputation.
