“People say they’d like to return to their late teens or early twenties and start again, but I’d never want to revisit that age. I wouldn’t have the confidence to relive that painful time of uncertainty, anxiety, dread, and horror muddled together.” Oh Junghee told me this in private. Already many years have passed, but my memory of our conversation is still vivid. At the time, I was envious to the point of jealousy seeing university freshmen in the bloom of youth. I was anxious to return to those days and start my life over. For this reason, I was more than a little shocked by Oh’s words. But deliberating as to why she said this, I arrived at a number of possibilities. In fact, separation anxiety, fear of the dark, despair at being rejected, and the death drive are conspicuous everywhere in her fiction. And perhaps her feelings are understandable, given her biography and background environment.

     Oh was born in 1947, at a time when Korea had been liberated from Japanese rule, but before the government of the Republic of Korea was established. She suffered through the Korean War (1950-1953) as a young child. Her family had to move several times even after they were no longer displaced from the war, and when she was fifteen, she witnessed the death of the youngest family member. Oh said that her mind went utterly blank when she saw her sibling after a traffic accident. Considering that she neither dealt with the trauma properly nor went through the regular process of mourning the family member she’d loved so intensely, she likely would have endured an uneasy adolescence. It would be impossible now for her to look back on this dim and gloomy period as a golden age. And even after this, she would have spent many stretches of uncertainty due to political and economic conditions. Perhaps for Oh, literature took the form of an earnest prayer for the possibility of freedom from this instability. And maybe the uncertainty and loneliness, sorrow and solitude that existed inside her drew her to literature, and powered her love for it. Writing was an aesthetic form of self-therapy. And her work was sublimated through the force of imagination, and it spread with growing intensity towards the horizon of collective healing.

     Wandering uncertainly, having lost the safety of its nest, where can a young bird build a home? This question fills readers with tension and guides the narrative of The Bird, the novel considered to best represent Oh’s aesthetic. The Bird is a work that displays the author’s defining characteristics, and it is a touching story with a plot that is representative of contemporary prose. Oh thoughtfully describes the wandering, uncertainty, and sense of loss of a brother and sister who have been abandoned by their parents. The story is told from the perspective of a pure-hearted twelve-year-old girl. As the contrast develops between the innocent brother-and-sister pair and the grim conditions of the world affecting them, the sad mood becomes overpowering. Oh takes problems related to the precarious existence of a nest to their logical extremes. The German translation of The Bird won the LiBeraturpreis in 2003, and Oh’s acceptance speech can be of help to us in understanding the overall nature of the work.

     “Bird is the story of a young brother and sister. A family that lived a happy life together cultivating flowers on a farm loses its home and livelihood in a flood, and migrates to a large city to make a living. There they join the underclass, and fall into a steady downward spiral of poverty, dread, and familial break up. In the course of these events, their true nature as human beings is tarnished and eventually destroyed. When a society is unstable and families are torn apart, the biggest victims are children, who lack the ability to defend themselves. In this novel, I wanted to say that when children are left on their own, their spirits breaking in the face of abandonment, violence, and neglect, they grow up and become our dark and bitter future.”

     “My name is U-mi – the “U” is for “universe”, and “mi” means “beautiful” – she said I was the most beautiful baby in the universe. My little brother’s name is U-il – the same universe, but “il” for “number one”. Our mother gave him that name so he would become the most handsome man in the universe.” (143). That voice was suffused with the warmth of human love. As long as the children can hear that tender voice, they are poor but happy. However, when they are no longer able to hear it, they wander around, not knowing where to turn, and shrink and become timid. They can neither adjust to school nor enjoy normal human relationships. Their plight can be compared to that of the bird in the book, portrayed without a protector. Hearing the sound of the bird conscious and singing under the black cloth wrapper in Mr. Yi’s empty room, the sounds of suppressed crying and murmuring coming faintly through the wall, the children come to identify their situation with the bird’s. And no wonder, because the children, abandoned by their parents at too young an age, are destitute, having lost the sound of a loving voice and the protection of a comfortable home. Whenever their elderly landlady demands rent, they tell her that their father is coming back with a lot of money to pay it, but even in their own minds they have resigned themselves to a life without hope.

     Once they are abandoned, children have lost the chance of ever making a happy home. To children like this, the world is like a tomb. Take for example this scene: “The room was horribly dirty and dark, and the closely confined air had a feted stench. It felt permeated with the sound of sobs scratching at the walls and the suppressed screams of anxious nightmares.” (136). Their next-door neighbor, Mr. Jung, once committed murder in the course of a trivial argument, and he runs away once his identity as a fugitive becomes known. The description of the room in the passage above is from the outside looking in at his room after he has fled, but it closely applies to the children’s room as well. It is obvious that even a pure-hearted child would be unable to maintain hope for tomorrow in such a space. The children are living this nightmare-like reality, devoid of hope. And not only does U-il fail to become the finest man in the universe, he wanders around, unable to achieve basic literacy, and grows physically smaller by degrees. The child grows thinner by the day. The ribs that protrude from his chest like tree branches curve delicately inward. As his body grows fantastically smaller, ironically, his habit of speaking in the voices of nightmares continues unabated, approaching the point of madness. Perhaps if the children had received protection and regard in a normal family, these physical and verbal peculiarities would not have manifested. Even now, the symptoms displayed by U-il in The Bird are the symbolic representation of pain felt by abandoned children across the world.

     U-mi has been taking care of her brother in his condition, but at the end of the novel, she locks him in the room and leaves for parts unknown, carrying Mr. Yi’s birdcage. On the way, she meets a counselor who has cared for her, but fails to recognize the woman. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that she has already been scarred by her, but primarily it is because the situation has already surpassed the limits of what the child can endure with her spirit intact. It has become difficult for U-il and U-mi to live up to their names, given their circumstances. Her brother’s room is locked. The guess that U-il was trying to grow lighter in order to fly has become moot. Just like the caged bird, and her brother in the locked room, the girl leaving down the road with the bird is in a state of confinement, inside the metal cage of harsh reality. She strikes off, but the road is closed to her. For the children in this story, there is no such thing as growth, hope, or a future.

     The Bird portrays the world from the children’s standpoint. Oh’s tone is calm throughout, betraying no emotion. She does not offer alternative scenarios either. In this way, ironically, the tragedy of the subject—abandoned children who are rejected by the world—is rendered more acute. After reading the novel in its entirety, adult readers would have difficulty looking into the eyes of the children in the novel. It would also be hard to muster the right words to address the children, in any tone of voice. Rather, Oh performs the important task of awakening adults to their responsibilities here and now, for the sake of hope and the future of humanity. From this story, we can also infer the reason why Oh does not want to return to the days of her youth. And as for us, when we walk down the street, we should calmly check to see if there is a young girl toting a bird cage, having difficulty wandering around. 

by Wu Chan-je

Literary Critic and Professor of Korean Literature

Sogang University