Park Bum Shin calls Cholatse, The Mapmaker, and EunGyo as the ‘trilogy of yearning.’ In Cholatse, the author describes the limitation of humans’ vertical willpower against the backdrop of the Himalayas. In The Mapmaker, he portrays the horizontal yearning of a dream by tapping into historical time. In EunGyo, he finally returns to reality, exploring and chronicling the innermost human desire and its origins.

Reporter You Yong-joo and novelist Park Bumshin

The Korean peninsula has joined the subtropical climate. Gone is the rainy summer monsoon; Korea is now said to be divided into the wet season and the dry season. Entering the second week of July, the streets of Seoul were ablaze with scorching heat. The streets and buildings and cars all appeared to have melted under the sun and swelled up like rising pastry. Who is feeding the furnace-fire? The entire world is aching from global warming and unseasonably high temperatures: the glaciers of the North Pole are melting, snow has fallen along the equator, and sea levels continue to rise. Is the earth headed for another ice age? Where are all these people and cars sweeping the streets headed? In the middle of chaotic downtown Seoul, a city of over 10 million, I narrowed my eyes as I waited. It was the day I was scheduled to meet Park Bum Shin, the fiercest writer—with a “volcanic” heart—on the present literary scene in Korea. Tall and handsome, with deep eyes, a stately nose, prominent cheekbones, and grizzled hair, Park resembled the first wave of a tsunami. He was like the wind. White sneakers, worn jeans and a blue button-down shirt, he was still young. He suddenly reminded me of the leopard in Hemingway's “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Not an ounce of flab in sight. Or maybe he is like one of those mules that climb up and down the snowy mountains of the Himalayas. His bones are rough. If he were a tree, he would be a well-dried oak. He could also be a Chinese ash tree that dyes the water blue. Without any detours, I take a direct shot.

You Yong-joo: Your cheeks are a little red. Have you been drinking?

Park Bum Shin: You need an occasional drink in your life. The world is such a mess I can’t bear to face it dead sober.

YY: You described love as a crazy, mysterious racing emotion. Where does that passion come from? Writing a novel is hard work—does this mean you’re crazy?

PB: You calling me crazy? I’m not crazy. But if you look carefully inside my ribcage, you’ll find a nut job hiding in there. I’m not the one who wrote EunGyo. A beast-like fella in here. He and I, we don’t always see eye to eye. Sometimes I want to beat him to death. That’s the relationship we have. There’s an odd-looking fella inside me.

YY: In your novel, there’s an old poet named Lee Jeok-yo, a young writer named Seo Ji-wu, and the high school girl EunGyo. The way I see it, Lee and Seo are the two faces of the same person. Is that maybe you?

PB: Oh wow, you’re right on the money. How did you know? How could anyone write without inner conflict? That’s the source of my energy. I want to die and I also have an intense will to live. I want to give up on life and I also want to hold onto it fiercely. Pretty big mood swings. That’s where I get my energy. In literature emotional fluctuations refer to the inner conflict; without such fluctuations, how are we supposed to excite ourselves? We become excited through these fluctuations and we write to death because we are excited.

YY: You write more than most young authors. Do you exercise to keep yourself in shape?

PB: No, I hate exercise. But when I’m not writing, I’m always on the move. I just came from working in the field. I enjoy plucking and fixing and building things. I don’t wear gloves when I work outdoors. You see all these scars? If I get hurt while working with my bare hands, it makes me feel so alive. It makes me happy to get bloody. Maybe it’s a kind of addiction to physical labor? When I’ve got nothing to do, I reorganize my bookshelves. I work well past 2 a.m. I’m the happiest when I’m lying down from exhaustion. I was running even during my Himalayan trek. All my fears disappear when I feel one with nature. One’s true nature lies not in the body but the mind. When I was young, I was so frail that my mother sent me away to live with a shaman. And in middle school, I walked to school carrying my rice-and-barley lunch, 16 kilometers, round-trip. If you take everything into account, I probably walked around 50 ri [about 19.65 km] every day. That walk was encoded into my DNA.

YY: Your novel depicts the love between an old man facing his death and a 17-year-old girl. It’s such a frank portrayal of envy, jealousy, and lust. Is it a depiction of what you hope for?

PB: Yeah, you’re right, the novel reflects my desires. Doing it with women is not that important to me. You don’t have to understand EunGyo in such realistic terms. It’s just a depiction of an ideal world. She’s a 17-year-old girl, yet sometimes she feels like my 37-year-old wife and other times, like a middle-aged woman in her late 40s. Eungyo is at once my young bride and my desire for things of immortal value. My yearning for things that possess absolute beauty—that’s Cholatse and The Mapmaker and EunGyo—something hot and surging from within. Sometimes it’s a woman and then it becomes Mount Everest and later a poem or a novel.

YY: You wrote the novel EunGyo in a month. What fueled this runaway train?

PB: I didn’t want to live this long. I wanted to become oxidized. Like the kamikaze unit, to use the Japanese expression. If I only think of absolute beauty as an ultimate value, I just want to fly away and burn into ashes like a fire-moth. It’s been a long dream of mine, but I keep carrying on like this instead of fulfilling it. I wanted to at least make like I was doing it. All I did was write, hardly ever stopping to eat or drink. The suffering that comes from time is enormous. It’s been over 10 years. I haven’t resolved my inner conflict yet, but I do want to confront the finitude of life head on. I don’t want to just give in, accepting defeat. There is a universal seat in society for people in their mid-60s. I don’t want to sit there. That’s not a seat I have created for myself. I don’t want to act or write according to what the world, the universal cycle, wants or demands. Because I’m responsible for my own existence. I’m going to take responsibility for what remains of my life in a beautiful way. I want to build myself a more beautiful chair than the one given by the world. That’s my way.

YY: Why do you communicate with young writers and readers through various channels such as the Internet?

PB: As people grow old, they want to be treated with respect. I’ve never wanted that. If I had to choose, I’d want to be loved. I’ve never repressed young people, either. If I don’t respond and stay open to new cultures and new times like a weather vane, that’s death for me. It means I’m lonely, too. You have to open up yourself to new ideas, new generations, and always bear in mind something that will be useful to them. If you demand respect just based on your age, you can’t help but become lonely. I pioneered publishing serialized novels on the Internet. That’s what I intended all along. I thought younger writers would have it easy if I opened up the way. The results were mixed, maybe half successful. The Internet as a medium has both good and adverse effects. My hope is that publishing companies and writers will work at it together to bring progress. I serialized EunGyo in my personal blog instead of making it available to all online because I was worried about the adverse effects and because I yearned to write more freely. I hope to provide younger writers with more opportunities. I want to be someone who helps them without anyone knowing about it. I’ve been teaching for so long that it’s become a habit to help them. It pains me to see impoverished young students.

YY: What do you think about electronic books?

PB: In Korea, I was the first major writer to make a new work available as an e-book and in print at the same time. A lot of older works have become available in electronic form. Truth be told, I don’t really understand e-books. I still write by hand on lined manuscript paper. But you can’t block off a new culture. You should take advantage of it. You have to accept it and conquer it—try to adopt it as your own and rule over it. When you’re writing a new novel, you can’t negotiate with the reader—but the author is by nature a dictator, so he doesn’t negotiate anyway. If your novel is precious to you though, you should try to reach as many readers as possible with your work. The author’s responsibility doesn’t lie in academic postures. You shouldn’t rest content on the foundation of nobility and yangban [gentry]. Since literature is a statement about life, it needs to work fiercely to reach the reader.

YY: You cite many poems from both the East and the West in EunGyo.

PB: I read most of them in the 60s and 70s, in my youth. Bookstores carry a lot of poetry collections. I cultivated my sensibility through poetry. A poem can rise to heaven in an instant. That’s not possible with a novel. That’s why poetry is compared to canonization. The novel, on the other hand, can be likened to the Chinese character for house. It’s like building a house on the ground. But there’s a great variation within the genre of poetry; some poets are stuck in the gutter, while others have reached the heavens. Poetry is what always nourishes our intuition and emotions.

YY: Some advice for young writers.

PB: Young writers have helped expand the horizon of the Korean novel. Subject matters and perspectives that weren’t handled in the past have proliferated. Great literary style and sensibility, too. My one concern is that they might be a little lacking in terms of the red-hot passion, the singular devotion to literature. I think it’s problematic to only get the benefits without consideration for due effort. Literature is an unconditional path, you can’t just write in your free time. You have to sacrifice everything else. If you only write in your free time, what kind of work do you think you’ll produce? That’s why I think a writer might have to endure some discomforts in life. My values are set: in my social life, I try to help younger writers, and I write novels for myself.

1. The Mapmaker

Park Bum Shin, Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.

2009, 360p, ISBN 9788954608275

2. Cholatse

Park Bum Shin, Prunsoop Publishing Ltd., Co.

2008, 330p, ISBN 9788971847671

YY: Do you set aside a regular time for writing? What’s your writing style like?

PB: There are many possible methods. Balzac set aside time for writing and wrote regularly. Once he entered into a novel, he put a complete stop on his social life, not seeing even his lover. The best method depends on how much you’re willing to sacrifice for literature. There’s no such thing as an absolute relationship. When my generation was coming of age, literature was absolute. Someone actually wrote “Literature, a tree I’d gladly hang myself on” in his acceptance speech for the Spring Literary Prize, so you can imagine what it was like back then. I can’t force the younger generation to be that committed. I myself am struggling to hang myself, so to speak. You see, I wanted to provoke the reader’s instincts in my new novel. You’ll be made to see the desolate stillness within yourself no matter how respectable and dignified you are. In other words, I’m picking a fight with the reader. Work hard during the day and observe your instincts at night. Rediscover your instincts that have been repressed in the name of the world. Reflect on the meaning of your instincts at the very moment you get an erection. I wrote day and night, hoping to see the comeback or resurrection of instincts. EunGyo is stuck in the world of fiction like an apple seed. It’s a novel that made me happy.

YY: You have about a year left until retirement. What are your plans?

PB: I want to return to the country. I thought about moving to the country in anticipation of my retirement, but my wife doesn’t want to. I’ve been mulling over it and I think my plans might change. Let’s see, the year was 1993—I was just wandering about, having stopped writing altogether, and then I moved into a country cottage near Yongin. I was happy at first. Then I was sad, crying a lot. Every day for a whole year, I just drank soju, ate, slept, and cried. After a year passed like that, I was met with the blessing of nature. It had an unbelievable power of healing. I was really happy in nature. You don’t have to move to the country to be closer to nature. But now that I’m old, I want someone to take care of the cooking for me. The meals pose a problem. I could cook for myself, but the problem is, I’d have to eat alone. You can work alone, but you shouldn’t eat alone. Eating with other people also helps with digestion. Nature is beautiful to be sure, but if a novelist turns his back on people to retreat into nature, he has to go out of business. A writer is a part of nature too, so he should live together with other people.

YY: How can one live a true life?

PB: What you need is complete combustion at all times. I have a strong desire to die in action. God has given everyone equal talent. And I use all of mine. I give my everything to write novels, my everything to teach my students, my everything to maintain my relationships with my family and neighbors, and my everything in my social life. I live every moment as if it was my last. You think it’ll be the end if you use it all up now, right? But if you get to the other side, you find yourself with more energy. It might be mathematically impossible but it’s possible in life. The way I think is, I’d be happy to collapse and die right after I finish writing this novel. In living your life, always conserving 30 to 40 percent of your energy for writing is certainly rational, but what you can achieve with rationality is obvious. You can view it as a reasonably comfortable life. But the people who are always exhausting themselves 100 percent, they’re the real deal. They may be nut jobs, but that’s how they survive. The human existence is incredible. Your energy is like the widow’s cruse of oil. The more you conserve your energy, the more lethargic you are. You know the saying “your body is a temple full of gods.” Everyone’s body is a temple so it is constantly replenished. The energy you expend on labor is always renewed. You should believe in that. A fundamental respect and utmost kindness for the people I’m with, that’s my way. Always full of energy from a well that never runs dry.

By You Yong-joo