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Kyung-Sook Shin (author), Anton Hur (translator), Violets, The Feminist Press, 2022. 218 pgs.
Kyung-Sook Shin burst onto the Korean literary scene in 1985, after her graduation from Seoul Institute of the Arts, with a novella, Winter Fable, for which she was awarded the Munye Joongang New Author Prize. Now 61 years old, she has had an illustrious writing career, with 13 novels behind her. The most famous of these is the best-selling Please Look After Mom (2009), which was published in English by Alfred Knopf in 2011, winning the Man Asian Literary Prize. It has been translated into thirty-five languages. Shin is considered part of the “386 Generation”: politically active, generally left-leaning Koreans born in the 1960s, and a number of her books concern the lives of women from a feminist perspective.
Violets was written in 2001 but not translated into English until 2022. It contains many parallels to Shin’s own childhood in a small rural village. As one of six children, she grew up working in the fields… but also keeping a diary. By the age of 15 she knew she wanted to become a writer, and at 16 she left to join her elder brother in Seoul, where she took a factory job and went to night school.
The novel, however, explores an alternative, much darker trajectory. A young Korean woman, San, grows up in rural poverty as the only child of a beautiful but frustrated mother, her father having abandoned the family. The early parts of the book describe the girl’s lonely childhood. Her paternal grandmother, who still lives with them, constantly berates and blames San’s mother for the failure of the marriage, and the conflict between mother and grandmother eventually escalates beyond verbal fights into violence. San leaves her house during those fights and wanders in the fields surrounding the village, or sits on the dyke near the minari field that separates the village from the rest of the world. Her rage and longing turn inward, causing her to want to hurt herself. Her only friend is another little girl, Namae, whose mother has died and whose father gets drunk in the evenings and then crawls inside a large earthenware jar, and sings in a muffled voice for hours.
These two children of unhappy single-parent households are drawn together, and San pours all her love in the direction of her friend. One day, after Namae shows San her mother’s burial mound near the dyke, she pulls her into the water, fully clothed. The girls then lie naked together, as their clothes dry in the sun, in a scene of vividly-described childhood intimacy. Suddenly, Namae turns on San and ends the friendship. This rejection, which San cannot understand, colours everything that follows in her life.
When we next meet her, San is in her early twenties, living in Seoul; she has run away from home and her mother without telling anyone where she’s going. She has depleted all her savings by taking computer courses, but cannot land a job in her desired field of word processing—a stand-in for her secret dream, which is to become a writer. Her silent companion is a notebook in which she writes down her thoughts. As she wanders the city streets, she comes upon a flower shop with a “help wanted” sign in the window. She goes in, and is hired. The rest of the novel deals with the relationships between San and her co-worker, a young woman of the same age, and a small number of other people she meets through her work at the store or through the building where she lives. We observe her longing for connection, her intense loneliness, and her gradual mental and emotional disintegration after she fails to find the love she seeks and is victimised by a series of men.
Writers from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, to more contemporary figures such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Han Kang, and Teju Cole, have all experimented with ways of taking us inside a character’s head. The best parts of Violets, for me, were the chapters where San is falling apart. Written in the present tense, these sections have a claustrophobic immediacy; Shin succeeds in making us inhabit San’s loneliness and hopeless desperation.
My least favorite aspect of the book was a continual shift in verb tense, which I found odd, confusing and distracting. Although it’s not a style I prefer, most of the book is written in the present tense, and, as mentioned above, I can see good reasons for that choice. However, there are sentences in the past tense that are immediately followed by the present, and vice versa, and there are paragraphs that weave back and forth between the conditional, past, and present. So what is going on here? Kyung-Sook Shin’s credentials as a major writer are well established. Anton Hur, the translator of three of her books, is also widely acclaimed. At first, I thought perhaps this was a translation problem, but now I wonder if it was a case of less-than-rigorous editing, where the editors didn’t engage with these distracting issues of tense usage. Even for a less demanding reader, the shifts in tense would be awkward, and make the prose harder to read.
A continual, fascinating thread throughout the book is the relationship—one might even say identification—between human beings and plants. This begins in the village with its life-giving field of minari, a peppery, slightly bitter herb that all the villagers use in their cooking and for medicinal purposes. It continues in the city where San learns how to care for all the plants in the flower shop. Each one—from expensive roses and lilies, the lucky-bamboo plants, the fussy orchids, the papaya palms grown proudly from seed by the shop’s owner, and the bonsai ficus trees, to the carnivorous Venus fly-traps—has its distinctive character and requirements, and also particular people to whom it appeals.
When a photographer, sent to the shop to take pictures of violets for a magazine, asks why anyone would choose such a small, undistinguished plant, it is San who champions the flower, explaining why it is beautiful. Later, she takes little pots of violets and surreptitiously plants them at an ugly urban building site, only to find them dug up and destroyed by a huge excavator some weeks later. Shin has spoken about how threatening she found the city buildings when she first arrived in Seoul, saying she was afraid the “huge buildings would run at us, and crush us”. In Violets, the excavator comes to embody this threatening inhuman power.
I was reminded of the final book in John Berger’s trilogy, Into Their Labours, which follows French peasants from an Alpine village who are trying to make their way in the big city, often failing at legitimate jobs and instead piecing together a living through scavenging and petty crime. In that book, an enormous crane at a building site becomes a malevolent force in the hands of uncaring bosses. Berger loves his characters and makes them tremendously sympathetic; they are fully alive, scrappy, creative, and determined, and continually helped by their love for one another—and this is what helps them survive in an alien and hostile atmosphere. Not so with San, who is crushed not only by the cold indifference of the city, but by her loneliness and inability to find connection. The tone of Violets could not be more different. We feel immense compassion for San, but I’m not sure we are able to love her.
In a 2014 interview with the Guardian, Shin said, “I feel the time given to me doesn’t belong only to me. In everything—my writing, my travelling, my happiness—I live partly on behalf of those who weren’t able to survive. I feel I’m living their share of life.” In her Afterword in Violets, she writes that her intention was to highlight the forgotten Korean women like San who exist and struggle in large numbers—victims of poverty and lack of opportunity, of callous and cruel men, and of a society that doesn’t care anything about them. She calls these women “violets” because of the insignificance of that ignored flower, lovely and fragrant as it is, which exists under our feet, growing in cracks and poor soil. She writes: “To amplify the voices of those women, whom no one could hear unless one was listening very carefully, to let them speak through my words—this is Violets.”
How to cite: Adams, Beth. “On Behalf of Those Who Weren’t Able to Survive: Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/30/violets.
Elizabeth (Beth) Adams is a writer, artist, and publisher. She is a dual Canadian-American citizen, and has lived in Montreal since 2005. Her biography of Bishop Gene Robinson was published in 2006, and Snowy Fields, a book of her drawings and essays has just come out. She was a founder/co-managing editor of the former e-zine qarrtsiluni, is founder/editor of the independent press Phoenicia Publishing, and her blog, The Cassandra Pages, has considered questions of arts&letters, culture, and spirit since 2003. She is a member of PEN Canada. Photo of Beth (2023) by Jonathan Sa’adah. [All contributions by Beth Adams.]