Lee Chang-dong on South Korea in the Nineteen-Eighties and Today

In this week’s story, “The Leper,” the narrator discovers that his father has confessed to spying for North Korea and is under arrest in Seoul. How did this premise come to you? When was the story first published in its original Korean version?

This story is based on a real incident involving my father that occurred in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan was at its height. But it was not published in a literary magazine until 1988, after some measure of democratization had been achieved. However, depicting a person who claimed to be a spy for North Korea was still a sensitive issue that touched on major taboos in Korean society at the time, so I had to write it with some discretion.

The story, which has been translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl, appears in your forthcoming collection, “Snowy Day and Other Stories,” translated by Fenkl and Yoosup Chang. It will be published by Penguin Press in February. In what period of your life were you writing these stories? How do you feel about them going out into the world again, this time in English?

I wrote this story at a time when fundamental changes were taking place in Korean society. The military dictatorship that had ruled for decades was falling, democratization was occurring, and the Seoul Olympics were being held, so the tenor of the whole society was changing. I was in my mid-thirties then, and I felt that I needed a change. As a writer, I was feeling the limits of my abilities and was thirsty for a new way of communicating. And I think that thirst is what led me to the film industry. Now the stories I wrote back then are meeting new readers in English, across the vast span of thirty or forty years. And I’m thankful for this amazing opportunity that I would never have imagined when I wrote this story.

In “The Leper,” we learn that the narrator’s father was a Communist who’d once been active in the old South Korean Labor Party. Was it dangerous to hold those kinds of beliefs in South Korea in the years after the Korean War?

After the Korean War, the dictatorship suppressed those who participated in the human-rights and labor movements, or who called for democracy, by labelling them as Communists. But there were virtually no cases of those people actually being Communists. If someone had revealed that they were a Communist, they would have been ostracized like a leper—like the father in the story—subject to legal sanctions, and isolated from society. The situation is not much different now.

Was the fear of North Korean infiltration and espionage omnipresent up until the nineteen-eighties? Between 1961 and 1988, the country had periods of rule by military dictatorship. Did this have any impact on what you could write and publish?

Even after the Korean War, North Korea continued military provocations and made serious attacks on the South. But the real fear that those incidents created was no less than what was instigated by the military dictatorship in South Korea. The South Korean military regime justified its violence toward its own citizens by using the threat of North Korea as a rationale. In the Gwangju Uprising, hundreds upon hundreds of citizens were massacred by the military, which had seized power through a coup in 1980. I was a writer who believed in William Faulkner’s idea that literature should be for the souls of the suffering people—“the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself”—but in the face of the regime’s violence, my words felt less powerful than a single line of a slogan at a protest. What role could my writing play in changing reality? While I was constantly asking myself these questions, I still had to write so as not to deny reality. The stories included in the “Snowy Day” collection were written amid these questions about the role of literature and how to communicate with readers.

The father’s life has amounted to nothing. His wife, the narrator’s mother, worked and kept the family going until her death. Has the narrator tried to mold himself in opposition to his father? Has that distorted the trajectory of his adult life?

This story reflects my actual relationship with my father, to some extent. It also shows how our generation, born after the Korean War, clashed with our fathers’ generation, who experienced colonialism and war firsthand. In the case of Koreans, due to the history of repeated upheavals since the beginning of the twentieth century, generational conflicts are complex, internalized, and often violent. Personally, I tried to live a different life from my father, and even tried to change the personality I inherited from him (passionate and impatient), and I can say that I was somewhat successful in that regard.

In “The Leper,” we learn that the narrator goes by the name Kim Youngjin, but that his given name as a child was “Maksu.” He hated the name when he was a boy, but didn’t learn why his father had named him as a tribute to Karl Marx until he was older. Can you imagine him ever changing his mind about that name? Does he think of himself as Youngjin or Maksu?

For Koreans at that time (and to some extent even now), Karl Marx was not just a historical figure but a kind of demonic being symbolizing the world of darkness. So, to the protagonist, the name “Maksu” must have felt like a curse that his father had placed on him. Perhaps if he could have better understood his father, that could have been a decisive turning point in the story, but it would not have been easy for him to change his mind about that name—at least as long as he lived in South Korea. In any case, his confusion about identity would have been inevitable, given his two names. This is not only true of the protagonist. Many Koreans experience an internal division amid the continuing conflict between the South and the North.

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: To a Korean, the narrator’s surname, “Kim” (the same as Kim Il-sung’s, the ruler of North Korea at the time), when juxtaposed with the demonized “Marx,” would link him even more intensely with the idea of communism.]

By the close of the story, we understand why the narrator’s father has falsely confessed. He’s all too aware of how much of an outcast he’s been, both from a political movement he was once committed to and from South Korean society. Is he a tragic figure?

The narrator’s father tries to give meaning to his miserable life by admitting that he was a North Korean spy. He makes foolish choices to achieve goals that are not realistically possible. In that sense, he’s a tragic protagonist who recklessly fights against his own fate and ends up both sacrificing himself and destroying himself, in keeping with what Aristotle says about tragedy in his “Poetics.”

You’re known throughout the world as an award-winning film director. Your most recent movie is a short called “Heartbeat,” about a boy who runs away from school. Does it share any qualities with a short story? Are you working on a new feature at the moment?

“Heartbeat” is about a boy who is worried about his depressed mother. He runs out of school during class and up to the rooftop of the apartment where he lives. It’s structured similarly to a short story in that it shows a cross-section of our lives via a scene from daily life filmed in a single, long take. At the moment, I’m writing a screenplay for a new movie, and I’m planning to start filming next year.

South Korea has recently experienced a period of political turmoil. At 11 p.m. on Tuesday, December 3rd, President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law. Two hours later, after parliamentarians rushed to the country’s National Assembly building and voted against the declaration, martial law was revoked. Were you shocked by these events? Could President Yoon have succeeded?

Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law was the first in forty-four years, since 1980, and it awakened the collective trauma of Koreans who remember that time. Yoon’s attempt to destroy democracy was unsuccessful because of the people who stopped the troops trying to enter the National Assembly in the middle of the night. If the people had not delayed the military by standing and blocking the soldiers’ guns with their bodies, and if the majority of the National Assembly members had not gathered after midnight to vote to lift martial law, the coup would have succeeded and Korea might have returned to the dictatorship of more than thirty years ago. That dictatorship was controlled by the military, but this one would have been more firmly entrenched by combining the military with the judiciary.

How far—or close—is the South Korea of today to the place depicted in your stories from the nineteen-eighties?

What’s happening in Korea now is a painful reminder that the stories in this book may not just be stories relevant to the past. Surprisingly, they remind us that the events of today—in 2024—can instantly invoke the memories of 1980 and the massacre at Gwangju. It seems that these challenges to democracy are happening not only in countries like Korea but also all over the world—even in the United States. Just yesterday, on December 14th, the Korean National Assembly passed the impeachment bill against Yoon Suk-yeol. I was at the rally in front of the National Assembly with hundreds of thousands of citizens. People were not singing folk songs or the national anthem, like they did in past protests. They were holding light sticks and singing K-pop songs, as if they were at a concert. Light overcoming darkness, youth overcoming old age, lightness overcoming heaviness, and women overcoming men—to me, it felt like this was the future of Korea and of the world. ♦

Lee Chang-dong’s responses were translated, from the Korean, by Heinz Insu Fenkl.