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Iubita fiului meu
Povestitorii imparțiali ai lui Jung, atitudinea ironică și umorul adesea subtil (sau chiar negru), combinate cu tema uniformă a lumii moderne care îndepărtează emoțiile din relații fac ca Iubita fiului meu să reprezinte un câștig esențial pentru biblioteca oricărui fan de ficțiune modernă coreeană, de fapt un câștig esențial în biblioteca oricui iubește ficțiunea modernă.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Jung Mi-Kyung
2 books1 followerJung Mi-Kyung (Korean: 정미경; 4 February 1960 – 18 January 2017) was a modern South Korean novelist.
Jung graduated from Ewha Womans University with a degree in English literature and in 1987 made her literary debut by winning the drama category of the JoongAng Literary Award. After this, however, she withdrew from literary work for over a decade, re-entering the scene as a novelist, debuting with the short story "The Woman With Arsenic" in the Fall volume of World Literature. Thereafter, she has concentrated on her literary career with great success.
Jung graduated from Ewha Womans University with a degree in English literature and in 1987 made her literary debut by winning the drama category of the JoongAng Literary Award. After this, however, she withdrew from literary work for over a decade, re-entering the scene as a novelist, debuting with the short story "The Woman With Arsenic" in the Fall volume of World Literature. Thereafter, she has concentrated on her literary career with great success.
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December 21, 2014
The short story has always been the highest form of modern literature in Korea, and Jung Mi-Kyung’s My Son’s Girlfriend is a powerful argument for it. My Son’s Girlfriend contains seven stories all of which hit, in various ways, at the alienation of modern life and the loss, distortion or impermanence of love, focusing on plots and themes that are specific to Korea, while at the same time have relevance to all modernized countries.
While the characters and settings vary, as the band Led Zepplin once sang, “the song remains the same.” Jung explores the erosion of love in the modern world, and frequently in light of decisions made years prior, making the stories not just about current situations of the first person narrators, but also of choices they made which led them to the bleak lives they lead.
Among the first books published in the Dalkey Library of Korean Literature, My Son’s Girlfriend, Lonesome You by Park Wan-suh and A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories by Jung Young-moon are the three short story collections. My Son’s Girlfriend however can not only be read as seven short stories, but as a yŏnjak sosŏl (linked novel) or collection of separately published short stories which can stand alone or supplement each other as a novel. Traditionally, yŏnjak sosŏl was written by multiple authors but Jung takes on the role of sole author, as Cho Se-hui did in his The Dwarf, or Yang Kwi-ja in A Distant and Beautiful Place (also brilliant places to begin your reading of Korean fiction).
The narrators and settings vary, from artists, to traders, mothers, to girlfriends and beyond. The book begins with I Love You, a non-ironic title in which a young couple who are clearly in love pay a high price as they scheme to find success in Korean society, and work out a plot involving the rich boss of the male narrator, which, in its sick way, ‘works’. To say more would be to spoil the plot. But it ends on a poignant note that sets the tone for the remainder of the book.
Bison, similarly, includes a kind of love triangle, focused around Su-hye, a sculptor whose husband has died shortly after she declared her desire for divorce. Her new gallery piece, named “Bison” is meant to show the layers, or as she says, strata, of ice, that embed us all, and when the third member of the love triangle, the narrator, meets Su-hye, like the Bison in her exhibition, they have to decide how to navigate their personal Ice-Age.
In The Wind takes the image of a flower, and through a loveless marriage and infertility, turns it into an image of death and sterility. Jung’s merciless irony and use of symbols is clearest in this story, as it is infertility, death, and sterility itself that is keeping a loveless marriage together.
The book’s eponymous story, My Son’s Girlfriend, deftly explores class divisions overpowering emotions as strong as love. The story is narrated by a mother watching her son, deeply in love with a poor woman, slowly follow a path that causes her to think back to a similar decision she had made in her own youth, and the price she has paid for it. The irony is thick and the relationships thin.
Cicada, the story of a man battling tinnitus (and again, the nearly inevitable love triangle), is worth reading if only for it’s accurate representation of the incredible volume at which Seoul lives. Anyone who has lived in a region with cicadas, will recognize the symbol as apt. Jung is skilled at putting her arguments into symbolic form. This story contains a line emblematic of the problem at the heart of all of Jung’s work, when the narrator says, “[another patient] seems to think that the sound I can’t stand comes from the outside on not from within me.” (140)
In Signal Red a relationship and a life have ended, and the survivor must put together what it all meant and, in fact, if there were any meanings to the relationship at all. The work also contains an interesting meditation on the relationship between looks and success, particularly vis a vis men and women, and in some ways echoes points made in Dalkey’s publication of Pavane for a Dead Princess, by Park Min-gyu, which is among this year’s publications.
Jung ends the collection with a summarizing story Night, Be Divided which, after 6 stories and 182 pages of description of the end of love, ennui of love, theft of love, and false love, tells the tale of a filmmaker going overseas to reunite with an old friend, a doctor working on creating a drug that will ‘make’ people fall in love. The filmmaker reads this as the creation of a ‘cure’ and asks the doctor if he considers love a “disease,” to which the doctor essentially argues that diseases can be created, and that when his drug works, “the extinction of passion will become a disease." (191)
This is Jung’s final irony: Don’t worry, the symptoms all the previous stories have focused on, caused my modernity, will shortly be known as a disease and modernity will cure it. Modern society, having throttled love, will now to cure it through technological means. One can only be skeptical. Given all that has gone before, this is a thought appropriate to the Ice-Age through which Jung’s Bison trudge, and one that brings the collection together brilliantly.
Jung’s dispassionate narrators, ironic stance, and often subtle (if dark) humor, mixed with the uniform theme of the modern world stripping emotion out of relationships, make My Son’s Girlfriend an essential addition to the library fo any fan of modern fiction.
Luckily for the reader who would like a taste of Jung’s fiction before purchasing, LTI Korea has an excerpt from the title story, “My Son’s Girlfriend” available online, here: http://www.list.or.kr/node/1036.
While the characters and settings vary, as the band Led Zepplin once sang, “the song remains the same.” Jung explores the erosion of love in the modern world, and frequently in light of decisions made years prior, making the stories not just about current situations of the first person narrators, but also of choices they made which led them to the bleak lives they lead.
Among the first books published in the Dalkey Library of Korean Literature, My Son’s Girlfriend, Lonesome You by Park Wan-suh and A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories by Jung Young-moon are the three short story collections. My Son’s Girlfriend however can not only be read as seven short stories, but as a yŏnjak sosŏl (linked novel) or collection of separately published short stories which can stand alone or supplement each other as a novel. Traditionally, yŏnjak sosŏl was written by multiple authors but Jung takes on the role of sole author, as Cho Se-hui did in his The Dwarf, or Yang Kwi-ja in A Distant and Beautiful Place (also brilliant places to begin your reading of Korean fiction).
The narrators and settings vary, from artists, to traders, mothers, to girlfriends and beyond. The book begins with I Love You, a non-ironic title in which a young couple who are clearly in love pay a high price as they scheme to find success in Korean society, and work out a plot involving the rich boss of the male narrator, which, in its sick way, ‘works’. To say more would be to spoil the plot. But it ends on a poignant note that sets the tone for the remainder of the book.
Bison, similarly, includes a kind of love triangle, focused around Su-hye, a sculptor whose husband has died shortly after she declared her desire for divorce. Her new gallery piece, named “Bison” is meant to show the layers, or as she says, strata, of ice, that embed us all, and when the third member of the love triangle, the narrator, meets Su-hye, like the Bison in her exhibition, they have to decide how to navigate their personal Ice-Age.
In The Wind takes the image of a flower, and through a loveless marriage and infertility, turns it into an image of death and sterility. Jung’s merciless irony and use of symbols is clearest in this story, as it is infertility, death, and sterility itself that is keeping a loveless marriage together.
The book’s eponymous story, My Son’s Girlfriend, deftly explores class divisions overpowering emotions as strong as love. The story is narrated by a mother watching her son, deeply in love with a poor woman, slowly follow a path that causes her to think back to a similar decision she had made in her own youth, and the price she has paid for it. The irony is thick and the relationships thin.
Cicada, the story of a man battling tinnitus (and again, the nearly inevitable love triangle), is worth reading if only for it’s accurate representation of the incredible volume at which Seoul lives. Anyone who has lived in a region with cicadas, will recognize the symbol as apt. Jung is skilled at putting her arguments into symbolic form. This story contains a line emblematic of the problem at the heart of all of Jung’s work, when the narrator says, “[another patient] seems to think that the sound I can’t stand comes from the outside on not from within me.” (140)
In Signal Red a relationship and a life have ended, and the survivor must put together what it all meant and, in fact, if there were any meanings to the relationship at all. The work also contains an interesting meditation on the relationship between looks and success, particularly vis a vis men and women, and in some ways echoes points made in Dalkey’s publication of Pavane for a Dead Princess, by Park Min-gyu, which is among this year’s publications.
Jung ends the collection with a summarizing story Night, Be Divided which, after 6 stories and 182 pages of description of the end of love, ennui of love, theft of love, and false love, tells the tale of a filmmaker going overseas to reunite with an old friend, a doctor working on creating a drug that will ‘make’ people fall in love. The filmmaker reads this as the creation of a ‘cure’ and asks the doctor if he considers love a “disease,” to which the doctor essentially argues that diseases can be created, and that when his drug works, “the extinction of passion will become a disease." (191)
This is Jung’s final irony: Don’t worry, the symptoms all the previous stories have focused on, caused my modernity, will shortly be known as a disease and modernity will cure it. Modern society, having throttled love, will now to cure it through technological means. One can only be skeptical. Given all that has gone before, this is a thought appropriate to the Ice-Age through which Jung’s Bison trudge, and one that brings the collection together brilliantly.
Jung’s dispassionate narrators, ironic stance, and often subtle (if dark) humor, mixed with the uniform theme of the modern world stripping emotion out of relationships, make My Son’s Girlfriend an essential addition to the library fo any fan of modern fiction.
Luckily for the reader who would like a taste of Jung’s fiction before purchasing, LTI Korea has an excerpt from the title story, “My Son’s Girlfriend” available online, here: http://www.list.or.kr/node/1036.
May 3, 2017
The Korean novelist 정미경 passed away earlier this year aged just 57 (http://news.mk.co.kr/newsRead.php?yea...)
Her 2008 short story collection "나 아들의 연인"
was translated into English as "My Son's Girlfriend" (I'm pleased to say preserving the original title, unlike so many other translations) by Yu Young-nan (유 영난), who also translated Park Wan-suh's excellent Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel and Yom Sang-seop's classic Three Generations,
Published in 2013, the English translation was one of the earliest books in the now 26-book strong Dalkey Archive Library of Korean Literature. I have read 17 of those with my ratings and reviews here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Jung was a fine observer of the trappings of contemporary middle-class Korean life, but I'm afraid this book ultimately wasn't for me for several reasons, mostly personal:
- a translation that didn't read particularly fluently (patchy translation bedevilled the early Library of Korean Literature books, but has been rectified in the more recent editions)
- particularly with my timing of reading this immediately after the 2017 MBI shortlist, which set a very high standard for translated fiction
- a lack of personal enthusiasm for the short-story form. Particularly this type of stories, that feel like drafts for uncompleted novels rather than fully-formed works
- and to an extent a lack of personal sympathy with the rather obvious underlying critique of modern Korean society.
Jung's themes are well described by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea who sponsor the Library:
My Son's Girlfriend and, just this month, extracts from the other two authors mentioned, Jeong Yi-hyun and Seo Ha-jin, the latter taken from book 19 in the Library of Korean Literature.
The first story in Jung's collection I Love You is set in July/August 2007, and the most interesting part for me was the background references to contemporary events: the forthcoming Presidential election, a blockbuster local sci-fi movie which divided opinion (presumably D-War), a hostage crisis in Afghanistan, one a spiralling scandal of false academic credentials, and the start of the global financial crisis (albeit the author rather allows the characters to anticipate the effects. There was a stock market correction in August 2007 but it was rapidly reserved, the sub-prime crisis didn't really spill over into the wider stock market until 2008). The plot of the story - a couple both exploiting but also subjugating themselves to a rich man's wealth, seemed too obvious a metaphor of my taste.
The 2nd story The Bison concerns a love triangle between a sculptor, her husband, who seems to try to singlehandedly tackle medical poverty in North Korea and the more conventional narrator, her lover. She tells her husband:
I don't want to live with an angel. I want to live with a timid guy who's selfish, cowardly and only looks out for his family.
But when he dies, at the funeral she dismisses her lover: You're so much like me. You know that? I don't like myself.
The Bison of the title are the subject of her first major sculpture exhibition post his death, and the story is mainly set at the opening in a Insadong gallery. They are survivors of the ice-age and again this acts as a metaphor for frozen feelings.
The 3rd story, Three Winds was perhaps the most effective for me, a story of a couple undergoing UVF. The narrating wife gradually realises that her desire for a child has become an end in itself for her husband, a substitute for their love, although the following key passage is an example of the rather awkward English text:
Was it really a child that Yeong-jo had wanted so persistently for these past 8 years? For him, having a child could be one of the tasks he had assigned himself. Something like a goal for which one is supposed to do one's best until it is achieved through adequate planning, effort and investment. If I told him that at some point having a child turned into a sort of defiance of an elusive thing, would he deny it?
Although this story ends with my favourite line of the whole book:
She shuddered violently at the thought that nothing had changed.
The topic of the title story is explained above. The mother, narrating, has a conversation with her daughter about their prospective daughter/sister-in-law in a representative Gangnam setting, an upmarket spa, a setting intended by the author to expose the mother's snobbishness:
“So I hear that your son has finally found someone he’d like to marry.”
“I’m going to meet her near here this afternoon.”
That fast? Her eyes are wide. I say, “I thought it would be a good idea to meet her.” She says, “Whatever the case, she doesn’t know her social station.” “What’s your station, may I ask?” She glares at me, the whites of her eyes strikingly prominent. Although she’s my daughter, rather, because she’s my daughter, I wish she’d live differently. She goes out to department stores every day and drops by the spa, complaining that her legs hurt, and she relies on a housekeeper for all her household chores, but still she complains about everything, none of which is important. If she comes off like that to her own mother, who will ever find her pleasant? Right before the now-cooled stones on my back feel like foreign objects, the therapist removes them one by one. Even after they are taken off, their warmth lingers. It’s almost time to go out to meet Do-ran.
Despite my personal lack of enthusiasm, the two best bloggers on Korean literature both highly enjoyed the book (indeed one recommended it to me) so I would urge people to visit their reviews for a more rounded view:
Tony Malone at Tony's Reading List: http://tonysreadinglist.blogspot.co.u...
Charles Montgomery from Korean Literature in Translation: http://www.ktlit.com/review-my-sons-g...
Her 2008 short story collection "나 아들의 연인"
was translated into English as "My Son's Girlfriend" (I'm pleased to say preserving the original title, unlike so many other translations) by Yu Young-nan (유 영난), who also translated Park Wan-suh's excellent Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel and Yom Sang-seop's classic Three Generations,
Published in 2013, the English translation was one of the earliest books in the now 26-book strong Dalkey Archive Library of Korean Literature. I have read 17 of those with my ratings and reviews here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Jung was a fine observer of the trappings of contemporary middle-class Korean life, but I'm afraid this book ultimately wasn't for me for several reasons, mostly personal:
- a translation that didn't read particularly fluently (patchy translation bedevilled the early Library of Korean Literature books, but has been rectified in the more recent editions)
- particularly with my timing of reading this immediately after the 2017 MBI shortlist, which set a very high standard for translated fiction
- a lack of personal enthusiasm for the short-story form. Particularly this type of stories, that feel like drafts for uncompleted novels rather than fully-formed works
- and to an extent a lack of personal sympathy with the rather obvious underlying critique of modern Korean society.
Jung's themes are well described by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea who sponsor the Library:
In her work Jeong likes to use Seoul, more specifically Gangnam, a space engulfed by consumerism, as the backdrop of her stories filled with consumerist desire and extravagance. The Gangnam that serves as the backdrop of so many of her stories is the very definition of a “Wonderland of strange sorrow.” One of her better known works, “My Son’s Girlfriend,” tells a story of class and economic divide that is even more intense than the ideological conflict between the two Koreas. The protagonist of the story is a mother from Gangnam (South of the Han River), is rattled by her son seeing a girl from the wrong side of the town, Gangbuk (North of the Han River), but her hypocritical sense of refinement prevents her from voicing her concerns. Once she recognizes this she says to herself, “Even my vices are trivial, petty and ignoble.” Her self-disgust exquisitely conveys Jeong’s criticism on the empty morality of 21st century bourgeoisie. Rarely seen before in Korean literature, Jeong’s careful study of the life and thoughts of the bourgeoisie is grouped into a subgenre called “Gangnam Novella” along with the works of Jeong Yi-hyun and Seo Ha-jin, a relatively new literary branch of Korean literature.The excellent journal Korean Literature Now published online an extensive abstact from the title story of this collection,
My Son's Girlfriend and, just this month, extracts from the other two authors mentioned, Jeong Yi-hyun and Seo Ha-jin, the latter taken from book 19 in the Library of Korean Literature.
The first story in Jung's collection I Love You is set in July/August 2007, and the most interesting part for me was the background references to contemporary events: the forthcoming Presidential election, a blockbuster local sci-fi movie which divided opinion (presumably D-War), a hostage crisis in Afghanistan, one a spiralling scandal of false academic credentials, and the start of the global financial crisis (albeit the author rather allows the characters to anticipate the effects. There was a stock market correction in August 2007 but it was rapidly reserved, the sub-prime crisis didn't really spill over into the wider stock market until 2008). The plot of the story - a couple both exploiting but also subjugating themselves to a rich man's wealth, seemed too obvious a metaphor of my taste.
The 2nd story The Bison concerns a love triangle between a sculptor, her husband, who seems to try to singlehandedly tackle medical poverty in North Korea and the more conventional narrator, her lover. She tells her husband:
I don't want to live with an angel. I want to live with a timid guy who's selfish, cowardly and only looks out for his family.
But when he dies, at the funeral she dismisses her lover: You're so much like me. You know that? I don't like myself.
The Bison of the title are the subject of her first major sculpture exhibition post his death, and the story is mainly set at the opening in a Insadong gallery. They are survivors of the ice-age and again this acts as a metaphor for frozen feelings.
The 3rd story, Three Winds was perhaps the most effective for me, a story of a couple undergoing UVF. The narrating wife gradually realises that her desire for a child has become an end in itself for her husband, a substitute for their love, although the following key passage is an example of the rather awkward English text:
Was it really a child that Yeong-jo had wanted so persistently for these past 8 years? For him, having a child could be one of the tasks he had assigned himself. Something like a goal for which one is supposed to do one's best until it is achieved through adequate planning, effort and investment. If I told him that at some point having a child turned into a sort of defiance of an elusive thing, would he deny it?
Although this story ends with my favourite line of the whole book:
She shuddered violently at the thought that nothing had changed.
The topic of the title story is explained above. The mother, narrating, has a conversation with her daughter about their prospective daughter/sister-in-law in a representative Gangnam setting, an upmarket spa, a setting intended by the author to expose the mother's snobbishness:
“So I hear that your son has finally found someone he’d like to marry.”
“I’m going to meet her near here this afternoon.”
That fast? Her eyes are wide. I say, “I thought it would be a good idea to meet her.” She says, “Whatever the case, she doesn’t know her social station.” “What’s your station, may I ask?” She glares at me, the whites of her eyes strikingly prominent. Although she’s my daughter, rather, because she’s my daughter, I wish she’d live differently. She goes out to department stores every day and drops by the spa, complaining that her legs hurt, and she relies on a housekeeper for all her household chores, but still she complains about everything, none of which is important. If she comes off like that to her own mother, who will ever find her pleasant? Right before the now-cooled stones on my back feel like foreign objects, the therapist removes them one by one. Even after they are taken off, their warmth lingers. It’s almost time to go out to meet Do-ran.
Despite my personal lack of enthusiasm, the two best bloggers on Korean literature both highly enjoyed the book (indeed one recommended it to me) so I would urge people to visit their reviews for a more rounded view:
Tony Malone at Tony's Reading List: http://tonysreadinglist.blogspot.co.u...
Charles Montgomery from Korean Literature in Translation: http://www.ktlit.com/review-my-sons-g...
August 11, 2014
A decent serving of literary stories exploring the complexities of modern Korean relationships—not unlike Western relationships excepting greater helpings of live octopus and with more class tension and less affluence. The writing style is fairly straightforward and as a consequence pertains to the bland and conversational.
November 25, 2014
Jung Mi-kyung's My Son's Girlfriend (translated by Yu Young-nan) is a collection of short stories about life in modern-day Korea. The collection runs to almost 220 pages, but as most of the stories are about thirty-pages long (extended stories seem to be fairly common in Korean writing), there are actually only seven pieces in the collection. However, there are several powerful stories, each exploring the problems faced by people trying to live their lives in 21st-century Korea, some universal, some specific to those living on the peninsula.
A major issue in Korean society is social mobility, and in the title story, a mother is confronted by this problem after her son falls in love with a young woman from a background of poverty. As she attempts to allow her son to work out his feelings for himself, the beautiful, shy young girl reminds her of an admirer she had in her youth, a boy she led on even though she had no intention of developing a serious relationship with him.
It's an excellent story in which the reader sees life from various social strata. The woman's family lives at the top of an exclusive apartment building, literally looking down on the city, and it's hard to believe that the son's passion is anything but a temporary rebellious notion. In addition to the main action, there's also a clever sub-plot involving a driver employed by one the building's residents in which the idea of social inequality is further reinforced.
Of course, being at the top is a lot easier than getting there, and in 'I Love You' Jung takes a look at a couple who are desperate to get a foot on the ladder to success. A struggling investment analyst and a lecturer desperate for a permanent position, they're people at risk of falling behind their contemporaries, comfortable, but going nowhere. When an opportunity comes along for them to form close ties with a wealthy businessman, it's little wonder, then, that they take it without too much consideration. However, it turns out that this involves a fairly indecent proposal, and the couple are left to wonder what sacrifices are worth making for a shot at a luxurious lifestyle.
Another troubled relationship is described in 'The Bison', where a sculptress puts on her first show after the death of her husband:
"Only after he was gone did I realize that all of us are carrying a chill in our hearts as heavy as the weight of the universe. Just like the bison who lived during the Ice Age, we've been thrown here, though we don't know whence we came or why, and we must walk on ice, fighting off the cold with our entire bodies. After he was gone, what seized me was not sorrow but an intense chill."
'The Bison', p.55 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)
This passage is a little deceptive though - while the artist may miss her husband, their relationship was far from ideal. With his saintly obsession on providing aid for the starving in the North, she felt a cold chill well before his untimely death...
By now, you'll have realized that there aren't too many happy souls in this collection, and existential malaise is a theme which runs through the stories. 'In the Wind' sees a woman going through the mental agonies of IVF treatment, all the time wondering if it's what she even wants, especially when she's not even sure about her marriage any more:
"Once formed, a relationship meant bondage to another person for a lifetime, so why did people want to weave new webs of relationships?"
'In the Wind' (p.90)
The protagonist of 'Cicadas' is also tortured, but in a very different way. He's suffering from tinnitus, and the constant noise of Seoul is slowly driving him crazy. A chance encounter with a fragile young woman offers some relief, but having read some of the other stories in this collection, the reader doesn't hold out much hope for a happy ending here either ;)
My Son's Girlfriend may be a little depressing, but it's a very good collection of stories (only 'Signal Red', a story about a woman's relationship with a colour-blind man, was a little disappointing). A phrase which kept coming back to me while reading the book, my own, personal leitmotif for the collection, was one from my own younger days. As all blur fans will no doubt remember, modern life? Well, it's rubbish. The sad thing is that many of these protagonists aren't even holding out for tomorrow - they'd rather just end it all today...
The last story is, in many ways, perhaps the darkest. 'Night, Be Divided!' follows a successful film-maker on a trip to Oslo, where he takes advantage of the trip to catch up with an old friend from school, a hyper-successful doctor whose brilliance always amazed his friend. Having turned to research, the doctor's new challenge is to create a drug - to make people fall in love:
I ask, "Do you think the loss of love is a disease?"
"Well, doctors call what they can cure a disease and what they can't cure inherent human traits. They don't call loneliness, jealousy and sorrow diseases. Before the advent of sleeping pills, people just couldn't sleep. Insomnia wasn't an illness. With the emergence of Prozac, depression became a more common ailment. When my drug is perfected, the extinction of passion will become a disease."
'Night, Be Divided!' (p.191)
It's another chilling, horrible thought, and the story (which becomes very bleak indeed) is a fitting conclusion to the book. It's worrying to think that for many Koreans (according to Jung, at least), modern life really is that rubbish. Luckily, I can assure you all that My Son's Girlfriend is far from rubbish - it's actually very good :)
*****
Taken from the original review on my blog, Tony's Reading List
A major issue in Korean society is social mobility, and in the title story, a mother is confronted by this problem after her son falls in love with a young woman from a background of poverty. As she attempts to allow her son to work out his feelings for himself, the beautiful, shy young girl reminds her of an admirer she had in her youth, a boy she led on even though she had no intention of developing a serious relationship with him.
It's an excellent story in which the reader sees life from various social strata. The woman's family lives at the top of an exclusive apartment building, literally looking down on the city, and it's hard to believe that the son's passion is anything but a temporary rebellious notion. In addition to the main action, there's also a clever sub-plot involving a driver employed by one the building's residents in which the idea of social inequality is further reinforced.
Of course, being at the top is a lot easier than getting there, and in 'I Love You' Jung takes a look at a couple who are desperate to get a foot on the ladder to success. A struggling investment analyst and a lecturer desperate for a permanent position, they're people at risk of falling behind their contemporaries, comfortable, but going nowhere. When an opportunity comes along for them to form close ties with a wealthy businessman, it's little wonder, then, that they take it without too much consideration. However, it turns out that this involves a fairly indecent proposal, and the couple are left to wonder what sacrifices are worth making for a shot at a luxurious lifestyle.
Another troubled relationship is described in 'The Bison', where a sculptress puts on her first show after the death of her husband:
"Only after he was gone did I realize that all of us are carrying a chill in our hearts as heavy as the weight of the universe. Just like the bison who lived during the Ice Age, we've been thrown here, though we don't know whence we came or why, and we must walk on ice, fighting off the cold with our entire bodies. After he was gone, what seized me was not sorrow but an intense chill."
'The Bison', p.55 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)
This passage is a little deceptive though - while the artist may miss her husband, their relationship was far from ideal. With his saintly obsession on providing aid for the starving in the North, she felt a cold chill well before his untimely death...
By now, you'll have realized that there aren't too many happy souls in this collection, and existential malaise is a theme which runs through the stories. 'In the Wind' sees a woman going through the mental agonies of IVF treatment, all the time wondering if it's what she even wants, especially when she's not even sure about her marriage any more:
"Once formed, a relationship meant bondage to another person for a lifetime, so why did people want to weave new webs of relationships?"
'In the Wind' (p.90)
The protagonist of 'Cicadas' is also tortured, but in a very different way. He's suffering from tinnitus, and the constant noise of Seoul is slowly driving him crazy. A chance encounter with a fragile young woman offers some relief, but having read some of the other stories in this collection, the reader doesn't hold out much hope for a happy ending here either ;)
My Son's Girlfriend may be a little depressing, but it's a very good collection of stories (only 'Signal Red', a story about a woman's relationship with a colour-blind man, was a little disappointing). A phrase which kept coming back to me while reading the book, my own, personal leitmotif for the collection, was one from my own younger days. As all blur fans will no doubt remember, modern life? Well, it's rubbish. The sad thing is that many of these protagonists aren't even holding out for tomorrow - they'd rather just end it all today...
The last story is, in many ways, perhaps the darkest. 'Night, Be Divided!' follows a successful film-maker on a trip to Oslo, where he takes advantage of the trip to catch up with an old friend from school, a hyper-successful doctor whose brilliance always amazed his friend. Having turned to research, the doctor's new challenge is to create a drug - to make people fall in love:
I ask, "Do you think the loss of love is a disease?"
"Well, doctors call what they can cure a disease and what they can't cure inherent human traits. They don't call loneliness, jealousy and sorrow diseases. Before the advent of sleeping pills, people just couldn't sleep. Insomnia wasn't an illness. With the emergence of Prozac, depression became a more common ailment. When my drug is perfected, the extinction of passion will become a disease."
'Night, Be Divided!' (p.191)
It's another chilling, horrible thought, and the story (which becomes very bleak indeed) is a fitting conclusion to the book. It's worrying to think that for many Koreans (according to Jung, at least), modern life really is that rubbish. Luckily, I can assure you all that My Son's Girlfriend is far from rubbish - it's actually very good :)
*****
Taken from the original review on my blog, Tony's Reading List
July 24, 2025
Watch my review on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMP6S...
June 1, 2022
Mi-a plăcut profunzimea acestor povestiri.
August 2, 2022
I love a haunting short story collection. These stories are honest and bleak — one of the main reasons I love Lorie Moore’s short stories — but Mi-Kyung pushes herself to five stars because I felt incredibly connected to these stories’ characters even in ones that only ran around 20 pages. I found the endings to be both unpredictable and realistic, which I think is lovely. Great read, definitely recommend.
December 10, 2023
Beautiful stories of love and friendship. Very nuanced and not at all idealized.
January 25, 2018
This book has seven short stories so I will review the individual stories, and then decide the overall rating for this collection.
I Love You – 2.5/5 Stars
This story was beautifully written, and invoked strong imagery in my mind. It also made me hungry when they was talking about octopus soup, and iced coffee. The story felt realistic, but I didn’t enjoy the sad tones, and the reality of how tough life is. I also felt the cultural divide hit me in this story, because I couldn’t really relate to it. I could relate to being with a person out of comfort, but not the desperate desire to survive life, because I haven’t been that desperate yet. The ending was sad too, but I did appreciate the writing.
The Bison - 3/5 Stars
This story was so sad. Sadder that I Love You. I Love You was a story about desperation. The Bison is a story about loss. The Bison follows Myeong-jo, and Su-hye. Su-hye is a recently widowed artist, and she spent the last year away from her college friend/lover Myeong-jo, and they meet at her exhibition. It’s sad, but in a depressing way. The good thing is that I could imagine walking down the streets of Insa-dong, and Pyongyang. This story made me feel more emotions than I Love You, and I could relate to the story more, so that’s why it is rated higher.
In The Wind – 2.5 Stars
This is also a sad story, about a marriage that’s on the brink, and the fate of the marriage depends on whether the wife can get pregnant through IVF. It’s a sad story, but sad in a different way from the other two stories. The sadness stems from the wife being unsatisfied with her life. She thinks about an ex who didn’t want children no matter what, the children she has to look after at school and the possibility of her future child becoming like them, and the state of her family, and married life. The writing in this story was less descriptive, and more on bonds of friendship, family, and lovers.
My Son’s Girlfriend – 4 Stars
The sadness in this story is the sort of sadness where you know that it’ll be a sad ending, so you’re sad in anticipating it. Sad in knowing that there will be an end. This story is about a mother, and she doesn’t like her son’s new girlfriend. She’s poor, but the girlfriend also reminds the mother of herself when she was younger. When she was in a relationship with a guy she loved, she chose a good future, and a husband. This is the first story where I was captivated from the beginning, and I wanted to know the ending, and wondered how it could have been a sad ending. I liked the mother in this book. She looked out for her children, but she also gave the girlfriend a chance. The descriptions of shaved ice-cream, and black bean noodles made me hungry. Jung Mi-kyung is very good at describing food.
Cicadas – 2/5 Stars
This story is about a man who suffers from auditory hallucinations of Cicadas, waterfalls etc. Essentially white noise, and it follows his treatment, and his growing relationship with a woman who suffers from fainting. I didn’t like this story, and I didn’t feel anything when I finished it. The ambiguous ending annoyed me, and I didn’t take away anything from this story. I did enjoy the descriptions of spaghetti though. It made me hungry when I was full up.
Signal Red – 4/5 Stars
This story follows a woman’s relationship man, from start to finish. I really liked this story. It felt relatively realistic, but there also was no strong feeling of sadness. More of regret, and sorrow. The woman starts off at an audition for a theatre production company, and I really liked reading about her job. If this was a full book, I would definitely be interested in it. Jung Mi-kyung also manages to describe the feeling of hammering a nail exceedingly well. I felt the pain of hammering my own nail again.
Night, Be Divided! – 2.5/5 Stars
This is the story of two old friends reconnecting after a decade. The narrator reflects upon his life, his friendship, and his past love. This one is another sad story, but the sadness you feel is more like wasted potential. I didn’t really like this story because the characters weren’t likable. Though it was an interesting insight into the film business.
This short story collection was an interesting read. It was both a surprise, but also what I was expecting it to be. I did imagine feeling depressed after reading this book, but luckily I don’t feel too sad. It has enlightened me to the different types of sadness an author can make you feel, as the reader. I would recommend this short story collection if it sounds like your cup of tea.
I Love You – 2.5/5 Stars
This story was beautifully written, and invoked strong imagery in my mind. It also made me hungry when they was talking about octopus soup, and iced coffee. The story felt realistic, but I didn’t enjoy the sad tones, and the reality of how tough life is. I also felt the cultural divide hit me in this story, because I couldn’t really relate to it. I could relate to being with a person out of comfort, but not the desperate desire to survive life, because I haven’t been that desperate yet. The ending was sad too, but I did appreciate the writing.
The Bison - 3/5 Stars
This story was so sad. Sadder that I Love You. I Love You was a story about desperation. The Bison is a story about loss. The Bison follows Myeong-jo, and Su-hye. Su-hye is a recently widowed artist, and she spent the last year away from her college friend/lover Myeong-jo, and they meet at her exhibition. It’s sad, but in a depressing way. The good thing is that I could imagine walking down the streets of Insa-dong, and Pyongyang. This story made me feel more emotions than I Love You, and I could relate to the story more, so that’s why it is rated higher.
In The Wind – 2.5 Stars
This is also a sad story, about a marriage that’s on the brink, and the fate of the marriage depends on whether the wife can get pregnant through IVF. It’s a sad story, but sad in a different way from the other two stories. The sadness stems from the wife being unsatisfied with her life. She thinks about an ex who didn’t want children no matter what, the children she has to look after at school and the possibility of her future child becoming like them, and the state of her family, and married life. The writing in this story was less descriptive, and more on bonds of friendship, family, and lovers.
My Son’s Girlfriend – 4 Stars
The sadness in this story is the sort of sadness where you know that it’ll be a sad ending, so you’re sad in anticipating it. Sad in knowing that there will be an end. This story is about a mother, and she doesn’t like her son’s new girlfriend. She’s poor, but the girlfriend also reminds the mother of herself when she was younger. When she was in a relationship with a guy she loved, she chose a good future, and a husband. This is the first story where I was captivated from the beginning, and I wanted to know the ending, and wondered how it could have been a sad ending. I liked the mother in this book. She looked out for her children, but she also gave the girlfriend a chance. The descriptions of shaved ice-cream, and black bean noodles made me hungry. Jung Mi-kyung is very good at describing food.
Cicadas – 2/5 Stars
This story is about a man who suffers from auditory hallucinations of Cicadas, waterfalls etc. Essentially white noise, and it follows his treatment, and his growing relationship with a woman who suffers from fainting. I didn’t like this story, and I didn’t feel anything when I finished it. The ambiguous ending annoyed me, and I didn’t take away anything from this story. I did enjoy the descriptions of spaghetti though. It made me hungry when I was full up.
Signal Red – 4/5 Stars
This story follows a woman’s relationship man, from start to finish. I really liked this story. It felt relatively realistic, but there also was no strong feeling of sadness. More of regret, and sorrow. The woman starts off at an audition for a theatre production company, and I really liked reading about her job. If this was a full book, I would definitely be interested in it. Jung Mi-kyung also manages to describe the feeling of hammering a nail exceedingly well. I felt the pain of hammering my own nail again.
Night, Be Divided! – 2.5/5 Stars
This is the story of two old friends reconnecting after a decade. The narrator reflects upon his life, his friendship, and his past love. This one is another sad story, but the sadness you feel is more like wasted potential. I didn’t really like this story because the characters weren’t likable. Though it was an interesting insight into the film business.
This short story collection was an interesting read. It was both a surprise, but also what I was expecting it to be. I did imagine feeling depressed after reading this book, but luckily I don’t feel too sad. It has enlightened me to the different types of sadness an author can make you feel, as the reader. I would recommend this short story collection if it sounds like your cup of tea.
December 14, 2014
This book consists of seven stories, translated directly from an original collection in Korean. The stories are as follows:
"I love you" - a man who's lost millions of a rich old man's money and a woman whose academic clock is ticking and finds she has to pay to get a position agree that the solution for both their problems is for her to enter into a relationship with the old man, serving both his intellectual and carnal needs.
"The Bison" - a man visits an artist friend and former lover on the eve of her first exhibition since her husband died of cancer a year before.
"In the Wind" - the latest round and perhaps the last in a couple's attempt to have a baby through IVF.
"My Son's Girlfriend" - the mother in an affluent family becomes curious about her and her husband's son's girlfriend who is from a very poor family and decides to meet her.
"Cicadas" - a man with severe tinnitus and a woman with a crippling disease (maybe muscular dystrophy) enter into a relationship.
"Signal Red" - a woman becomes the assistant director to a charismatic director on an ambitious project taking the place of the previous AD not only professionally but also as the director's lover.
"Night, Be Divided" - a doctor turned filmmaker visits old friends in Norway, a doctor turned - something - and his wife, and discovers what has become of them.
For me "The Bison" and "In the Wind" were the best stories, with "Cicadas" not far behind. The title story, "My Friend's Girlfriend", was the most ambitious both in concept and in execution (and also the most "Korean"), but I found it ultimately unsatisfying. The other three were OK but not great, at least for me.
All short story collections are uneven, and it's not a fault that this one is too. The problem with the book for me is that there is something about the stories that makes them all the same. A kind of bleakness that is so distinctive and visceral it is almost like a smell that someone's house has that makes you think every time you visit, oh, yes, this is the way this house is.
The bleakness gets into the characters and makes then seem more alike than they should be. While they are a mix of men and women and seem to relate to each other in the way men and women typically do, I found them to be under-differentiated, so that the man in one story seemed hardly different from the woman in another or vice versa. This was so much the case with "Night, Be Divided", that I actually became confused as to who was attracted to who.
I also felt that a couple of the stories got a little out of control at the end, not in what happened but in how it was told. It's possible that this is more a matter of the translation than the original, but still, it's something I noticed.
All this said, I think the book is very good overall and definitely worth a read, at least if you are in the mood for what it is. I give it 4 stars.
"I love you" - a man who's lost millions of a rich old man's money and a woman whose academic clock is ticking and finds she has to pay to get a position agree that the solution for both their problems is for her to enter into a relationship with the old man, serving both his intellectual and carnal needs.
"The Bison" - a man visits an artist friend and former lover on the eve of her first exhibition since her husband died of cancer a year before.
"In the Wind" - the latest round and perhaps the last in a couple's attempt to have a baby through IVF.
"My Son's Girlfriend" - the mother in an affluent family becomes curious about her and her husband's son's girlfriend who is from a very poor family and decides to meet her.
"Cicadas" - a man with severe tinnitus and a woman with a crippling disease (maybe muscular dystrophy) enter into a relationship.
"Signal Red" - a woman becomes the assistant director to a charismatic director on an ambitious project taking the place of the previous AD not only professionally but also as the director's lover.
"Night, Be Divided" - a doctor turned filmmaker visits old friends in Norway, a doctor turned - something - and his wife, and discovers what has become of them.
For me "The Bison" and "In the Wind" were the best stories, with "Cicadas" not far behind. The title story, "My Friend's Girlfriend", was the most ambitious both in concept and in execution (and also the most "Korean"), but I found it ultimately unsatisfying. The other three were OK but not great, at least for me.
All short story collections are uneven, and it's not a fault that this one is too. The problem with the book for me is that there is something about the stories that makes them all the same. A kind of bleakness that is so distinctive and visceral it is almost like a smell that someone's house has that makes you think every time you visit, oh, yes, this is the way this house is.
The bleakness gets into the characters and makes then seem more alike than they should be. While they are a mix of men and women and seem to relate to each other in the way men and women typically do, I found them to be under-differentiated, so that the man in one story seemed hardly different from the woman in another or vice versa. This was so much the case with "Night, Be Divided", that I actually became confused as to who was attracted to who.
I also felt that a couple of the stories got a little out of control at the end, not in what happened but in how it was told. It's possible that this is more a matter of the translation than the original, but still, it's something I noticed.
All this said, I think the book is very good overall and definitely worth a read, at least if you are in the mood for what it is. I give it 4 stars.
April 24, 2024
There is something buried deep in the mix of this seven story collection; not simply a mood but a sense of melancholy and distance, of slight fracture. Jung Mi-Kyung's antenna is tuned to a lurking disquiet in the shiny edifice of contemporary Korean society. Her characters are complex and self-reflective. Their thoughts and feelings are textured. They appear to live at a remove, from themselves as well as others, and there is a sense that something elemental is either missing or not quite wired in properly. Yet, 'My Son's Girlfriend' is neither gloomy nor especially disturbing. Rather, it is tender and intimate. Across these seven short stories, we meet intelligent, yet bruised individuals, their lives unpacked with a blend of delicacy, restraint and cool honesty. More importantly, there is an enigmatic tone, something that cannot readily be pinned down or neatly described. I only wish there were more than seven stories here.
July 11, 2026
This is a collection of 7 short stories by a female writer of Korean modern literature, Jung Mi-kyung.
Stories were told from a first person point of view, mostly male. All 7 stories have a common theme of messy and complicated relationships between lovers, spouses, and in the title story, between a mother and her son's girlfriend. It also portrays the reality of depiction of happy relationships that are deceptive in the eyes of the outsiders.
The author has a winding writing style that goes in circles, leaving the stories to my interpretation. Apart from My Son's Girlfriend, which I can easily relate to, thanks to the Korean dramas I've watched, the rest were depressing reads that I rushed to finish.
'Who was it that said after a phase of boredom in marriage comes a phase of disenchantment?'
Stories were told from a first person point of view, mostly male. All 7 stories have a common theme of messy and complicated relationships between lovers, spouses, and in the title story, between a mother and her son's girlfriend. It also portrays the reality of depiction of happy relationships that are deceptive in the eyes of the outsiders.
The author has a winding writing style that goes in circles, leaving the stories to my interpretation. Apart from My Son's Girlfriend, which I can easily relate to, thanks to the Korean dramas I've watched, the rest were depressing reads that I rushed to finish.
'Who was it that said after a phase of boredom in marriage comes a phase of disenchantment?'
September 1, 2018
Giving another 4 stars, since Goodreads doesn't allow much subtlety in their rating system. Anyway, the translation seemed a bit shoddy at times, but overall I enjoyed this a lot.
Oddly enough, I kept guessing the gender of the narrator incorrectly at the beginning of each story for some reason. Not sure why.
My favorite is probably the last story, about a rival who has bested you at everything (including a little etymology of the word rival, which makes me wonder what the original version says in Korean), only to find out things are different and how it affects you. It's hard to make too many comments without giving it away.
But I really liked all of them, with the possible exception of the first story, which just didn't pull me in much.
Oddly enough, I kept guessing the gender of the narrator incorrectly at the beginning of each story for some reason. Not sure why.
My favorite is probably the last story, about a rival who has bested you at everything (including a little etymology of the word rival, which makes me wonder what the original version says in Korean), only to find out things are different and how it affects you. It's hard to make too many comments without giving it away.
But I really liked all of them, with the possible exception of the first story, which just didn't pull me in much.
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May 22, 2015
Beautifully written and haunting. The stories in here really stuck with me, perhaps because they're saturated in that very mundane kind of haunting that we all go through. No supernatural ghosts, but instead those everyday struggles and non-struggles that we have to go through. When I read this book, it felt like I was looking into real lives and with such a short time to connect us to people, Mi-Kyung Jung does an amazing job.
These losses are real. They're not necessarily the large, sweeping tragedies that would make news. Instead it's the small losses, or the big losses that are highly personal and that people just can't understand.
Definitely worth the read.
These losses are real. They're not necessarily the large, sweeping tragedies that would make news. Instead it's the small losses, or the big losses that are highly personal and that people just can't understand.
Definitely worth the read.
October 22, 2014
Good, if conventional collection of stories about women, and a few men, in disappointing relationships. There didn't seem to be anything especially Korean about them besides the different besides the food the ate and the somewhat stronger class and familiar obligations. Seemed kind of an odd choice for the Dalkey Archives, as there was nothing especially avante garde or even challenging about the whole thing, but I did find myself emphasizing with at least one of the characters in each story.
Read
September 5, 2017The stories in My Son's Girlfriend are on the longish side, averaging 30 pages per story. Each story typically has one main plot peppered by incidences/events that are seemingly unrelated but connected (through the narrator's perception) to the main storyline as a sort of foreshadowing, symbolism etc. that hold some significance.
Don't expect a page turner - just expect something that is contemplative yet illuminating on the melancholic nature of urban loneliness.
Don't expect a page turner - just expect something that is contemplative yet illuminating on the melancholic nature of urban loneliness.
April 19, 2017
Not a short story guy, but this was great. Strong, romantic sense of loss and time passing resonated most. I want to be in Korea now.
July 10, 2017
Seven short (actually, not short) stories set in contemporary South Korea. I liked them, but because her theme is alienation, the stories can feel a little bleak.
September 8, 2022
I did not have high expectations for this book. It is a mini collection of stories. I loved the 5th and 7th story the most, the rest were pretty tedious. It was easy to read. Nothing impressive.
April 17, 2025
I enjoyed the final story “night, be divided” the best but found most of the others difficult to grapple with! The writing is very good though.
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