The Pink Ribbon Era

Some destinies just don’t deal uppercuts. Just a couple of a few light jabs. All you need is a galvanizing punch, but as fate would have it, you only get unsolicited nudges.

42-year-old Kwon Yeo-sun is one of those people. After receiving Korea’s 1996 Imaginative Literature Award for her long novel “Blue Crack,” she became famous overnight. Back in those days, when literature was a shared culture, university students carried her book everywhere.

A decade later, when Kwon released her new novel “The Pink Ribbon Era,” published by Changbi, she still hasn’t landed that clinching punch, however. She went on to write longer novels, but Korean literary tastes have forced her back to writing short stories. Still, she was criticized. Time passed, and she was forgotten. It was only until 8 years had passed that she quietly published her short stories. The solicitations began to flow in again. “It’s a pretty good work,” people said.

“The Pink Ribbon Era” has compiled 7 of those “pretty good works” lauded by others. Even when she was studying in graduate school, facing a shaky living and only working small jobs, she never lost her desire to write. She vowed that she would write about the people she walked this earth with. The insecure fluctuations of everyday life show through in her sharp literary style.

Her title piece is a story of discovering the hypocrisy of the middle-class after meeting a married college colleague couple. The couple that decries meat for the sake of staying fit but binges on meat cuisine, the colleague who has a seemingly normal married life but is having an affair with a subordinate, and other things that the writer had kept in her heart pour out in her book.

Laura, who screams at her mother in front of her boyfriend after suffering from insecurity over her looks in “When Fall Comes”; Yoon Yang, who gets hit by a car after rushing out into the street after a father–son spat in “While the Beans are Boiling”; and other characters illustrated in the book are all walking on thin ice.

“Before, I had to follow my gut instinct to write, but now the characters materialize in my head a bit. I think I’m becoming a true writer,” Kwon said, and added in a voice polished by destiny into a humble but strong tone, “I will write for a very long time.”

kimjy@donga.com