Years and Years – Hwang Jungeun

[Open Letter; 2024]

Tr. from the Korean by Janet Hong

Hwang Jungeun tends to write in the first person. In One Hundred Shadows, her breakout novel, the narrator is a young woman who works in an electronics market, fixing watches and watching shadows. Her subsequent two books, I’ll Go On and dd’s umbrella, feature multiple first-person narrators (a pair of sisters in the first, and a nonbinary gig worker plus a struggling writer in the second). But Jungeun’s fourth novella, translated by Janet Hong as Years and Years for Open Letter Press, breaks from that previous pattern. Here, the narrative departs from the intimacy and immediacy of the first person to a more sweeping third-person tale, one that sways between the 1950s and the twenty-first century, tilting between the plushness of South Korea’s luxury bedding stores and the grimy Styrofoam of New York.

Years and Years shares with Jungeun’s other work an unwavering focus on the lives of South Korea’s marginalized. Like Jungeun’s previous novels, this latest also centers on women, with men playing decidedly bit parts. The three main characters of this four-part novella are Sejin, Yeongjin, and Sunil, a pair of sisters and their mother. All three women are full of emotions—resentment, annoyance, pain—that they do not allow themselves to express, and parts of their lives that they keep strictly under wraps. This is a story, in short, of women’s silences, and the ways those silences reverberate throughout a family.

Sejin is the younger sister, a playwright whose perspective bookends the novella. A grown adult, she still seems to be playing the archetypal good daughter role. Year after year, she takes her mother Sunil to visit her grandfather’s grave in the town of Galmal in Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province, a taxing wish that Sejin indulges because she senses that, “for her mom, that grave was her childhood home.” Sejin listens half-heartedly to Sunil’s cascade of housekeeping-related laments, often missing the specifics of what her mother says. What she does notice, however, are Sunil’s gestures of repression, the way her face twists, or the firmness with which her mouth clamps shut. We realize, via Sejin’s observant gaze, that there is more to Sunil than what she allows herself to speak aloud.

Sejin’s older sister, Yeongjin, is the family breadwinner. Forced to abandon her longtime dream of studying fine art after her father lost their dried fish store, Yeongjin worked her way up to being a skilled salesperson of luxury bedding after graduating high school. Unlike Sejin, who (to their mother’s knowledge) is single, Yeongjin now is a married mother of two, and has adopted Sunil’s habit of vigorously squashing her more deeply felt urges: “Just because you have a thought,” Yeongjin reasons, “doesn’t mean you should say it or act on it. And just because you want to say or do something doesn’t mean you should actually say or do it. You should hold it in. You should bear it.” For Yeongjin, emotions are things to be prodded at from a distance, and ultimately smothered, in order to make others’ lives more pleasant. But painful memories thrum under Yeongjin’s placid demeanor, occasionally making startling appearances throughout the text in bold, like intrusive thoughts. One phrase in particular, “dirty lie,” follows Yeongjin from her childhood through her early forties, cropping up when she is riding the subway train, or is at home with her children. When a stranger calls her pretty on the subway train, Yeongjin instantly thinks “he couldn’t possibly find me that attractive,” tearing herself down internally. These moments of bold text are particularly gutting, showcasing the unexpected self-directed violence of Yeongjin’s inner monologue and the effort she must exert to simulate normalcy.

The final character in Years and Years’s central triad is Sunil, mother of Sejin and Yeongjin. When we first encounter Sunil’s story, in the chapter corresponding to Sejin’s perspective, the facts of her life are recited summarily. Sunil, we learn, was born in Galgol, moved to Jigyeong-ri as a young person, and now spends the bulk of her days caring for her daughter’s family in a five-story, piloti-style building. Viewed from the vantage point of Sejin or Yeongjin, Sunil seems to be a rather two-dimensional version of the Disgruntled Housewife. Her apron is the “first thing she puts on after getting out of bed, and the last thing she takes off before going to sleep”—a prop attesting to her never-ending domestic care duties. But in the book’s third chapter, Sunil’s backstory acquires more texture, emotion, and darkness. In that section, the narrator puts words to Sunil’s silenced stories, to her memories of fire, loss, blood, and guilt.

While we readers are granted access to the sorrows of Sunil’s early life, her children know little of their mother’s past. This is an intentional choice on Sunil’s part. “All those horrific stories,” the seventy-four-year-old thinks to herself, “do I have to keep thinking about them and talking about them?” It is Sunil’s greatest wish that Yeongjin, Sejin, and her son Mansu never have to experience the things she did, even secondhand, as recounted memories. Sunil’s belief in the salutary properties of repression, however, puts her at a remove from her daughters; the “unspoken stories” that surround Sunil make her an island alone. In the absence of their mother’s words, Sejin and Yeongjin learn to parse Sunil’s slightest gestures, and eventually take up her will to silence, replicating her isolation.

In a play Sejin writes, called Family Exercise, this stifled dynamic comes to the stage. The play consists of one seemingly anodyne scene: a family sitting down to dinner. But, as in Lore Segal’s short story “The Reverse Bug,” a horrifying sound from outside of the scene slowly grips everyone within it, gradually becoming too unbearable to ignore. “From time to time, roars could be heard in the background, as if several sounds had been combined and stretched out,” the narrator recounts. “The performers acted as if they couldn’t hear the noise, even when it was so loud that their own lines couldn’t be heard.” Yeongjin, watching her sister’s play, recognizes a version of herself in an actress who squeezes her eyes shut, “as if trying to suppress her emotions,” and then opens them again. The scene makes Yeongjin want to explode with laughter. As usual, however, the older sister remains quiet.

Notably sidelined in this family story are male characters. When men do appear in Years and Years, they are uniformly terrible: Here we have a moocher, a couch potato, and a despot. First, there is Mansu, Sunil’s only son, who was able to study literature (his passion), before traveling abroad to New Zealand. Down south, he lives off of gifts from an elderly patron figure, and the funds sent to him by his sisters back in Korea. Then, there is Wonsang, Yeongjin’s husband, who is a foul-mannered layabout, and can barely bring himself to make eye contact with his wife’s family members when they come by to say hello. Wonsang speaks the language of “possibilities and opportunities,” words that appear to be off limits to the women of the family. Finally, there is Grandfather, the man who raised Sunil after her parents died in the Korean War. This is a man who made Sunil watch empty-bellied as he ate his plate of food, and who “put a yoke on Sunil’s shoulders or tied it around her waist, making her drag the plow” through his fields when she was a child. Across the novella, Jungeun does not bother with developing compelling backstories or inner emotional lives for any of these men. The flattening of Mansu, Wonsang, and Grandfather’s complexities feels intentional, political. The omniscient narrator does not deign to enter into men’s thoughts or to explore men’s pasts; Years and Years maintains a ruthless, single-minded focus on women’s stories. While Mansu, as Sunil’s only son, might be the legal inheritor of his mother’s land in Galgol, his sisters Sejin and Yeongjin hold an exclusive monopoly over emotional depth in the story’s pages.

Part of Jungeun’s impetus for writing the book, as she reveals in an afterword, came from a real-life conversation she had with a woman named Sunja. Born in 1946, Sunja survived the Korean War by fleeing from her home to the south of the country, a displacement that deeply scarred her. When recounting her story to Jungeun, Sunja’s narrative had come out disjointed. “The object of her sentence often disappeared,” Jungeun remembers, “the time and place became jumbled, and her sentences rarely went on for more than five words. Each time, she would gasp out a few words, suddenly stop, then stare at me.” In the section of Years and Years corresponding to Sunil, Jungeun attempts to replicate Sunja’s way of speaking, her fragmented language. For just over a page and a half, the omniscient third-person narrator cedes authority to Sunil, as she flashes back to time spent with her friend Sunja:

Sunja lived next door she was my friend

She went to a girls high school in Yeongeungpo but somehow we got to know each other we were close

If I went to her house because I wanted a little break

my uncle would come after me and ask why I kept going over there did they feed me or give me things he would cause such a scene

so her ma said don’t come around here anymore

I never got enough food enough sleep enough clothes

I can’t take it anymore I need to get out of here do you know a place I could go

The writing here is at its most raw. Sunil’s emotions rush out, unhampered by grammar, linearity, or social norms. It is electric to stumble momentarily into Sunil’s frantic first-person flashback; it is disappointing when Sunil is snapped out of her reverie, and the withdrawn, polished narrator takes over the story once again. Encountering Sunil’s flare of wild words is like the times in Han Kang’s Greek Lessons (in Emily Yae Won and Deborah Smith’s translation), when the narrative reveals the cold, vivid language that throbs in the dreams of a woman who has become mute. “Words would thrust their way into her dreams like skewers,” the narrator says, words from a terrifyingly “self-sufficient language.” In both cases, a woman’s silence momentarily gives way to an inner, roiling mass of words.

Hong, the translator of Years and Years, has said that she tends to translate work that is “quite dark,” since “these types of stories often feature imperfect people or the neglected and marginalized, and [she wants] to help give voice to these types of characters, rather than to those with privilege and power.” In this novella, that element of darkness does not show up as the rape and murder of a schoolgirl against the backdrop of a polluted, industrial city (as in the titular story of Hong’s translation of Kang Young-sook’s At Night He Lifts Weights), or as the investigation of the 2002 homicide of a high schooler (as in Hong’s translation of Kwan Yeo-sun’s Lemon), but is rather of the boiling-frogs variety: Jungeun’s characters are slowly driven desolate by their own unexpressed emotions and memories. The darkness accumulates, over years and years.

In One Hundred Shadows (translated by Jung Yewon), Jungeun depicts an urban “slum” in a contemporary South Korean city, a space slated for demolition. There, the narrator Eungyo encounters the phenomenon of shadows that “rise up,” symptoms of social malaise and government repression. That novella is ostensibly all about darkness—“shadows” appear in the title—but levity and hope for the future shine through its final pages, as Eungyo unexpectedly finds romance in Mujae, a young man who also works as an apprentice in a transformer workshop. There is a tender moment towards the end of the book in which Eungyo and Mujae walk away from a risen shadow into the dark night, holding hands. No such hopeful scene occurs in Years and Years, however. As the omniscient narrator declares, any hope of “romance and reconciliation is dashed” by the story’s end.

If anything, Years and Years is remarkable for its pessimism. Sejin and Yeongjin seem to be aware of the pitfalls of their mother’s refusal to speak of her past, or about her true emotions, but they ultimately do the same themselves. The three women take silence as a given, assuming that speaking would only lead to more harm. Sunil thinks that “some things can never be forgiven.”

What if, though, the unspeakable was spoken? Could there be forgiveness for those who dare to ask for it? In this surprisingly bleak novella, such questions are never asked aloud.

Anna Learn is a PhD student at the University of Washington, where she studies Persian, South Asian, and Hispanic literature. You can find her work on her website.