I’m at a professor’s apartment petsitting for a couple of days while she attends a conference. Her place is so nice (and so clean, OMG, so clean) it makes me have fantasies of getting a job. I’m not sure if all assistant professors can afford such a nice place, though. It’s really nice to pretend like I have pets for a change.
I’m sifting through references for the second chapter. My draft of the first chapter still has to make the round of the committee, but my advisor suggested I start reading for the second chapter. Most likely, I’ll be revising the first chapter as I glean comments and questions from my readers and reading for the second chapter at the same time. I’m writing on Maxine Hong Kingston and Helena Maria Viramontes in the second chapter, and I’ve just started going over the critical stuff on Kingston. So many essays and books . . . I need to take a break.
Which makes my mind wander back to last night when I, after reading Inhoon Choi’s novel The Square (something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but have only just gotten around to), realized that I made the most embarrassing mistake a human being can possibly make. I mean, this is a novel I’m interested in. How can I make such a mistake? Basically what I did is I made a factual error in writing a conference paper proposal on The Square and another text. While I need to put in more work on the dissertation, I for some reason thought that I’d be able to write this essay that I want to write on two books I’m really interested in if I made myself write a conference paper to begin with. The conference was a pretty prestigious one, and my proposal didn’t make it in, which didn’t upset me. But the thing is I know one of the conference organizers who would probably have read my proposal and thought that I was the sleaziest reader in the history of mankind.
The protagonist of the novel, a Korean War POW, opts to be repatriated to a “third country” over either the South or the North. At the time of narration, the protagonist is on board the ship that is taking him and a bunch of other POWs to India. And I said he was on his way to Hong Kong. The ship stops by Hong Kong and Macao on its way to India. But Hong Kong instead of India! Next time I run into this conference organizer, if I ever do, I’m definitely going to duck.
Anyway, it’s interesting reading a Korean novel that I read probably sometime in high school again. It reads very differently. I don’t know why I’m suddenly developing an interest in Korean writers. There was this lady who worked with my mom a little bit a while ago whose husband (who recently passed, RIP) was a renowned literary critic (well-known enough that you’d know who he is if I mentioned the name). When I first met her in Seoul where she was visiting for a conference and which was right before I left to study abroad, she asked me why I didn’t do Korean literature. And I’m pretty sure she said it in a way that clearly conveyed her puzzlement as to why I would want a doctorate in English. I guess it didn’t quite enter her mind that her husband’s primary works were in English literature and not in American literature. They’re the same, right? The Anglo-American continuum.
She’s a nice lady, and I know that she was just puzzled and not judging. But it did make me think of why I’m not doing Korean literature. Frankly, I didn’t like twentieth-century Korean literature at the time. Depressing, depressing, depressing. The colonial period is about subjugation, exploitation, occasionally struggle for liberation; between Independence and the Korean War is about taut ideological battles; nation-reconstruction after the War is about the strenuous fight for democracy and for workers’ and citizens’ rights, about modernization which entails poor folks leaving the countryside and pouring into Seoul, about urban consumerism and those who get excluded from that. The impression I then had about Korean literature was that it was dark, gloomy, and full of hardship. Back then, I wanted none of it. Little did I know that I’d develop an interest in modern Korean literature as I got to understand what criticism meant. Better than never, I guess.
