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When refreshing the last three chapters to prepare the session next week, I still like the book very much.
It connects. The life in Seoul doesn't look very far away, now and then the details echo: Yes, the bleaching big city view, the pathetic street flowers in early spring, cicadas in summer heat. The familiar east Asian stressful life style. So in 1994, they had a school vacation for the heat wave, we didn't. And I remembered the heat.
It feels peaceful while reading. The pain is familiar, but the talent, the rational conversation, the thinking for a meaningful life, in a realistic social injustice, is not often seen in a novel. It feels good even after translation. Even the Korean names in English are not a blocker, though they are difficult to pronounce and meaningless, I constantly tried to map it back into Korean names in Chinese characters.
The weekend I started to read it, I finished it all.
I recommended it to Xiao Cai, a few weeks later she replied: I can understand the sadness, the frustration, which somehow helps to understand my son generation. But I can't agree. The thing is, sad people tend to write, those who really does things don't. It is an unfortunately bias: the down tones are louder.
I thought about it. That makes a point.
But when read the last three chapters again. I still love this book. It is not all about sadness. It's about struggling, about facing it, about love and hope. It's "true and real".
Just like Chloé Zhao said about Hamnet: the vulnerability we shared connects.
The year when Han Kang won Nobel prize, book reviews on her works look heavy. It set a bit the background for reading this book. At least a rough impression of big history events is ready. The sheer gravity of reality in Han Kang's stops me to read them. Not in these heavy years. This, on the contrary, is a small soft book, also about what happens there, what they think now. It comforts to see people seriously trying hard to improve things even impossible to change. Even the small, indecisive efforts from ordinary nobody, is admirable.
Yes, this is a story about ordinary people, not so successful. But, an unsuccessful life is still a true decent life, still has a stage of its own. And, the ending is warm.
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