The second of fifteen stories in the Bilingual Edition of Modern Korean Literature collection is “Happy New Year to Everyone- To Raymond Carver,” penned by writer Kim Yeon-su.

The story evolves as the narrator, told in the first person, watches the friendship grow between his wife and Satbir Singh, an immigrant worker from Punjab, India.

The wife teaches Korean to immigrant workers at an institute where the Indian worker studies. They become close, despite the language barrier. She speaks English while the Indian guy speaks still unpolished Korean.

One day, the narrator has the Indian worker tune his old, heavy piano at home. While seeing the man working on the piano, the narrator gets curious about how his wife and the guy have become friends. He underestimates their friendship, thinking he's just a guy who lives in a makeshift container, and thinks, “How on earth could such an immigrant dude, who came to Korea to earn money, become friends with my wife? I can't believe this at all.”

The narrator believes that they’ll never be able to share the deep things from inside their minds, due to their poor language skills. However, he's totally wrong. He soon realizes that they really do communicate well and that the wife even confesses her loneliness to the other man.

It turns out that both of them have gotten to know each other through various means of communication, despite their chosen languages being a bit clumsy. The narrator realizes that there needs to be something more than just a means of communicating. In their relationship, there are two people who want to talk to each other and who are willing to listen to what the other says.

“When I talked to my wife, I sometimes felt that she might just need someone to listen to her without saying anything, whether the listener understands it or not. I think it has been the Indian guy to whom she has turned since last fall, as that man is always there to listen to her stories, even though he never understands, her hardships, dreams that she still has in her mind or even trivial things, such as which colors she likes and which books have impressed her the most. That’s why she calls him a ‘friend.’”

There is one scene where, on a wintry New Year's eve, the narrator waits for his wife with a, "Happy New Year,” lending itself to the title.

Seeing its cover, one can tell that the book has a subtitle, “To Raymond Carver.” When asked why, the writer said that, “I realized that the story sounded similar to a certain short story written by Raymond Carver, which I was translating at that time.”

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) is an American short-story writer and when Kim published his story, he was translating one of Carver’s works, “Cathedral.” Carver's short story has the same structure as Kim’s work, as it tells the story of a narrator, his wife and her old friend. In Carver’s story, the narrator feels isolated and feels some prejudice when his wife brings her old friend home.

In “Happy New Year to Everyone,” too, Kim tries to reveal how hard it can be to understand others, to grasp their pain and to communicate well with them.

“This work gives the clearest logic that there’s still hope for communication with others,” said literary critic Lee Gyeong-jae. “The story between the three main characters in this story -- the narrator, the wife and the Indian immigrant worker -- remains hopeful until the end, delivering the idea, though in a vague manner, that we can shake off prejudice against an ethnic group, long embedded in our minds, and can move on to create a new community through communicating and listening.”

Born in 1970 in Gimcheon, Gyeongsangbuk-do (North Gyeongsang Province), Kim Yeon-su graduated from Sungkyunkwan University with a degree in English literature. In 1993, Kim made his literary debut with a poem and the following year he was Writer’s World Rookie of the Year with his novel “I Wear a Mask.”

Some of his other works include full-length novels “Route 7” and “Night Sings,” and the collections of short stories “Twenty Years Old” and “When I Was Just A Child,” as well as the essays “Sentences of Youth” and “Right to Travel.”

By Sohn JiAe
Korea.net Staff Writer
jiae5853@korea.kr