There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun

Ch'oe Yun

Mei 2008 · Columbia University Press

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Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.

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Ch'oe Yun, in addition to being an award-winning author, is professor of French literature at S?gang University in Seoul, Korea, and has translated contemporary Korean fiction into French. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize for "The Gray Snowman" and the 1994 Yi Sang Literature Prize for "The Last of Hanak'o." Translations of her works can be found in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. Her writings have also been translated into French and Spanish.Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of the Korean women's anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer and cotranslators with Marshall R. Pihl of Land of Exile. They have also translated contemporary Korean novels such as Hwang Sun-won's Trees on a Slope and Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, cotranslator of A Ready-Made Life, coeditor of Modern Korean Fiction, feature editor of Seeing the Invisible, and associate editor for Korea of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.