The best short story I've ever read

While I've been blogging through the short stories from Pushcart, I've also been taking time to do a side project I've wanted to do for a while. Sixteen years ago, when I was getting ready to start my job as a translator, I was looking for something to work on to improve my Korean with. Rather randomly, I picked up the Korean version of the year's best short story collection for 2003. One of the stories in it, "A Wildflower Seed" (들꽃 씨앗 하나) by Yi Chong-jun (이청준), has stayed with me ever since. Over the years, I lost the book that story was in, and I was having a hard time remembering what the series was called so I could get a replacement, but I finally figured it out and have spent the last week re-reading the story. When I started, I was thinking I'd like to translate it in the hopes of sharing it with the world. But there are a lot of reasons that might not work out. Yi died in 2008, and I really have no idea how to get a hold of his family to ask for permission to publish his work in translation. I've never done a literary translation before, so I have no idea how that world works. I intend to try, because it's my favorite story ever and it deserves a wider audience, but since it's unlikely to work out, I here present a synopsis and a brief analysis of why it's my favorite story.

It's a pretty simple story, although rather long, sort of in that no-man's land between a long short story and a short novella. Jin-yong comes from a poor country town. And when I say poor, I mean really poor. This story takes place in South Korea in the years right after the Korean War, when Korea was poorer than India and devastated by three years of conflict. Jin-yong's father was a casualty of that war, and Jin-yong lives with his mother and younger sister. In order to lift his family from poverty, Jin-yong heads off to the big city ("K City, which I assume is Kwangju") as soon as he graduates from elementary school. He does odd jobs and studies at a private academy to pass middle school. The plan was that he would do this for three years and then take a job in his hometown as either a school teacher or a civil servant. But as he gets near the end of middle school, the rules change. The job he wants now requires a high school diploma.

Jin-yong takes the entrance exam and passes with flying colors, but he has no money to attend high school. (Since high school is not mandatory at this time, it seems the only school available charges tuition.) A teacher at the middle school offers to help Jin-yong out. He knows the administrator of the high school. He thinks he can either get Jin-yong a scholarship or a payment plan. But Jin-yong needs to go back to his little village and pick up a tax form showing that his family is poor and return with it by Saturday at 3 P.M. Jin-yong learns of this on Thursday. Without the form, there is no high school and no eventual job that will get his family out of poverty.

South Jeolla Province, 1950s. 

He takes the earliest bus on Friday morning. There should be time to get down to his hometown, get the document, and return to Kwangju that same day, leaving plenty of time to have everything set up for high school. He desperately wants to see his family while he is back home, but he doesn't think it will be the responsible thing to do, given his time crunch, and he intends to go down and back without stopping at home.

Fate has it in for Jin-yong. The bus breaks down, causing a delay of hours. The delay is longer when a woman on the bus realizes her money has been stolen, and she forces everyone to help her try to find the thief. Ji-yong arrives at City Hall too late to get the document that day. He tries to see the bright side, figuring at least he'll be able to see his family, and maybe he can still get the document in the morning and make it back to Kwangju on time. But his mother and sister are both away. He learns from an uncle that they have gone to find work. The uncle helps Jin-yong by making him a new stamp, which Jin-yong will need to obtain his paperwork. At the crack of dawn, Jin-yong rises, gets his document, and gets on the bus back.

But now there is snow. The authorities have shut down the road leading through Wolchu Mountain. It looks like Jin-yong is not going to make it. The bus driver hears his story, and within an hour, the bus is suddenly allowed to pass, because they are carrying an important military officer to a meeting in Kwangju that he must attend. It's not clear if the bus driver and this officer have come up with this plan to help Jin-yong or if the officer really had a meeting, but I suspect the former. The bus makes it, with great difficulty, through the mountain, but Jin-yong gets back to Kwangju too late. His teacher, who promised to wait until two before going to the high school, isn't at the middle school anymore. Jin-yong runs to the high school, but everyone has gone, and a guard tells Jin-yong he missed the deadline to apply. So all of Jin-yong's desperate efforts, as well as the efforts of everyone who tried to help him, come to naught.

One of the most uplifting things I've ever read. No, really. 

What I've just described sounds like a really depressing art house film. But it's not. In his short analysis of "A Wildflower Seed" within that 2003 anthology, Lee Dong Hwa called it a "failure story," which, one would assume, is the opposite of a "success story." As Lee put it, the hero had an objective--get the document back by three on Saturday, meet the next step in your plan to lift your family out of poverty--and he failed. In the hands of another writer, this would have been a critique of capitalism or society. The message would have been: Look! This person did everything to try to lift himself up by his boot straps, and it didn't work out! The dreams of capitalism are all lies! But that's not what this story is about.

Lee Dong Hwa listed three reasons why this story is actually more hopeful than depressing, calling his essay on the story "Hope Stronger than Fate." I also have three reasons why I love this story, and while the Venn Diagram between my reasons and Lee's overlap a bit, I'll present mine without referring to his.

1. Jin-yong might not succeed, but by God you want him to. 

In creating Jin-yong, Yi gave us something rare: a flat-arc character who is good from beginning to end but also totally believable. Just to have written a character the reader can feel so unashamed to root for and so terrible to see fail is a noteworthy accomplishment.

2. Jin-yong owns his own destiny

The funny thing about Jin-yong is that at the story's end, he isn't blaming others or blaming fate. He blames himself. This is, on one level, ridiculous. He is taking on responsibilities nobody would expect someone his age to have to take on. He did everything he could to get the document back on time. He just had rotten luck. But that's not how he sees it:

But when he thought about it, this wasn't something anyone else should feel bitter or sad about. Others had done nothing but help him out. In the end, what had made things not work out was that he, of his own fault, did not meet the timetable. He felt only shame and sorrow. He felt guilt about his teacher, his uncle, the workers at city hall, the bus driver, even this guard at the school. He felt shame in front of all of them. But more than anything, he felt shame and sorrow about his mother and sister, waiting with their hearts in their stomachs for him to return home in glory. 

Sounds harsh, yes? I was crushed when I read that. I thought, what a terrible story. But I kept ruminating on it for days afterwards. There's something noble about that way of looking at things. By reserving blame for himself and feeling only gratitude toward the many people who tried in vain to help him, Jin-yong maximizes his own agency. He refuses to give in to fate, to say he got bested by circumstances beyond his control. If it's his fault, that means he can do better next time and turn failure into success.

There's always a dangerous balancing act with this kind of story. Blame the individual too much, and society gets off the hook for creating conditions nobody should have to overcome. Blame society too much, and the individual escapes responsibility for his own actions. Jin-yong decides it's better to err on the side of blaming himself, because this is the only way he can feel control of a life where fate seems at war with him. He may have lost the battle, but a reader can leave the story with a sense that he might still somehow, however improbably, win the war. He certainly won't win the war if he allows himself to dwell on how fate cheated him. Even if he does not manage to win the war, his failure is one of the noblest things I can imagine.

I've thought about this story virtually every time I've faced any kind of adversity since I first read it. Not that I would dare compare myself to the many real people who have faced lives like Jin-yong's, but I do think that I, as a first-worlder, have a lot to learn from people like Jin-yong. We focus a lot on the impact of society on the individual in the first world, which sometimes makes us lose our drive to overcome that impact. I love this story for the way it restores my drive.

3. As much as it focuses on individual responsibility, it is very much about how we are all bound together.

People help Jin-yong along the way. His teacher, the old men at city hall who arrange to get him on the road quickly, the bus driver, his uncle. And the great thing about Jin-yong is that he notices these things. On the first morning of his trip, when the bus first starts to have problems, the driver and his on-board young mechanic work together to nurse the bus onward. Jin-yong thinks that, "Compared to himself, sitting with nothing useful to do but wait, he felt sorry for the driver and his helper who kept working hard in the cold. And he felt nothing but gratitude for their hard work, which would enable him to take care of his work that day."

Jin-yong repeats this gratitude over and over. It's one of the reasons he's so easy to root for. He comes from a culture that understands the bonds that tie people to one another. He find it easy to empathize with others. Even when the woman delays him further by crying over her stolen money, he feels sorry for her and her family who will have to live without the money. Jin-yong's entire motivation for pulling himself up by his bootstraps is to take care of his family, not to be rich himself.

There are some incredibly touching moments of kindness Jin-yong receives, much of it from grumbling old men who pretend to be much put out by Jin-yong's impertinence and impatience.

Much as Jin-yong's self-blame allows him to maintain a feeling of control over his destiny, the care others show to Jin-yong allows the story to both reflect the real troubles in society but also to demonstrate that love and kindness are at work as well, and can do much to help overcome those troubles.

Reviews of stories abuse the word "beautiful." This is one of the few stories I've ever read I would call beautiful. The wildflower never actually makes an appearance in the story, but if I had to guess what the meaning of the title is, I'd say it has to do with how the beauty of something can lay hidden in the ground for a long time before it is evident. South Korea's strong social ties and the belief of Korean individuals that they controlled their own fate allowed the country to turn from a devastated country to the powerhouse it is today almost overnight.

I've thought about this story more than any short story I've ever read. I'd love a chance to translate it for real so I can spend more time thinking about it.