Word vomit on Han Kang’s short story, The Fruit of My Woman, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith.
“Mother, I keep having the same dream. I dream that I’m growing tall as a poplar tree.” —an unnamed housewife in a breaking marriage in a contemporary South Korean high-rise overlooking the main eastern road.
She has bruises all over, first pale blue “the size of a newborn’s fist,” then yellowish green, then dark green, “the dull colour of a weeping willow’s branches.” Then she’s orange. And finally, opaque tree-trunk brown.
“How did you get those?” —a husband who can’t remember the last time he saw his wife naked.
She takes her clothes off, at his request. He wants to see these mysterious bruises, bruises she says do not hurt.
“Go to the hospital,” he says. Not let’s go, just…go. The doctor has no answer.
The husband remembers she once had dreams of new blood in her veins, dreams of seeing “the very edge of the world. To get as far away as possible, bit by bit.” The whole thing “an unrealistic, romantic delusion…no more feasible than those a child might concoct.”
She doesn’t. She stays. She pours her little money into a flat she doesn’t like, into a wedding. He gets pompous, feels proud knowing it must have been him that prompted this change of heart, this “belated realisation.”
After they’d married, he put flowerpots out on the balcony, but nothing lived. Some said the couple “lacked the good faith necessary to tend living things.” Husband says that’s not true. My wife cared for them deeply. A withering plant would “plunge her into depression for half a day.”
The plants don’t make it.
“It’s impossible to live in this stifling place,” she tells him. “Let’s go somewhere far away, the two of us.” She wants sun, she wants air—clean air. She wants fewer people, quieter sounds or perhaps no sound at all.
Husband doesn’t like this, says he can’t stand it, can’t take “these sharp little jabs” shattering his new-found happiness—or his wife’s “long-suppressed misery drawing out of her wasted body.” Can’t you see I’m happy, hush now.
“I keep wanting to go outside,” she tells him. “And as soon as I do . . . as soon as I see the sunlight, in fact, I get the urge to take my clothes off. It’s as though my body wants them off.” Husband, something is happening and I don’t know what or why, are you listening.
Husband’s reaction, summed up: K.
Later, husband returns from yet another business trip, and panics when he can’t find her. His first impulse is worry, then a pang of loneliness. Loneliness to rage.
“I’ve been lonely my whole life,” he blurted out when he first met her, a product of alcohol and a “momentary conviction” that she understood him. She would be the anodyne to his desolation, he must have thought. But the loneliness never did subside.
A feeble voice comes from the balcony. Dark green limbs, a face “like a glossy evergreen leaf.” His wife, now toothless, begs. “…water.” (Gasp)
My favorite part of this short story begins now. Part 7.
Knowing that soon these hands will grow into fingerless branches, she’s writing a final letter to mother.
She admits she feared having the life her mother had—the poverty, this fishing village. At 17, she leaves home for the urban districts of Busan, Daegu, Gangneung.
“I was unhappy at home and equally unhappy elsewhere, so tell me, where should I have gone?” This hit me; you’ll see why.
“He bought a huge flowerpot and planted me in it,” she writes. He climbs mountains to fetch mineral water for her legs. He remembers she doesn’t like tap.
But it’s getting cold now.
“I’m scared, mother.”
His wife bears fruit on the balcony one day—tiny fruits, their rinds “entirely devoid of taste or smell,” says husband.
The next day, he goes to the store; he lines flowerpots near his withered wife, plants her fruits in them and wonders, “Would my wife sprout again?”
—
This short story is a precursor to Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which won the Man Booker Prize for International Literature in 2016. It’s free to read online at Granta.
I am completely new to Han Kang and have little insight on any translation controversy, though I realize such controversy exists. After watching Parasite, I was just craving more Korean art exploring the country’s rapid industrialization, its class conflicts, how Korean gender roles—the domesticity of women in particular—are playing out, have played out, how they’re keeping up with the overwhelming shift toward urban life, toward conformity and “ecoambiguity,” as Smith mentions in her translator’s note. This story has it all. A childless couple, a sterile high-rise, traditional gender roles, a yearning for money and success for him and a wife who realizes that she has never been happy, that she’s feeling stifled, that she needs air, she needs to breathe, she needs sun and she dreams often of becoming a poplar tree and this is how she will escape.
Note that she had wanted to escape at 17, too. And she did. She left her mother’s fishing village for those dazzling urban lights, failing to find the happiness she sought. This stuck with me. Is happiness a sense of belonging? “I was unhappy at home and equally unhappy elsewhere,” she says. Perhaps nowhere felt right; you come from one world and end up in another—it’s the migrant story. She says she’s only ever wanted to run away; she had dreams of seeing “the very edge of the world.” Was this, again, because nowhere felt right? Fight or flight, choose flight.
I have felt this my entire life. I have made my parents promise to make me a tree when I die. It is only my belated affection for trees, for roots, that I’ve been able to find grounding, to begin believing that perhaps I belong to this Earth alone and perhaps this is enough. I’ve realized it’s more than enough. It was a book and a dog that did this for me, plunged me into the outdoors when I wanted to be anything but alive in places nowhere wanted people like me to exist.
The end, too, is especially poetic. His wife’s transformation, does it make him a better man? Is her liberation, her escape through the roof, is this good for him? He’s grown kind in ways we never saw in chapters prior.
“I told her I’d had a dream where the balcony was crowded with large flowerpots, each of them filled with green lettuces and perilla,” he told her when they first met, soon after he drunkenly admitted he’d been lonely his whole life. “In summer, tiny flowers would unfurl on the perilla plants like drops of snow. And there would be bean sprouts growing in the kitchen.”
She laughed.
“Trying to cling on to the trailing end of that innocent, fragile laugh, I said the words again: ‘I’ve been lonely my whole life.’”
—fiza
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