Word: hwang
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Thomas J. Hwang ’13, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall...
...Take the first section, which comprises 13 brief stories written while Hwang was a student in Tokyo, and first published as a single book, Hwang Sun Won Tanpyonjip (literally, "Hwang Sun Won Story Collection"), in Korea in 1940. In it there are upheavals of every kind: spiritual, geological, corporeal, romantic, ethical, political. An earthquake rocks the Japanese capital, while beggars shiver in the cold. Anticipatory lovers throb with desire in the shadowed alleyways of "Trumpet Shells." In "The Offering," a young boy who kills an old red rooster for no good reason is wracked by guilt and fevers. In "Scarecrow...
Taesop, the backwater math tutor at the center of Hwang Sun Won's Lolita-like tale "The Pond," heaves a deep shudder upon realizing that an ample-bosomed pupil has played him for a fool, using her coquetry to make him unwittingly party to her elopement with a much hipper philosophy student in Seoul. It's a pathetic moment, both embarrassing and revolting to witness, but not hard to imagine. It's also just the first of many convulsions that course through Lost Souls, a compilation of three early collections of stories Hwang - a highly influential Korean writer, who died...
...Originally published as The Dog of Crossover Village in 1948, the second grouping (of seven stories) describes a ghastly ethical vacuum in the wake of World War II, infested with craven church elders, black marketeers and property speculators, which Hwang, who himself crossed over with his family from Pyongyang to Seoul in 1946, knew first-hand. "What a wretched state it was, with Koreans trying to swallow each other up," he writes in "Booze," venting authorial indignation, as he often does, in the guise of one of his characters. In this case, it's through the thoughts of an upright...
...That Hwang can rotate a small roster of stock characters - swarthy, oppressed sharecroppers, damsels in distress, prodigal sons - throughout the stories yet keep them fresh is a sign of his mastery. The title story of Lost Souls is a timeless romance hinged on filial impiety. From the book's less topical third section, written just after the Korean War's end, it's reminiscent of the classic tale of Chunhyang, often likened to a Korean Juliet, that's still a pansori and cinema standard. (Im Kwon Taek's 2000 film version was a blockbuster.) But the ending of Hwang...