2024-05-11 05:00:52
BarcelonaHaesu Im, a middle-aged therapist, dedicates herself to writing letters full of sorrow and reproaches to all those who helped to bring her down, but she never manages to finish them. Then he leaves the house and shreds them before throwing them in the trash. This woman’s stagnant life begins to change the day she decides to feed a stray cat, and this action will allow her to meet a nine-year-old girl, Sei Hwang, with whom they will become friends. This is the starting point of I’m all ears, Kim Hye-jin‘s second novel (Daegu, 1983), which can be read in Spanish thanks to the translation by Irma Zyanya Gil Yáñez and Minjeong Jeong for the publishing house Las Afueras. Like contemporaries such as Cho Nam-joo and Kim Ae-ran, Kim Hye-Jin analyzes the effects of economic neoliberalism and extreme individualism in South Korean society today.
I’m all ears is his most recent novel, but he began publishing more than a decade ago. Were the beginnings difficult?
— In Korea, if you’re a writer it means you’re poor. Devoting yourself to literature is no business. My parents tried to get me to do something else, such as teaching at a school or applying to be a civil servant. They didn’t get away with it, because since I was little I didn’t stop writing stories and novels, and then I studied literature and won a literary prize with my first long story, Chicken run.
In 2014 he made his debut as a novelist with Central Station. It explained a love relationship between a man and a woman on the fringes of society. Ever since then it seems like exploring the fringes has been a regular feature in your fiction, don’t you agree?
– Yes. I have a penchant for people who live on the fringes of society. The center does not interest me. In the case of Central Station the origin was the story told to me by a friend of mine who volunteered to help the homeless who lived – and still live – near this station in Seoul. Since then I accompanied her many times, and it was there that I began to wonder what it must have been like to live on the streets.
A about my daughter (Las Afueras, 2022), the protagonist is a woman who works in a residence for the elderly who has to take in her daughter. Although she is a university professor, the young woman cannot pay the rent.
— This novel was born out of my growing concern for old age. In South Korea, families have been shrinking: in the past, up to three generations lived in the same house, but now one in three people live alone. It is clear that when we grow up we will end up in nursing homes. I would like to find an alternative to this fate.
Did the novel want to be a wake-up call about the dangers of loneliness based on the conflicting relationship between mother and daughter? There is a passage where he writes: “This girl, born of me, blood of my blood, is perhaps the person I feel most distant.”
— There is a cliché that I was interested in exploring: they say that the relationship between a mother and a daughter is not the same as between a mother and a son. I have no answer as to the truth of this statement, but sometimes a mother thinks she knows her daughter best and she is wrong.
I have a predilection for people who live on the fringes of society”
To the characters of about my daughter i I’m all ears they find it hard to find people to help them. It paints a very individualistic society, don’t you agree?
— Any person can have many different problems. It is normal to believe that others will help you. However, ultimately it is ourselves who will have to overcome the problems we have. The mother of about my daughter she feels disappointed in her daughter and even allows herself to hate her. Until he finds a way to accept the girl he won’t leave. To the protagonist of I’m all ears a similar thing happens to her: she has received many attacks from the outside and drags a deep wound inside that only she can heal.
The attacks that Haesu Im has received have to do with statements she made on TV about a famous actor. Shortly after, the actor commits suicide and articles begin to appear against her and defame her through social networks. Was it inspired by a real case?
— I didn’t need it. In South Korea, the culture of cancellation is powerful. There is a lot of lynching through social media. People are too quick to judge the information that is circulating, without verifying whether it is authentic.
Haesu Im loses everything because of this lynching: her job, her partner and her friends. They even forbid him to enter a restaurant where he often dined for fear of bringing the business into disrepute with his presence.
— If you are lynched on social networks, they can end your life or they can make you reborn. The novel begins at the lowest point in Haesu Im’s life. Dealing with a crisis like this is tough, but if you’re lucky, you’ll grow personally.
It is ironic that she is a therapist, used to solving other people’s problems, who must face her own misfortune.
— She, who should distinguish herself to listen to others, has spoken more about the account. The learning process that the novel explains has to do with stopping saying what you think and starting listening.
When she sees that helpless and sick cat she needs to save him because, deep down, saving him is like saving herself.”
Haesu Im feels sorry for a stray cat that some neighbors hate and starts feeding it.
— When she sees that helpless and sick cat she needs to save him because, deep down, saving him is like saving herself.
Thanks to this kind action, she makes several friends, including a nine-year-old girl.
— Sometimes it’s the unexpected relationships that can save our lives. I wouldn’t say that there is friendship between the two of them.
Sei Hwang also secretly suffers from being mistreated by some of her classmates.
— Even if we protect ourselves with the strongest armor, problems often arise from within us.
The context sometimes makes it more difficult for us. The neighborhood of Seoul where Haesu Im has been installed is in the process of gentrification.
— He seems to have been unlucky in this too. When he buys the house he lives in, he is told that the whole neighborhood will soon be rebuilt. But it doesn’t happen like that: they renovate the houses on the sidewalk in front, but not theirs. A lot is happening in Seoul, this. They start to build, but there is not enough money to go as far as they would like.
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