Lee Oi-soo on Love, Partings and Hanging In There

Even in later life, the late Korean writer Lee Oi-soo kept talking to readers much younger than himself. He adopted their slang eagerly and sometimes came up with expressions they would take up in turn.

People called him an eccentric, a description he used for himself on the talk show Knee-Drop Guru. He joked that aspiring artists in Korea are warned they will be cold and hungry. He had been writing for thirty years and had kept his wife and children fed. By his own measure, that was eccentric enough.

Lee Oi-soo’s Way of Loving

Lee could play the eccentric and still be in touch with a younger generation. Both sides come through in these short essays, collected in a book whose Korean title roughly means Love, the Side Stories.

It looked like something I could read in a quiet moment to clear my head.

That is how it felt to read, too. The essays grow out of incidents that might happen to anyone. I do not remember every one of them, but a particular phrase stayed with me.

“I Live by Hanging In There”

The phrase he returns to is jonbeo, an abbreviation of Korean slang for hanging the hell in there. It sounds unusually coarse coming from a writer of Lee’s standing. I think that was part of his charm.

If a word felt current and spoke to people, he would use it. A writer protective of literary language might wince at it. Lee listened to the language young people were using and made room for it on the page.

The essays can feel easy on a first reading. Trying to write one yourself is another matter. Lee had lived enough to be able to touch a heavy subject lightly.

The prose is plain and quietly moving. If it were a meal, it would be an earthy bowl of soybean-paste stew.

After putting the book down, I tried a few lines in the style I had just been reading.

• “Spring, summer, autumn and winter are all good seasons to fall in love. None is a good season to say goodbye. I have only lived a few decades and have said goodbye hundreds of times. To those who have left me, how are you? I am getting along.
• It is a quiet Saturday evening. I do not know when this will go up, but it will go up one day. Winter has been long, and spring finally seems to be on its way. I looked up and found the air had already warmed.
• A little bump has come up under my tongue. It stings every time I move it. All right, I get the message. Eat something good and get some rest.
• Winter goes without my telling it to. Spring comes without being called. Oh, it is already here.
• I know all this perfectly well, and still I grow impatient. I suppose I have some learning left to do.”

Book Information

Love, the Side Stories: Lee Oi-soo’s Way of Loving

Author

Lee Oi-soo

Publication date

October 30, 2012

ISBN-13

9788965743590

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