Emerald Palace — The People Who Live Behind the Motel Sign

When winter comes, the tree lets go of the leaves it spent spring and summer growing. In a place with four distinct seasons, losing part of itself is how it gets through the cold. I find myself wondering what it would feel like to let those leaves go while they were still green.

I had that thought after reading Park Hyang’s Emerald Palace. Then I thought about a parent who has to leave a child to survive. I’ve never been put in that position. The novel made it possible to imagine enough of it to feel how little I would know what to do.

What the Guests Bring to the Motel

The people in Emerald Palace carry something the Korean word han can get at: sorrow or grievance that has had time to settle. The novel brings them together in and around a motel, at the edge of the respectable world other people think they live in.

Yeon-hui keeps the desk after running away with Sang-man, a married man, and losing her family and much of her earlier life. Gyeong-seok and Hye-mi arrive with an infant and stay. Seon-jeong sells sex, Su-ho is a guest who does not speak, and an older couple comes to be together away from the disapproval of their children. Jeong-ran runs a food stall nearby.

What Hope Looks Like from the Desk

For a time, the golden dome on the roof can still look like a promise that the motel will make them prosperous. The longer they stay, the harder it is to see the life they are waiting for.

Murder, abortion, departures and infidelity enter the story without making the place feel unreal. The events can belong to lives going on around us while we fail to see much of them.

People betray someone who has helped them because they see no other way to get out. Others stay and carry what cannot be resolved. Yeon-hui gives that feeling a voice.

• She is afraid of being left with nothing to do while everything falls apart in front of her. If she can only watch for long enough, she feels as though her entire life might slip away.

Reading those lives made me notice how much I take for granted in my own.

Even keeping a family together can require more from people than I understood when I was younger. I thought again about what that work cost my parents.

Room 317

Certain things seem to keep happening in room 317. Sang-man’s former wife comes there and stays with him for three days. It is also where she attempts to take her own life.

Su-ho spends time with a lover in the room, then later attempts to take his own life there. Why Park chose 317 stayed an open question for me. The number has the precision of something known without giving the reader a clear explanation.

How Did Park Make the Motel So Specific?

I kept wondering how Park could make the motel so particular that I felt I could find my way around it.

She also knows how to put a person in the doorway who looks as though they would really have arrived there.

It is hard to write a story that carries a recognisable piece of its time without making the people seem like examples in an argument.

That takes observation. Park makes the motel a place with corners and routines, then finds people whose different reasons for being there can coexist within it.

That is among the reasons the book seems deserving of the Segye Literature Award it received.

Book Information

Emerald Palace (Korean title, translated)

Author

Park Hyang

Publication date

21 March 2013

ISBN13

9788997962082

View the book on YES24

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