The Dwarf

"The early 1970s—more than halfway through the Park Chung Hee dictatorship —was a time when a writer could get in trouble for criticising the military dictatorship and restrictions on civil liberties. Several notable Korean poets and fiction writers served time in jail during the Park Chung Hee era in the 1960s and 1970s. Cho Sehǔi had something very important that he wanted to talk about, the ‘little people’ who made possible Korea’s rapid journey from poverty. You have to remember that it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that South Korea’s economy caught up with the North Korean economy. He wanted to showcase the factory workers, male and female, who helped this monumental change in South Korea. “It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that South Korea’s economy caught up with the North Korean economy” He wanted these stories, which he gathered into a book, to be read by the widest possible readership. And to stay out of jail, he adopted a very terse, concise, syntactically simple writing style. Anyone with a middle school education could read this book. But as you might expect, it’s heavily overlaid with irony. The committed reader will find something of interest. So it’s not just about the workers, those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s also about the people at the very top, the people who own these conglomerates in a variety of industries—tech, textiles, and so forth. Also playing a prominent role in these twelve or thirteen stories is the emerging middle class, which we see identified with some of the first generation of consumer goods. Like most writers, Cho Sehǔi is careful in the words he uses. Presumably his focus on the dwarf represents disproportionate development. If he’s talking about the Korean economy—and most of us agree that this was his goal— Cho Sehǔi is asking us to think about the course of its development, which was distorted during this time. He first published these stories in literary journals, from 1976 to 1978. Then in 1978 he went to perhaps the most prestigious publisher of literary fiction in South Korea at the time, and the book went through more than a hundred printings. Practically everybody who went to school in South Korea has read this book, or at least knows of it. He wanted readers to understand what made possible the South Korean ‘economic miracle,’ a phrase often heard when Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics in 1988. So we see some of the stories describing the working conditions of the factories in explicit detail. It reminds me of my mother—she grew up in the years leading up to World War Two and worked for the Boeing aeroplane manufacturing company during the war. In order to navigate the huge buildings in which these planes were built, she and the other women workers had to wear roller skates. Cho Sehǔi adds these sorts of telling details that give readers a sense of exactly the responsibilities that these factory workers had. In a couple of the stories involving this emerging middle class, we see Shinae, a mother, protecting the dwarf as he’s being beaten by a man who owns a plumbing shop. Shinae comes out with a kitchen knife and slashes the thug across the arm. These examples of cross-class solidarity occur so infrequently that I think this is one of the most triumphant moments in modern Korean fiction. When we translated this novel, we felt it was the most important single-volume work of literary fiction in modern Korea."