Shin Kyung-Sook’s “Violets”: Both Tender & Unflinching

Violets [2001/22] – ★★★★

There is a Chinese proverb that states “a child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark”. Acclaimed South Korean author Shin Kyung-Sook may agree with this statement, seeing that her sixth novel titled Violets (2001), translated from the Korean by Anton Hur in 2022, is all about a girl who is determined to overcome her traumatic childhood experiences while trying to find her calling in the buzzing capital of the country – Seoul. San is first introduced to us as a little girl born into a poverty-stricken family with one wayward father and not-so-very-responsible mother, and San’s only ray of sunshine seems to be another girl her age named Namae. It is the 1970s, and the two girls spend their time together, bonding over their respective families’ poverty and inadequacies, until one incident puts an unbridgeable distance between the girls. Then, we follow San, who is already aged twenty-two, as she seeks a job in Seoul, presumably in the 1980s, and, after unsuccessful applications to various publishing houses, lands the job of a flower seller.

It is in this, at first unenviable, position of a “flower girl” that shy San starts discovering things about herself and others, first making a connection with the mute shop-keeper and then friends with strong-willed and bold co-worker Su-ae. However, what was planted in childhood is bound to shoot up in adolescence and adulthood. San may be attempting to find fulfilment in her new job and friendship with Su-ae, but her painful past, her persistent isolation and her growing inward despair, may just get the better of her. San’s uncertain condition and need for attachment culminate in her obsessive love for one magazine photographer and then in further trauma as her search for comfort and understanding leads to some thoughtless and erratic actions. Shin’s tender, dream-like narrative puts our heroine in juxtaposition to the elements of her brash immediate environment, including the misogynistic attitude towards women, the competitive job market of the 1980s’ Seoul and the lonely disillusionment of “big city” dreams. The message is clear – San represents those ordinary, anonymous women in society, whose pitiful circumstances and trauma were systematically shut down and ignored[1]. The novel in our hands ensures that their voices are heard and remembered.

The unflinching, bold nature of Shin Kyung-Sook’s novels is dictated by her own experience of living through “terrible political events”[2] when she was young and when people at political demonstrations in her country were detained and then “disappeared”. Violets is not political in a strict sense of this word, but it does sent out clear messages on the position of women and the plight of young people coming to big cities in search of jobs. In that vein, the novel could be said to fall somewhere between the author’s autobiographical novel The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, which tells the story of one girl who moves Seoul to work in a factory, but who actually dreams of the career of a novelist, and I’ll be Right There, a more political work which focuses on young activists who live in a country run by a military dictatorship. In Violets, there is the same dreamy “little girl” lost in a big world, but instead of the cruel militia patrolling the streets, we see greedy landlords, and immoral and licentious men eager to take advantage of the innocence, inexperience and solitude of poverty-driven girls who flock to big cities.

If Shin Kyung-Sook’s best-known novel, Please Look After Mother, was all about celebrating motherhood as it sent out its message of cherishing mothers while they are still with us, in Violets, Shin presents a more disturbing, but no less realistic, portrayal of motherhood and, this time, one filled with rejection, abandonment and guilt. Can one really escape one’s traumatic childhood? What about the rejection and abandonment by one’s own mother, or the “unfair” spurning by one’s best friend? We are told in the story that “[memory] is an unannounced visitor. It lies crumbled in some corner of the body, then suddenly knocks on the door of reality and makes you scream”, and while San may make us believe that her uneasy relationship with her mother is behind her, this is far from clear. San reads letters from her estranged mother, but her real thoughts on the issue remain hidden. Like in real life, where we do not see into people’s thoughts and hidden traumas, but only see the consequences of them, San also hides herself from us, and we can only guess the true weight and extent of her buried mental burden at the end, when all perceived aid alternatives have failed.

And, just as in Please Look After Mother Shin Kyung-Sook emphasised showing compassion and understanding for a person some people may take for granted – their mother, in Violets, Shin’s aim is directed towards demonstrating sympathy for another seemingly insignificant and “small” individual of society – that ordinary girl at one’s local store who tries hard to fit in, find meaningful connections in her life and make ends meet. And, just as the mother in Please Look After Mother, San is also irreversibly “lost” in Violets, but Shin’s thesis of the irreparability of the damage and common responsibility seem even more pronounced in Violets as San’s fate is left hanging in the balance and on the conscience of every person she has ever met.

Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman is an obvious comparison book now because of its emphasis on valuing individual differences, female autonomy and decrying the societal prejudice against women, but Violets is more than a statement against the misogyny and in support of those “unheard” voices. In a few pages, Shin Kyung-Sook manages to weave into her narrative all the joys and uncomfortable memories of childhood, symbolically represented by the minari field in the story, as well as the pains of first obsessive and unrequited love, represented by those “damn violets” in the tale. In the story, San not only longs to make new meaningful connections, but also to recover the ones she lost, but still holds dear. In that way, San makes her way back to the village of her childhood, looking for her friend Namae, a trip “down the memory lane” that would prove fruitless, again. And, just as caring for plants makes San forget her worries (“the green shine of her charges helps her forget her regrets, or gently buries clumps of memories she’s rather not untangle”), her sudden obsession for one photographer also forms part of her copying mechanism to escape her past trauma and persistent loneliness (“desire for this man would wake her up in the middle of the night, washing away her childhood feelings of loss and abandonment”). It is San’s clinging to this unreachable ideal that makes her feel powerful and part of something special. San’s illusion does not last, but, as it turns out, neither does her current reality.

Shin Kyung-Sook’s gentle narrative throughout the book makes her almost-too-violent finale feel even more intense. One “symbolic attack” followed by a heart-breaking denouement transports the story from the realms of leisured passivity into sheer poignancy and quiet heroism. However, despite the plot being full of memorable imagery, it is still Shin’s writing that stands out, that delicate touch that the author puts on topics that usually elicit clear, one-sided reactions from the readers, such as childhood, friendship and loss, as Shin quietly makes the small feel “big” again and whatever pain felt is soon washed away in a dream-like recall, drowned in an assortment of flowers and feelings.

💐 Violets in the story are linked to such words as “violence” and “violator”, being close together in an English dictionary, but the common meanings of the flower are said be “innocence”, “everlasting love”, “modesty”, “spiritual wisdom”, “faithfulness”, and “remembrance”. It is the first and the last words on this list – “innocence” and “remembrance” – that Shin might have been trying to imprint in the minds of her readers. Her book is a story of a girl on a mission to make something out of the perceived insignificance and meagreness of her everyday existence, and in spite of the unenviable fate that life dealt to her, and finding that society would only go so far to help, and that its prejudice and unconcern would only hasten the expected downfall. The title of the novel may be “Violets”, but reading the novel is akin to blindly spreading one’s hands towards a bouquet of roses – there will be plenty of tenderness found, as well as the aura of life, youth and promise, but as one’s hands touch the green leaves and flowers, the thorns will also draw blood. The painful memories, brutal reality, and societal indifference will not go away, but at least Shin Kyung-Sook offers a glimmer of hope by way of acknowledging and giving voice to those hurt and unable to reach out.

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[1] Shin Kyung-Sook, Violets, Afterword (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022), 211

[2] Kyung-Sook Shin: ‘In my 20s I lived through an era of terrible political events and suspicious deaths’ | Fiction | The Guardian