- Title: Simple Heart
- Author: Cho Haejin, translated by Jamie Chang
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Doubleday Canada
- Pages: 232
Simple Heart is a new, English translation of South Korean novelist Cho Haejin’s story about Nana, a woman whose earliest memory involves being rescued from train tracks in Seoul. Raised in France by her adoptive parents, in the present day she is pregnant and solo by choice. When Nana receives an invitation from a filmmaker in Seoul to create a documentary about her search for her biological mother, she accepts on a whim, and together they document an attempt to unravel the mystery of her origins.
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The prose of this slim book is elegant and cool, deceptively simple in matters of the heart while building toward an emotional ending. Cho delivers this by weaving together major themes of Korea’s past century in a braid going back in time. Amid the coffee shops and flower arrangements of today’s Seoul, Nana pieces together the past with filmmaker Seoyeong and Bokhee, an older woman who runs the restaurant below the filmmaker’s apartment, where Nana is staying. Bokhee’s true name is revealed midway in a significant turn in this slow-burn revisitation of a buried history.
The older woman is a living link to the past, propelling Nana down a different rabbit hole than the one she came to Korea to explore. A long legacy of war, dictatorship, public health and poverty underpin this story, as does the presence of the American military and its men.
Cho Haejin’s book is part of a wider movement in South Korean feminist literature.Supplied
But make no mistake – women, and their life-giving actions despite an unforgiving world, are at the heart of this book. With this English translation, author Cho has contributed to a wave of South Korean feminist fiction finding audiences around the world. South Korea clings to a deeply patriarchal culture (and the biggest gender pay gap of all OECD countries), while its biggest literary international successes are fuelled by strong lead characters who are women, and their female authors, including Han Kang, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, and Cho Nam-Joo, author of the bestselling novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.
“That was the big literary event in Korea that opened the floodgate and laid groundwork for the development of feminist literature in Korea,” Halifax-based translator Jamie Chang says. She did the English translation of both Simple Heart and Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, which was originally published in Korean in 2016. “And because it had such a powerful impact,” she says of the latter, “there was a lot of backlash.”
For further context, the 2023 book, Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide by journalist Hawon Jung, outlines the country’s feminist movements, not only since Me Too, which engulfed the nation with its reckoning, but also historically, giving context to the postwar years explored in Simple Heart.
Just as Simple Heart does powerfully with fiction, Jung focuses on the actions of women who come together through compassion, a sense of justice and acts of mutual aid, despite the steep social consequences and barriers they face. Flowers of Fire conveys how much of modern-day feminism in South Korea is fought in the online arena, with words that are fast, fierce and viral.
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By contrast, a long history of letter-writing – heartfelt and slow-paced – figures into the plot of Simple Heart and is the basis for another book from South Korea, The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing by Juhee Mun. It’s also a great companion to the emotional wallop of Simple Heart.
As the title suggests, The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing is a calming respite from the world, a step-by-step guide and rumination on the power of letter-writing to keep us whole, human and connected. The book is inspired by the success of the author’s two geulwoll shops in Seoul, where people go to write letters, sometimes to their own friends and family, and sometimes to strangers, through Mun’s anonymous pen pal system. Every year, 5,000 people take her up on the deal – if you want a letter, you must write a letter and leave it for someone else.
What’s so special about letters? Mun calls them an act of storytelling, which is as true in life as it is in fiction. Without reaching out through letters, the women of Simple Heart would never have connected with each other to surface a history of decent and human acts, linked and remembered, despite the churn of a world that would rather we forget.
Yes, Simple Heart will make you cry. Its emotion is stunning and pure. Flowers of Fire will make your jaw drop with facts. (Did you need a reminder that the world needs feminism now more than ever?) The Healing Power of Korean Letter Writing will bring you back down to earth from your heady feelings, where a connection with someone else, and perhaps even more importantly, with yourself, has the healing power to keep us grounded and moving forward.