‘The Waiting’ Is a Piercing Story of Family Separation in Korea

Separation from family and loved ones has taken on particular poignancy and pain in these last few pandemic-ridden years. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s new graphic novel The Waiting encapsulates an earlier story of suffering with gritty honesty and almost unbearable sadness.

Nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, The Waiting tells the story of an elderly Korean woman named Gwija and her adult daughter Jina.

When the Korean War broke out Gwija and her young family joined a river of people fleeing south. During the trek, she is accidentally separated from her husband and toddler son. Even after she resettled in Seoul, Gwija continued to search for her lost family.

The impetus for the story came from Gendry-Kim’s own family history, when her mother revealed that she’d been separated from her sister during the war. As Gendry-Kim writes in a postscript to the story, although the characters are based on real people, her decision to fictionalize was meant to shield families from potential retaliation by North Korean authorities.

In the novel, Gwija waits on word from a Red Cross program that reunites South Korean residents with their long-lost relatives north of the border. A lottery system selects only 200 people annually for reunions from the more than 50,000 people registered. After 70 years of waiting, Gwija is still holding out a fragile measure of hope that she will be reunited with her family.

Janet Hong translated The Waiting from Korean. Based in Vancouver, Hong has translated fiction, essays and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s first graphic novel, Grass.

The art of translation is a curious one, a balancing act of interpretation and invention. Every language has its share of idiosyncrasies, and it is the job of the translator to recreate the story while maintaining voice, content and a thousand other nuances that make up the experience of reading a piece of literature.

The Tyee posed a few questions to Hong about her work. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: The profound sadness of The Waiting seems to come out of the hope that families have sustained over so many years, but as people get older and the possibility of reunions fades, how do people deal with the loss of hope? Was it difficult for you to contend with this kind suffering within the context of the story?

Janet Hong: I tend to fact-check everything to a fault when I translate. So naturally, when I was working on The Waiting, I read countless articles and watched videos of the reunions of the separated families, from the 1980s up to the more recent ones that took place several years ago. I was a complete emotional mess.

I also managed to find hours of footage of Finding Dispersed Families, a special live broadcast that reunited separated families in 1983, which The Waiting mentions. I sobbed watching these videos, which I had completely forgotten about.

Though I was only a baby and wasn’t living in Korea when the show aired, I recall these videos from when I returned to Korea for elementary school because they became iconic, a part of the Korean psyche. Seeing the clips again brought back my childhood and the strangest mix of feelings in me: nostalgia and grief.

What is your own family’s history with Korea? Have you experienced anything akin to the generational trauma that happened in the story?

Most of my extended family live in South Korea today, but my maternal grandfather, who’s no longer with us, is originally from Haeju, North Korea. At the time of the Korean War, he’d been studying and living in Seoul. His parents and siblings managed to flee North Korea during the war, all except for his elder sister, who’d been married with a family of her own.

Like Gwija, my grand-uncle registered with the Red Cross for a chance to reunite with their sister, but his name was never among those selected, and they never received any news of her. Since she was the eldest of my grandfather’s siblings, she has probably passed away by now.

I’ve never talked about this openly, but I travelled to North Korea via China many years ago, for an unrelated reason as a “sponsor” of the annual Spring Arts Festival, which is a major event that coincides with the birth anniversary of Kim Il-sung and attracts performers from all around the world.

I travelled with a group of older Korean Americans who had become festival “sponsors,” just so that they could have a chance to meet with family members they had been separated from during the Korean War. At the hotel where we stayed, I was able to witness firsthand these meetings, which took place in the hotel lobby. It was absolutely heart-wrenching to watch.

You’ve mentioned that translators, as the closest reader of a text, often have to compartmentalize when working on very difficult materials. What approach do you take when translating very emotionally challenging stories?

I do exactly that: I compartmentalize. I don’t do it intentionally; it’s a defence mechanism that kicks in when dealing with pain and trauma. When I produce a first draft, my goal is to simply translate the text. I don’t think about the deeper significance of the words, and I don’t try to feel what the character is feeling.

In a way, I’m translating at surface level, keeping a certain distance between me and the text. It’s with each revision that I wade in deeper, allowing myself to connect with the text by using all my senses. At the end, my goal is to be so completely in the author’s head that I can fully identify with the characters, feeling what they feel and knowing exactly what they mean, but I have to do this in bursts. I get in and get out.

Once it’s done, I try not to dwell on the dark, heavy sections. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to work.

How do you approach a work of translation? Do you consult closely with the author? Or is it more of an independent process?

I like to do the first draft independently, flagging any sections I don’t fully understand. If I still have questions after revisions, I consult with the author. We sometimes go back and forth via email or we might have a conversation on the phone. The intensity of the consultation depends on the work. If the translation is pretty straightforward, I might have a few minor questions at the end. However, if the work is enigmatic and layered, I’ll probably need to have multiple conversations with the author.

I always tell my students that as a translator, you need to understand everything about the text, even the small details that don’t show up in your translation, because how else will you describe a scene or know which elements to highlight if your understanding of the text is murky? How will the reader understand, if you, as the translator, don’t?

When I was translating an [earlier] novel, which contains a lot of wordplay, the author and I exchanged countless emails, not because she needed to see the solutions I came up with, but mostly because I wanted to get in her head completely. Only then did I feel I could “rewrite” certain sections of the book. I’d already had a great relationship with the author (I had translated a short story of hers previously), but through the process of working on the novel, we grew closer.

A side note. As a translator, I tend to have an intense relationship with the author’s work, so I love getting to know the author as a person. Since I live in Canada and my authors live in Korea, we keep in touch via email, instant messenger and Skype/Zoom, send each other books and gifts, and when I visit Korea, we go out for dinner and drinks. I know this doesn’t come as an automatic perk of being a translator, so I feel incredibly lucky.

Are there particular joys and idiosyncrasies that you like in translating graphic novels, as opposed to other literary forms?

I can think of some unique challenges that come with translating graphic novels, but I don’t know if I would call them joys!

It’s challenging to try to fit all the English words into a specifically sized word bubble, which originally contained the Korean words, because Korean is a language that will require more words when going into English. Then there’s the headache posed by Korean sound effects. Many Korean words are based on onomatopoeia. For example, there are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that describe virtually every possible sound, texture, sensation and movement.

However, more difficult than these is getting the dialogue and voice right in a limited amount of space. Comics are often dialogue-heavy and more casual than other literary forms, so everything needs to sound natural, while capturing a sense of character. I find that cartoonists have such a gift for dialogue. It’s my hope that by translating remarkable dialogue that is able to convey a great sense of character, my skills as a writer and translator will grow.