A layered self, and a woman who shuns the police

Ten years ago, a year ago, a month, yesterday: the self a person now holds, the notes write, can be said to be the layered days of a past self. Past choices, experiences, thoughts, and acts all gather to complete the “I” of the present. The strange behaviour described in the story, they say, is also the past Suni lived through working on the person she later became.

In the work, she behaves like the madwoman of the neighbourhood. She hears ordinary words as if they were blaming and suspecting her — a kind of hallucination — and she shuns the police and the station to an extreme degree, things that ordinary common sense cannot easily understand. All of these signs, they write, come from the past she lived through; if that past had not been there, she would have been no different from an ordinary person.

Jeju 4.3, and a past that is not only hers

What completes each person is each person’s own past; but when that past is a large historical event, it is no longer something one lives through alone. Many individuals are bound together, and many people live through one event. Suni’s experience in Suni samchon, they write, is of that kind. The story is set against Jeju 4.3, and keeps its focus on her, one person among those who lived it; and yet, because 4.3 is the background, it does not become only her past. It is, to differing degrees, also a past of the Korean people, and so a reader, they say, can better understand her mind and her suffering.

Most people in Korea, they write, already know of Jeju 4.3, and have learned it less as the putting down of a democratic uprising than as something close to a massacre of civilians, and have already been taught something of its depth and its background. Were the work set against a little-known foreign event, empathy would have been harder than it is now. It is only natural, they add, that an event everyone already knows is easier for a great many people to understand and to enter than the life of an unknown person A.

A memory of the Sewol, and a wish for those who remain

Reading Suni samchon, the writer was reminded of the Sewol disaster of 2014. At first, they write, there was a false report that everyone had been rescued; they heard it from classmates while listening to a lecture at school. After a few days the number of those rescued did not rise. Yellow ribbons and a heavy mood covered the society; spending shrank, and trades such as restaurants had a hard time; the radio carried only news of survivors and prayers for rescue; and everyone was so heavy-hearted that even funny stories on internet boards felt wrong to look at. Those remembered details are left as the notes write that year, not recast as a later official total or a later official count the notes do not give.

People directly caught in the disaster — survivors and bereaved families — will, they write, live the rest of their lives carrying that memory as a burden. They lost friends they had laughed with, families they loved, teachers they saw every day. Jeju 4.3, the writer confesses, had been learned only as writing in a history class, and so the felt temperature was different; through the Sewol, which they met as a recent event in real time, they could take one step closer to Suni’s heart. The feeling the book left was pity and a tightness in the chest. The close is a wish that wounds which cannot be erased might still be carefully closed, and that those who remain might live toward the future. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Hyun Ki-young’s Suni samchon, set beside a memory of the Sewol in 2014.

Last updated: 15 November 2026