The New Yorker:

The author discusses his story “The Leper.”

By Cressida Leyshon

In this week’s story, “The Leper,” the narrator discovers that his father has confessed to spying for North Korea and is under arrest in Seoul. How did this premise come to you? When was the story first published in its original Korean version?

This story is based on a real incident involving my father that occurred in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan was at its height. But it was not published in a literary magazine until 1988, after some measure of democratization had been achieved. However, depicting a person who claimed to be a spy for North Korea was still a sensitive issue that touched on major taboos in Korean society at the time, so I had to write it with some discretion.

The story, which has been translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl, appears in your forthcoming collection, “Snowy Day and Other Stories,” translated by Fenkl and Yoosup Chang. It will be published by Penguin Press in February. In what period of your life were you writing these stories? How do you feel about them going out into the world again, this time in English?

I wrote this story at a time when fundamental changes were taking place in Korean society. The military dictatorship that had ruled for decades was falling, democratization was occurring, and the Seoul Olympics were being held, so the tenor of the whole society was changing. I was in my mid-thirties then, and I felt that I needed a change. As a writer, I was feeling the limits of my abilities and was thirsty for a new way of communicating. And I think that thirst is what led me to the film industry. Now the stories I wrote back then are meeting new readers in English, across the vast span of thirty or forty years. And I’m thankful for this amazing opportunity that I would never have imagined when I wrote this story.

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