Review of The Age of Doubt by Pak Kyongni

*The Age of Doubt* by Pak Kyongni (2022). Published by Honford Star.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling is to pick up a book—if the place I’m going to has access to books. I know book access is a serious problem throughout the world, and not everywhere I go has easy access to a bookstore or the resources for literacy. I was in Malaysia in January 2024, and I knew I wanted to pick up a book there for sure.

So I was disappointed at the lack of bookstore options where my cousin was living, so when I saw there was a Kinokuniya at the top of KLCC, I decided to purchase a book there. I stumbled immediately into the Asian literature section, where I deliberated for a very long time what to purchase.

Because I’m doing my master’s thesis on Korean women’s literature in the colonial and immediate postcolonial period, I ended up landing on Pak Kyongni. I was familiar with her name due to my research, but I was also acutely aware that this translation of The Age of Doubt wasn’t easily accessible in the US unless I imported it.

So I purchased a copy, and weeped a little when I saw how much Kinokuniya charged. The little bookstore I found in Petaling Jaya, for reference, sold their books at 20 ringgits each. This Kinokuniya massively raises their prices, and I paid about 90 ringgits for this book. I also purchased some Chinese New Year bookmarks, so I spent around 120 ringgits in store.

Anyways, I read this all the way through on my flights home. Here’s my review!

A collection of some of Pak Kyongni’s most famous short stories.

There are seven short stories appearing in this collection, and I think it’s important to note that this is a collection compiling stories translated by different translators.

For those who are fellow academic nerds and into translation studies scholarship, this is something to note, as this means the translations could slightly vary (i.e. for my master’s thesis I decided to use the same translator for all six short stories I was analyzing, as using different ones would complicate my methodologies and research).

Most of Pak’s stories are set in the postwar era, but there are some that are really tapping into her own experiences growing up in the colonial period. One of the most striking stories from this was directly inspired by her own experience going to a school where both Japanese and Korean students attend.

In the short story, the protagonist, who comes from a wealthier background and can afford to go to school, writes a note of admiration to one of her female peers (there’s LGBTQ+ subtext here, as that was common during this period of time). There’s a problem with this: her peer is Japanese, and she is Korean. Big problems stem from this.

While that’s one of the short stories, many of Pak’s protagonists throughout this collection are women. Many are struggling with the poverty and situation many Koreans are in during the periods she sets her stories, such as directly after the Korean War.

In one story, a mother grieves the death of her son and gradually turns to religion because of it. In another, a woman owns her own store for dresses in order to provide for herself. A lot of people in these stories are scraping by in order to survive, whether it’s working for money or finding the emotional strength to continue on.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed these stories a lot! I could easily see how someone else might not enjoy them, though.

Having read a lot of these kinds of stories across the period for my master’s degree, I found these stories quite interesting to look at outside of my digital humanities work. What I found myself contemplating was that Pak uses a mix of protagonists, although a chunk of them come from wealth—this is common for other prominent writers during the period that were women.

Like my research as well, women are bound by their suffering in a myriad of ways. Something I debated was the role of han and how women’s experiences are a direct manifestation of this colonial invention, and men often depicted women as a form of the nation suffering, a failure of masculinity and the new nation. I think we can see echoes of the women’s work as a whole in these stories, and similar themes subverted.

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