Who History Leave Behind: The Women of Minbak
Tracing the shape of inherited memory
In her new novel Minbak, Ela Lee explores an untold slice of South Korean history, through the voices of three generations.
On the morning of 12 December 1979, my mother, then twenty-two-years-old, set out for Seoul. It was her first day as a newspaper reporter. She arrived early, wearing her best blouse. At noon, the editor-in-chief asked her where she lived, then abruptly sent her home. She was anxious that she had somehow made a terrible first impression.
Unbeknownst to her, he had received word that conflict was erupting downtown. Roads and bridges were sealed by the military. An army general named Chun Doo-Hwan was staging a coup. Though he would eventually instal himself as President of South Korea, he would be remembered by a different term: dictator. Weaving between 1985 South Korea and 2008 London, Minbak is set against this backdrop.
'Women’s stories were either obscured by silence or boxed into stereotypes.'
South Korea’s military regime remains infamous today for brutality common to most dictatorships. The stories of men tussling for power are immortalised in history, their names eponymous with documentaries and books. But as I wrote Minbak, I found myself returning to a quieter question: what of my twenty-two-year-old mother? What of her sisters, her friends? How did instability enter the bloodstream of a family, seep into its private corners? What was the texture of ordinary days from inside a classroom, or a boarding house? The more I researched, the more I found absence. Women’s stories were either obscured by silence or boxed into stereotypes: cautionary tales and romantic heroines. I became interested by the women who didn’t make it into official records and compromises they made, regrets accumulated, ambitions deferred.
These questions led me to Hana, a bright girl pulled from school to support her family’s business: a minbak, a modest boarding house. Through the minbak passes students, factory workers and missionaries, each glimpses of a world outside of her own. She works alongside her mother Youngja who, having lived through Japanese colonisation, the Second World War, and the Korean War, has a very different approach to survival.
Minbak unravels how a time of national crisis shapes the choices available to Youngja and Hana, and how the consequences of those actions calcify across decades, until they reach the third generation: Ada, a teenager in London, growing up in the shadow of her family’s distant past.
As I fleshed the novel out, I wrestled with my own loose notions of inherited sorrow and generational lags – the sense that children grow up out of sync with their family’s pasts. I wrote about mothers and daughters, between whom history is passed down through both confession and omission. Through fragmented stories, unexplained gestures and unreliable memories. The incommunicable lingers through the years, into diaspora, into successive generations. Fiction is where we can go beyond historical record to linger in these ambiguities and intimacies, deal in the stories women wish to tell about themselves, and the ones they cannot tell at all.