A creature of habit

Writer Bae Su-ah is prone to carsickness and cannot travel to Seoul for the interview, I am told. So on the Friday afternoon before the long Chuseok holiday, I get on a bus to Ilsan, Gyeonggi Province, for an hourlong ride, hoping that I can keep my nausea in check.

Bae works at home and does not feel comfortable doing an interview there, so she has picked out a cafe to meet at. Upon arrival, I find it has been the venue for several previous interviews, recognizing the particular blinds from photographs that accompany them. It seems she is a creature of habit.

A tall figure in dark gray with long jet black hair walks in and when I get up and wave hello, she takes big strides toward me, apologizing for being late. Her voice and speech are girlish, belying her age ― she is 49. She is without makeup, except for a bold black eyeliner and a bright red lipstick. And she wears near-black, dark nail polish on square-shaped nails.

Bae orders a siphon coffee. The owner of the cafe seems to know her preference.

“I have been doing interviews here since it opened several years ago,” she says.

She is curious why I have chosen her to interview, noting that she is not a popular writer in Korea.

“Most of my readers are young women. My style isn’t something that attracts men with common sentiments,” she says.

Yet, there is a quiet buzz about her outside of Korea. Her 1998 fiction “Cheolsu” will be released in English by AmazonCrossing in the U.S. next April. A short story, “Highway with Green Apples,” is due out next month as part of a collection of short stories by debuting American writers. “Highway with Green Apples” was featured in Amazon’s online weekly literary magazine Day One last December.

Before her literary debut, Bae had no inkling that she would become a writer. In college, she majored in chemistry because she “had to go to college” and got married upon graduation. She was a full-time housewife before her marriage ended in a divorce after three years. The divorce was an unexpected turning point in her life.

Needing to support herself, Bae found a job at the Military Manpower Administration as a civil servant. Her debut as a writer came about almost casually. She went to a bookstore, leafed through literary magazines and submitted work to two ― she later discovered that they were the least known of literary magazines. The writing was a piece that she had done while practicing to memorize the keyboard during breaks at a computer hagwon she attended to occupy her time while she was married.

Bae Su-ah poses before an interview with The Korea Herald in Ilsan, Gyeonggi Province. (Yoon Byung-chan/The Korea Herald)

“I was not sure if it was a mere scribble or literature,” she recalls. She had shown it to her husband, an English literature major, who commented that it was “showoff-ish.” “Now that I think of it, it was very perceptive,” she says.

Much to her surprise, the piece was selected by two magazines and she ended up withdrawing it from the more obscure of the two. “They called me and cursed me out,” she says with a laugh. The writing was published in 1993 under the title “A Dark Room of 1988.”

For nine years, Bae worked as a civil servant and a fiction writer. Her life could not have been more dichotomous ― mundane paper work by day, creative work by night. Her life took a dramatic turn in the mid-2000s when she took a leave of absence from work and went to Germany.

“I chose Berlin because it was cheap back then and I studied German because I wanted to read German,” she says.

She had always been an avid reader of foreign literature translated into Korean ― and this is reflected in her writing style which has often been referred to as “translated literature style” ― and wanted to read German books in the original language.

After 11 months in Germany, where she constantly pondered if she could quit her job, she returned to Seoul and turned in her resignation. She turned to writing fiction and translating full time.

Creative writing and translating seem to be two diametrically opposed activities. How does she manage to do both? “Translating requires intense concentration in reading. And reading has the closest relationship with the act of writing,” Bae says.

Perhaps she performs the two roles by switching locations. She is known to do her original writing abroad while translating when in Korea.

For a number of years, she lived half a year in Korea and the other half in Germany ― rather unusual for someone who professes to being a homebody and averse to travelling, as she would say later in the interview. She still frequently goes back and forth between Korea and Germany, necessitated now by having a filmmaker boyfriend in Germany, she confesses.

“It is easier to translate when I am home. I find that translating is very sensitive to the environment. On the other hand, fiction requires stimulations that touch the ‘language central nerve’. The more the better for creative writing,” she says. “If I were to have a studio, it would be abroad,” she adds.

Considered a prolific writer, Bae takes about a year to complete a work of fiction. “You need steadfastness for fictions. I prefer novellas both to read and to write. I am best at this form. I don’t really like going the long distance.”

Bae’s writings are notorious for their ambiguity, particularly about time. “Earlier in my career, I admit there was some imprudence,” she says. “After ‘Cheolsu,’ I began to despise plot-driven stories. I am no longer this way. I have always liked storytelling,” she adds.

Bae views such changes as natural. “My style has always evolved and even my interests have always evolved,” she says, adding that she now writes in a “comfortable style.”

“An Essayist’s Desk,” a fiction from 2003, reads like an essay on Shostakovich, music, and art borrowing the form of fiction. “Yes, there was a phase when I liked Shostakovich,” she says.

Although Bae frequently travels abroad ― just this year she went twice to the U.S., traveled to Spain and France, spent three months in England on a writer-in-residence program, and is scheduled to attend a book fair in Mexico in November, on top of shuttling between Korea and Germany ― she does not like leaving her house in Ilsan. “Seoul is the place that I hate the most in the world,” she confides. “My dream is to have a house big enough that I never need to step outside. I would even take my walks inside the house,” she says.

“The outside world is often difficult for me,” Bae says. She doesn’t watch television, only occasionally watching the news, and she does not drink, which limits her social activities. “There is no socializing without alcohol here. I wish I could find neighborhood friends, though,” she says.

At the moment, she is finishing up a book she meant to complete in England.

“It is a love story. My publisher told me to write a love story,” she confides. Next year, she plans to go to Nepal.

“I think I will be able to write when I do go,” she says.

By Kim Hoo-ran (khooran@heraldcorp.com)