When Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years ago, it was said that the South Korean writer celebrated with her son over a cup of chamomile tea when she received the news from Sweden. Since then, she says, whenever someone came to visit, she was given chamomile tea as a gift. “I have a supply of chamomile tea that will last me for the next ten years!” She really appreciates any gift, but she definitely likes other types of tea too.
We are sitting in the courtyard of a former women's prison in Berlin, which is now a hotel, surrounded by tall plants that, tightly intertwined, form a quiet backyard jungle in the middle of Charlottenburg. Anyone who knows Han Kang's work knows what an important role plants play in it, most prominently in her novel "The Vegetarian", which tells of the woman who rebels against her husband by announcing that she will no longer eat meat; which breaks with the law of the flesh and decides to be a plant from now on and only absorb sun and light. Han Kang laughs quietly and says that the cup from which she drank the chamomile tea is now in the museum in Stockholm. A photo of this can be seen in her new book, “The Golden Thread,” which the writer presented in Germany this week. And which, among various other texts, also contains the powerful acceptance speech for the award, which goes back to the beginnings of her writing.
Han Kang tells how she came across an old shoebox while clearing out the basement because of an upcoming move. When she opened it, she found a collection of diaries from her childhood and between them a thin, self-bound notebook labeled “poetry volume”. On the back was the year 1979 and her name. They were poems that she had written as an eight-year-old and had not wanted to show anyone at the time. Reading it took her back forty years, to the afternoon when she made the little notebook herself, using a metal stapler from her father's study. It was the time when she had just learned that the family was moving to Seoul. A turning point in all of their lives.
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, in the city where students, workers and citizens rebelled against the military dictatorship ruling South Korea in May 1980, hoped for democracy and were massacred for days by the military with 20,000 soldiers and tanks. The move to Seoul, when she was nine years old, took place four months before the massacre, without the family having any idea of what was to come. Since then, they have not been able to shake the feeling of guilt that they survived. When Han Kang was twelve, her father went back to Gwangju and brought with him a book of photographs that bore witness to the massacre. “The adults hid it in the bookcase,” she says in our conversation. They put it upside down on the shelf so you couldn't read the title. “But that made the book really catch my eye and, like all children, I wanted to read what was supposed to be withheld from me.”
Unprepared for what the volume contained, the girl opened the book. "When I learned about Gwangju, I lost trust in people. Writing about it was the only way to regain it," Han Kang once said. Did that work? Is trust back? She hesitates, as she actually hesitates briefly with every answer before giving it: In addition to the images of the bloodbath, such as the face of a girl disfigured by bayonet stabs, which is burned into her memory, there was also the photograph of an endless queue of willing blood donors in front of a hospital. There were images of destruction, but at the same time they also spoke of how people tried to help and preserve their dignity. That helped her, yes.
Han Kang has made violence and dignity the main themes of her writing. However, the novel she wrote about the Gwangju massacre was not her first. She was already considered one of the most important literary voices of her generation in South Korea when she wrote it. “Human Work”, originally published in 2014 and also in German three years later, tells the horror from the perspective of the dead, those left behind and those who escaped, who are still haunted years later by the “shame of having survived”. Han Kang brings the mostly young dead to life, describes their thoughts, fears and longings; chooses the perspective of the soul of a boy whose body lies in a mountain of corpses, describes the decomposition and dissolution of the body until it is burned by soldiers. What drives people to violence? And what does it mean to be human? It is these questions that run through her entire work.
At this point, her literary debut was twenty years ago. Shortly after graduating from Yonsei University in Seoul with a degree in Korean literature, she won the Seoul Shinmun newspaper literary competition in 1994 with the short story “Red Sail”. A first volume of stories was followed by further prose works, of which a story was translated into German for the first time in 2005 for the anthology “Korean Stories” under the title “The Fruits of My Wife”. It was published, says Han Kang, when Korea was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "It was my first book fair in Frankfurt, many Korean authors had interviews and a lot of appointments. But I only had this one small story at the time, hardly any obligations and spent my time walking through Frankfurt." The story was about a wife who turned into a potted plant - and was watered by her husband. It was the nucleus of the novel “The Vegetarian,” which was to be written afterwards.
Is it possible that she generally prefers plants to people? Han Kang hesitates again and then says firmly: “I am a person who likes people.” But of course she also likes plants, especially the plants in her garden, for which she has almost developed an obsession. “I believe you can only live if you spend a certain amount of time a week in nature.”
In “The Golden Thread,” the “Garden on the North Side,” as an autobiographical story is called, plays a special role. “There was a time when I was living in a rented apartment in Seoul and suffered from severe insomnia, which meant that the novel I was writing didn’t make any progress,” she says when we met. In Seoul there are still some districts in which there are modern houses and buildings, but in between you can occasionally find hanoks, traditional Korean houses that are built from natural materials such as wood, stone and clay and are usually only one floor high. “I found a house like that on Airbnb, lived there for a month, slept very, very well and then thought that I had to buy a house like that.”
A real estate agent eventually offered her a tiny house with a north-facing garden, which she immediately fell in love with. In order to live there, the writer had to get rid of a lot of what she owned: her sofa, many books. She also needed a smaller refrigerator because the old one didn't fit. But the insomnia disappeared. And when her mother came to visit her in her new house after the pandemic, she said as soon as she walked through the gate: “This house is just as big and has exactly the same atmosphere as the house where you were born and where we lived until you were three years old.” She had no memory of this house and there was no photo of it. “But I found it very unbelievable.”
Planting the garden without light was a big challenge. In the book, she writes how she met a landscape gardener who had never seen such a small plot of land and who advised her to install three adjustable mirrors in the small garden: "Direct the sunlight that shines in from the south. You have to redirect it, reflect it." So begins a restless time in which Han Kang becomes a gardener, learns everything about the path of the sun and adjusts her mirrors every 15 minutes to ensure the best possible light for her plants.
One might think that these are biographical details, mere anecdotes from her life. But you would be wrong and you wouldn't understand the “garden diary” that you find in “The Golden Thread”. Basically, all of these reflections on the furnishings that she sorts out or rearranges to furnish the precisely measured space, or on the light that she redirects while she takes on new perspectives, can be understood as reflections on the writing itself. The furniture could just as easily be words, the angles the perspectives of the story, the illuminated plants what the writer puts in the light.
Han Kang picks up a pen and a white sheet of paper as she talks about her garden in the Berlin jungle, drawing the wall of her house, the cardinal points and individual plants. Her major works such as “The Vegetarian”, “Human Work” or most recently “Impossible Farewell” may be novels that deal with historical trauma or forms of violence and deal with subversion and resistance. But they are, that's what makes them so great, imbued with a poetic power that is already visible in the book of poems that the eight-year-old made for herself.
However, the sleep disorders must have returned at some point. When asked what she remembers most about the day of the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Han Kang said: "I was very tired and had to be careful not to fall asleep during the long ceremony."
