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Nancy Abelmann, Josie Sohn Revisiting the Developmentalist Era Mother in 2000s South Korean Film
with her diving. And this young diver now takes a perfect
stranger into her home where everything – the old
dresser, photographs, and so on – is too familiar for comfort
to the guest. When Na-yŏng wakes after spending
her first night in the village in utter disbelief, Yŏn-sun, as
real as real can be, enters her room with a small breakfast
table. The seaweed soup that Na-yŏng had refused at
home and the pickled crab that her mother had embarrassingly
demanded at the aforementioned evening out
quietly lets us know that Yŏn-sun is and always has been
a kind and generous woman.
The film is propelled, as we wind the exquisite island
paths of yesteryear (interestingly, entirely different than
the crime-ridden dusty ways in the village in Mother), by
the ever-so-innocent love story of Yŏn-sun and the man
who we know will become Na-yŏng’s father – the island
postman. In what Korean cinema scholar Steven Chung
describes as the “spectacularizing enlightenment” (18),
theirs is an enlightenment story in which the postman
teaches illiterate Yŏn-sun, opening her world, allowing
her, literally, to name it (see Figure 4). 4 And Na-yŏng is
there to test her mother from the primers that her fatherto-be
has given her mother. In a nearly classical developmentalist
spectacle, we look on as Na-yŏng witnesses the
arrival of the island’s first bus, and we are there to capture
(in a photograph) Na-yŏng, Yŏn-sun, and, yes, the postman
who has peeped out
from behind the bus,
in the nick of time for
posterity (see Figure
5). How then does the
film allow us to thread
time: from literacy and
the first village bus to
the hardened antics of
a middle-aged laboring
woman? Are we to
wax nostalgic for the
days of yore before the
ravages of advanced
doggy-dog capitalism
– times in which the
Yŏn-sun could innocently
marvel at the
5. My mother, the mermaid (2004)
rural postman’s knowledge
and worldly ways? Are we to nod knowingly that
the kindness of Na-yŏng’s father’s variety, a throw-back
to island days and ways – somehow out of step with the
times – is enough to drive a woman crazy? Indeed, the film
opens on the adult mother at the funeral of her husband’s
buddy who has died leaving her husband the guarantor
of his debt: we see all of the antics of mourning, but in
her case the nearly humorous mourning of her husband’s
ill-founded generosity through which he no doubt squandered
her hard earned savings.
The climax of Na-yŏng’s suture is the moment in which
Na-yŏng and her child-mother are most integrated, a
moment in which the time traveler seems to touch, not
just witness, her mother’s past. This is also the moment
when Na-yŏng will call Yŏn-sun, “Mom,” instead of her
name. Yŏn-sun has nearly drowned, diving one too many
times in the throes of her mourning the news of the
postman’s relocation. As Na-yŏng nurses her mother at
the sickbed, Yŏn-sun confides in Na-yŏng that it wasn’t
until she learned from a neighbor that she had been an
orphaned child, picked up by her late non-biological
mother. Yŏn-sun continues that for a time she thought that
this explained her sometimes hollow heart and frightening
sadness. But she goes on, “[In fact] it wasn’t that at
all, I felt all that because I wanted to see my [biological]
mother.” And with the remarks that follow this comment,
4 We cite this idea from Steven Chung’s 2008 presentation at the University of Illinois Korea Workshop, “Enlightenment Discourse and Korean Peninsular Cinema,” in which he argues that many films from the postwar
era staged an “enlightenment spectacle.” A revised version of this presentation is forthcoming as “Modalities of Enlightenment in 20th Century Korean Cinema” in positions.
40 Korean Histories 3.2 2013