To confess, a few years ago when my book was published in Korean and Japanese and I submitted all the materials published in various newspapers and magazines to the screening committee, I was sure that the Ewha Literary Award of that year would be mine.
It’s not common to have one’s poems and articles published in the front page of a major newspaper; on top of that, my writing has been featured throughout Japan, in the Asahi and Sankei Newspapers, various magazines, and NHK TV & Radio; it wasn’t unreasonable to have hopes that I would win. Yet no news came, and I soon remembered that I was competing with many of my peers, all impressive writers in their own right.
So naturally I gave up hope of winning the award. And then what do you know! I was in Washington when I heard the news and was very surprised.
While I liked to write poems when I was a young girl, I never studied to become a writer. I was in TV broadcasting, which was my major in the US, for 30 years, yet at some point, I began to be referred to as a writer and a poet. In Japan, where I became known from about 10 years ago, I am now introduced as “the daughter of the world’s only mother-daughter poets”
Beginning several years ago, I started publishing an annual collection of poetry. It was not unusual to see comments from critics like ‘the mother was a good writer, so the daughter, naturally is a good writer too’ My mother was born in Japanese colonial era, and though she did write in Korean, most of her poems were written in Japanese. As I was born after liberation, I had difficulty reading her poems.
During my long stay in the U.S., I would from time to time visit Korea. When I was back home, my mother would say to me, “Would you listen to my recent poem?” and I would reply, “Mom, I am late. I have to go now.” After one or two times like that, mother may have thought that her daughter was uninterested in literature and in her life which was a series of hardships in poetry writing, and never brought up literature or poetry to me again.
I once spent a day with John Saul from Canada, the chairman of the International PEN Club. He was impressed with poems of my mother that I had recited to him while having tea in Insa-dong. When I told him that it's hard doing the ‘Son Hoyun Project’ as I had not heard enough of background story, and he said to me “You can do it, Sunshine because you heard her voice.”
So here I am. As I am receiving this award, I feel her poetic heart and love for literature, which helped her publish her first collection of poetry ‘Hoyun Poetry’ in 1944 before I was even born, has always been inside of me.
Today is my mother's 15th anniversary since she has gone.
Even while doing other types of work, I’ve diligently written and created 20 collections of poetry essays and translations.
I’ve been late getting into poetry but I feel that poems have an awesome impact over people. People in Japan have shed tears at my speeches and my poetry readings, saying ‘It’s different, what we’ve heard Koreans think about Japan and what Korean poet thinks about Japan.’
Like that, literature travels over borders. And like that, literature moves people.
Only when a person gets moved, his mind is changed.
We should imbue literature with our God-given talents and the essence of our DNA of thousands of years and change the world.
Poet Kim Chunsu said in 2002 that ‘there is enough of good literature in Korea. But the great literature is not seen.’ This has always stayed in my heart.
Some even say that happy people do not write.
I hope that we who have heard the teachers of Ewha, will be able to achieve ‘happy and great literature’.
Thank you very much.
Sunshine Lee
Speech for Ewha Literary Award
- Alumni Hall Ewha Womans University 2018 11 22
Address of Kim Hye Sook President of Ewha Womans University
