On Hang Kang's The Fruit of My Woman

I have to write. Today I don’t feel like I need to but rather that I have to. I owe it to myself. I didn’t know if I should write this on the pages of my diary. Pen and paper, always best. But then i thought my thoughts could be going rather fast and my hand is not as quick as my finger. So i stick to the digital paper. A google doc. And it is fine, that is not the point of all of this anyways. 

I read Hang Kang’s latest short story (or at least the latest translated) while i’m texting my boyfriend. He is something. I don’t even know how, nor want to, describe him. But for my own sake I’ll try.

He is tall and skinny. A small nose that I love. And a smile I like more than I don’t. I really like the shape of his teeth. He has just turned 26 and yet sometimes I feel he has the skin of a teenager, but that does not bother me. He has the prettiest heart, I keep saying and saying. To tell you why I came to that conclusion would be too much, but he does.

If he loves me, I don’t know. When I met him I was just bored. And I was too afraid when things started getting more serious. At the end of the day I was the one preaching the free-spirit tale in my group of friends. I was supposed to leave the country. I was going to China. But then a virus came and everything had to stop.Traveling, parties, work… even love. We’ve been secluded in our homes, I’ve only seen him twice since everything started, and it has been more like sneaking out than actually going to see him ‘cause I’ve done it behind my brother’s back ––who is too worried about this virus and does not want me to leave the house. i get it, but i also need to be with him or it is not bearable. However, I feel like twice in two months, only for a few hours, is not exactly ‘being together’ nor breaking the social distancing norms.

Last time I saw him we only had sex and barely talked. But it is ok, talking is what we’ve been mostly doing since our relationship has been reduced to facebook calls and texting. Before that we used to go here and there every weekend. Not too many since all this apocalyptic pandemic started a month after we met. I thought, then, that our relationship was going to die. I was afraid: What if we cannot talk? I love talking. I rarely do it. I mean, about things I actually care: like poems and languages and literary theory. 

sometimes talking with people is reduced to their relationships or non-important stuff. I had a friend to whom I could talk, but I did not physically liked him, so there’s that.

Him, I like him. I see him and feel like the luckiest to have him. The shape of his jaw, the way his hair falls down over his forehead, his eyes, the color of his skin, his little sparkling kind eyes. It is not all but it is something I love. His face, his body.

His smell. I like his smell. I’m getting used to it. It is a different smell. There has been smells, smells I’ve loved. His is fine. My heart does feel warmth when thinking of it. 

But when it all started I was just bored and horny, but perfectly fine on my own. Reading Soseki and Tanizaki, and daydreaming with Japan, even Korea. Learning everything about history, philosophy: reading all I could written by Eco and Bloom. That was happiness.

However at the core of all that was my wish of having a family. A husband and kids. Life in a flat, afternoons of being a mom. And I wonder if at the end it was all about that. Finding someone, falling in love, becoming a mother. I’ve read what i’ve wrote when I was 19 going on 20. I was honest:

En fin. Sobre fantasear con el futuro, a lo que iba es que soy una chica –fuerte e independiente– pero también quiero amor, y quiero casarme y tal vez tener hijos, o no, pero quiero tener a alguien...porque ¿por qué no?

I don’t KNOW what I really meant with all that, but I think about Jo March’s speech in Little Women by Greta Gerwig: 

Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition and they've got talent as well as just beauty, and I'm so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it! But... I am so lonely.

Maybe I was feeling lonely… but rather...maybe I wanted to share, maybe I wanted a kiss that felt more meaningful than the ones given on drunken nights and dark alleyways before fucking and then disappearing. Maybe I was sick of having to disappear. I wanted to know that maybe it was not impossible to be loved and to love someone, whatever love means. Because at 25 I’m sure I won’t love the way I did before. It would be too immature. The magic of that love was precisely ignorance and lack of experience, what Blake calls innocence.

But as time passed and my heart learnt maybe it became too aloof. I’m trying my best, really. 

Being your own person, as a woman, has a price too high to pay. That is what mom taught me. Mothers. Such a figure for daughters. We do not wish to kill them (in the freudian sense of the words) but we are afraid of becoming like them. Like a loop. Never ending generations of submission and self-resignation. Sacrifices. Losing one self to give and give. “Eres madre antes que mujer”, how many times i didn’t hear that. Like you lose all your rights. Of that I am afraid. And I am not saying I will become one now or in a year or two. I don’t know if I’m really getting married, of course I don’t. I want to and I wish to, but it is not just that. The thing is that having a relationship made me think of everything that was not there when I was single. All the potentialities of life. And all the sacrifices too.

In Hang Kang’s tale a man tells a rather singular story. Kafkaesque as a nightmarish metamorphosis happens. A woman gets married. She doesn’t even have a name. How sad! She is only ‘my wife’. The narrator retells how it all happened:

But it wasn’t because of our marriage that she quit her job. It was only after she quit, not long after, in fact, that I’d talked of marriage concretely. She’d taken out all the money she had – whatever she’d put aside from her monthly salary and pension allowance, plus any extra from part-time work at weekends – and was planning on leaving the country. 

As soon as I read those lines I had that feeling, the ‘this is a sign’ feeling, or, the ‘everything is connected, nothing happens just because, nothing is casual’ feeling. Because I guess I’m in a crucial point in my life. At 25, still so young, almost a child. I cannot help myself, how could I help other, I think. Isn’t it just natural wanting all those adventures, the rush of adrenaline of traveling and suffering, loving and discovering as well as losing?The thing is, here, that I’ve traveled and suffered, and loved and lost.

Utrecht, London, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo. I’ve been the lucky one. But at the end always on my own. I wonder why I crave for more? Why loneliness attracts me so much. I wonder if happiness is indeed within oneself and surrounded my paintings and books and coffee, why not sharing all that? Why do I picture my self best in a flat in a foreign country without long-life friends, without my parents or my siblings. 

‘I want to go and get some new blood in my veins,’ she said. This was the evening of the day when she’d finally given her letter of resignation to her immediate superior. She told me she wanted to transfuse the bad blood that was clotting up her veins like cysts and flush out her tired old lungs with fresh air. Living and dying freely had been her dream ever since she was a child, she said; she’d been putting it off because the time wasn’t right, but now she felt that she’d saved up enough to make her dream a reality. She planned to pick a country, stay there for six months or so, then move on somewhere else, and so on. ‘I want to do it before I die, you know,’ she said, and gave a low chuckle. ‘I want to see the very edge of the world. To get as far away as possible, bit by bit.’

I’ve been there, I know it is not easy. And I’ve come back and always think back and feel ‘how happy I was! How lucky I am to have had my life!’ and I want to keep adding those memories, like an addict. Like suddenly hugs and kisses and talking are not enough. Because it seems like it is not, like there is something else I want but I cannot name it because I am not sure of what it is: maybe making something for myself? Maybe not having it so easy? But that is quite hypocrite of me to say since I am writing from the comfort of my room, in pajamas, with coffee, in a flat my dad bought for me and since I haven’t had to leave my home and comfort the world outside because everything is falling apart. Everything is falling apart but I am safe and life is safe for me. Too safe. What am I doing then, I think? Why do I want to leave? I had a picture of my life: in Tokyo, learning languages, then doing a master, then if everything went well becoming an interpreter. It was a good plan and a safe plan and it gave me a sense of purpose. I was happy and excited and it was a goal, a big goal. Here what do I have? Truly: nothing. 

In this plan, too, was the possibility of finding love and marriage and children. Then it would have felt like I accomplished something. And like somehow it was something that happened and not what I wanted to happen. Because I wanted someone and wanted love. To be loved.

But in the end, instead of setting out for the world’s edge, my wife poured all her meagre funds into the deposit for this flat and our wedding costs. She’d explained this all to me in a single short sentence, saying she’d done it ‘because it’s not like I can part from you’. How real had been this dream of hers, this dream of freedom? Considering that she’d been able to relinquish it so easily, I assumed not very. The whole thing must have been nothing more than an unrealistic, romantic delusion, and the plans she’d made no more feasible than those a child might concoct for travelling to the moon. In the end, she must have realised all this by herself, and I felt vaguely moved and proud to think that I must have been the one who’d prompted this belated realisation.

That is the thing: how can we be sure we are loved? I have felt adored. Once again a safe standing point: what can go wrong if you are seen somehow like a goddess and not a mere human being. Does he adore me? I wonder. Is he willing to cross the sea for me, like others? Because if he isn’t, if I won’t be the center of his life then for me it would be too much a sacrifice. And yet, who would want me to be the center of his life? I won’t be daddy's girl for everyone. I’ll be a mere mortal. Who will want to share with me? Such a plain and simple girl. All I have are my adventures and without them I have nothing. Only a couple books I’ve read, pages of ink, and a weird love for flowers. 

I am a simpleton, really.

That does not mean I do not deserve love. I learnt to love me and fell in love with me. That is another thing: I don’t wanna lose myself, the loose sense of self I achieved after all: the stories, the trauma, the pain and finally the renaissance of my soul. And to give that up!

Hang Kang writes this story where the wife ––then a girl–– wants to travel, and how she does not to marry. Why she married him? because she felt she could not part from him! What a feeling, what a tragedy! And after a few years of sex and caresses she becomes quiet, too quiet, because truly that was all there was!: “but when I saw my wife standing with her cheek pressed against the glass door to the balcony, her narrow shoulders drooping like wilted cabbage leaves as she stared down at the speeding cars, my heart sank. She was so still, only the incredibly faint sound of her breathing confirmed she was still alive”.

Are we sacrificing ourselves for that? Our romantic dreams and longings for safety! For things like finding someone! And the girl, the wife, she becomes a plant! 

“This flowerpot is too cramped, its walls too hard. Shooting pains at the tips of my roots. Mother, I will die before winter comes. And I doubt that I will bloom again in this world”.

The only time in the whole tale when we hear her thoughts is to know her pain, to know how she feels cramped, limited, trapped. Being trapped is not being at home because there is a virus outsided, is being at home knowing you could have make another choice.

Why for girls life always seem like sacrificing something. Despite what Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Fisherman’s Daughter, I still feel you gotta give up something, while guys do not. They don’t even ask themselves, wonder, stop and think. A woman will renounce a thing. And if they do not see that, what a waste.

But to conclude, ‘cause I’ve written more than I intended, I’ll tell you my tale ––and interestingly, the girl in this story is also called Tale and she is one of my best friends. 

Back in 2017 I went to China. Because I was half in love with a boy and half in love with the idea of traveling and getting to know different cultures. The trip was a roller coaster. Some days were awesome and other days sucked. But overall, at the end, I loved it. It was really hard for me to come back to Mexico, and I loved it all so much that I found a job in China ––the one cancelled because of the virus––. One of the friends I made there was Tale. Now I can say that with her I made some of the nicest memories. And after years now, of knowing each other, I’ve seen how a great woman she is! So talented and full of creativity, and with such a way to see life that I am so glad we are friends, what Anne of Green Gables would call kindred spirits! One of our convos. was about postponing the trip (and our meeting) because of this virus, and about life and love. Me, confused as always, just told her that I wanted to be free with her. “Let’s be free together”. At the end the boy for whom I traveled is not that important in this story, not any boy for that matter, but what I discovered because I followed my heart: That I won an awesome person in my life, maybe a soulmate. That love is cool, but friendship…what the thinkers wrote about it:

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments.

And David Whyte wrote: “the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another”. So even when my friendship with Tale is (or was, who knows) like a pair of intersecting lines, just together for a brief period of our lives, and forever living in our memories as the two crazy twenty something girls discovering life for the first time, it is one of the most precious things I have. It is a kind of love too, maybe platonic. Who says you cannot be in love with your friends? 

Anyways, what I am trying to say is that adventures gave me life, a sense of accomplishment at an early age, of independence, of being my own person, of being able to do my own thing. That’s what I love of adventures, of traveling, of my lonesome ways. It’s the most palpable way of knowing I truly love myself, that I can rely on myself, that I will never abandon me. 

With romantic love, however, there is always the possibility of this endings and of suffering. I already suffered I don’t want to suffer again, I tell to myself. And yet, now there is a window to the future, that may or may not be open: a life I want, not as carefree as the traveling one, but one of compromise and maturity.

Am I afraid because I still feel like a child? Because I dread the possibility of ending like a Nora in Et dukkehjem? Kang’s translator comments: “[the story] still reflects damaging gender norms, dismissing his wife’s longing for a different life as romantic idealism, typically feminine, while taking pride in what he considers his own steady realism”. And that is why she becomes a plant. because she is so easily dismissed. 

I don’t want to be dismissed.

But about the boy of this tale. If he loves me or not time will tell. If I can let down all my walls will be a matter of time too. He is tall and gentle, and we’ve been together just for a brief period of time. I don’t even know if he knows me, if I know him. But I like his soul. I hope he likes mine just as well. What shakes my world is the way he came into my life, when I was not looking for anything, when I was about to leave.

Some people call it destiny. At the end love is trying to understand another. If he tries, if the conversations keep going and I feel like he does not dismiss me, maybe then I won’t want to run away.