K-Fiction series features bilingual (Korean-English) editions of texts by the most interesting contemporary authors from South Korea. Bilingual Modern series features bilingual (Korean-English) feaures editions of texts by the most interesting contemporary authors from South Korea.
This time Choo Nam-joo, whom you probably know from Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.tells the story of a family where the father has disappeared. You might have come across a similar theme in Please Look After my Mother (Zaopiekuj się moją mamą) by Shin Kyung-sook, but the disappearance of the mother and father have quite different consequences.
In Run Away, the mother informs her daughter about the father’s disappearance only after a month, explaining that she felt ashamed, but slowly it turns out that this situation is not as sad as it might seem. The family quickly gets used to the new everyday life. Even attempts to find the father are abandoned after a while, with the conviction that wherever he is, he is fine.
In her final essay, Roh Tae-hoon succinctly summarizes Choo Nam-joo’s feminist texts and her attempts to analyze the contemporary family and familial relationships. And Choo Nam-joo herself explains in the afterword that she wanted to imagine what society would look like without the patriarchy represented by the father – his absence is a metaphor for freedom.
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