O Jeonghui

The Bird is a thoroughly depressing story of two siblings in the economic slump of the mid-1990s. A 12-year-old girl and her brother are abandoned by their abusive father (who has already driven away the mother). The children are semi-adopted by an eclectic set of neighbors but soon enter an apparent downward spiral.

The Bronze Mirror is in at least two collections, including the seminal Land of Exile. In The Bronze Mirror an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution.

Translations of O Jeonghui's work into English have been varied. Her most recently published work is Spirit on the Wind. Spirit on the Wind alternates between the first-person narration of a husband, Se-jung, and the third-person narration of Ŭn-su, his wife. As the story begins, Se-jung ponders the latest in a series of his wife's disappearances, the first of which occurred a mere six months after their marriage. As Ŭn-su continues to wander off all of those around her, including her mother, become increasingly incredulous and troubled by Ŭn-su's behavior, which they see as an abandonment of her family. Ŭn-su herself is unhappy. She vaguely identifies the root of her wanderlust in the fact that she was an adopted child, but this never quite seems reason enough and she is, “tired of wandering, tired of feeling that the home in which she was living was temporary”. Ŭn-su's continued betrayal of the family bond strains everyone, yet she is unable to control the winds that drive her. Worse, she cannot seem to summon up the memories that might explain it, “Everything before that [her 5th birthday] seemed hidden behind a dark curtain: none of it had surfaced in her mind” (55-56). The consistent and obvious metaphor in Spirit on the Wind is the wind itself, which is explicitly tied to memory: “Whenever she heard the wind, Ŭn-su would nod as if some long forgotten memory has just then surfaced“ (50); and she is left with only, “her anxious quest for identity to be stirred up and given wing by the slightest breath of wind” (56). Ŭn-su's marriage collapses. Ŭn-su is finally reunited with her memories, but by the time that comes, it is too late for a happy ending. Ŭn-su remains in search of that wind that can blow her clean. This work is an example of O Jeonghui's later work in which women “perceive, with fear and trembling, the abyss of emptiness that is the origin of and the truth of human existence.”

O Jeonghui (born November 9, 1947) (Korean: 오정희) is a South Korean writer.

O Jeonghui was born in Seoul, South Korea on November 9, 1947. She attended the Sorabol Art College from which she received her B.A. in creative writing in 1968. O Jeonghui made her initial literary impact while in her final year of college as she was awarded the Chungang Ilbo annual award for aspiring writers. This work was even more remarkable as O Jeonghui began to write it while she was still in high school. The story was “The Toyshop Woman,” a dark story about a high-school girl, who is emotionally abandoned by her parents and whose disabled brother dies, setting her on a path of madness which is paved by kleptomania and sexual obsession. As O Jeonghui matured as a writer, her work became increasingly non-imagistic and centered on the idea of family life as a trap for women. From 1990 on, O Jeonghui has published only sporadically, including one work of children's fiction, Song-I, It's Morning Outside the Door.