Won-Pyung Sohn (Seoul, 1979) still savors Almond honey, the story of an adolescent incapable of feeling. The novel, which has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages, made her one of the best-known faces of South Korean literature in the West. Something unusual in the case of a literary debut.
The unexpected success overwhelmed her to the point that she did not know how to face the pen again. “I was under a lot of pressure because of my constant desire to write and also because of the obligations I had as a writer. I had many ideas but none appealed to me”, the writer confesses to La Vanguardia by email. She prefers this method, which does not break her writing routine, to talk about her day-to-day life and her latest work, El impulse (Today's Issues) that hits bookstores this Wednesday.
During that blank page lockout, she decided to dive into forums for inspiration. In one of them, a message was found that said: 'Recommend stories of people who failed and then succeeded. I need those stories now more than ever. “Underneath his request there was no comment or recommendation so I decided that I had to be the one to write something for that person. Before my debut, I also had moments when I desperately needed to read stories like that", says the author, to whom phrases like "everything will be fine" or "it's fine like this" did nothing more than "calm the tears of momentary way. She tried to convince me that, at the end of it all, one would be able to summarize what they had suffered in a single sentence, like 'what hard times we live in', and laugh.
This is how Andrés Kim Seong-on was born, the protagonist of this story, a man who does not even succeed when he makes the decision to commit suicide. He tries. He walks several times across the Mapo Bridge, better known as the 'suicide bridge', in Seoul, and looks straight into the abyss. He has the firm decision to die, but the icy winds of that day push him back. The idea of ending up frozen in the river doesn't quite convince him so he turns around and thinks of a plan B while he wonders where everything went wrong.
“I was not inspired by anyone specific. I think that adopting people close to you as a writing model can hinder the creation of new stories, since it requires constant energy to find someone to imitate”, admits the author, who inevitably did take into account how deep-rooted the suicide in the country, where an average of 36 people a day took their own lives, according to the WHO.
Won-Pyung is one of those who believes that "hitting bottom is only the first step to get to the surface", and this is demonstrated with this plot that, far from what it may seem at first, has an optimistic message. Of course, he stresses the importance of talking about mental health, both in the media and in literature, since they are dedicated to "portraying the human condition" for which "this type of story has to find its place more and more ”.
The author acknowledges that the pandemic has influenced the way these issues are addressed. Of course, she does not hide that she is concerned about the “growing lack of empathy and concern for others. Covid showed that we can live without physically interacting with other people and without interfering in the lives of others. This could have been an advantage at the time, but in the long run it brings many drawbacks”.
He regrets that society is bothered “increasingly by your happiness and that of the rest. It seems that most people are only happy when it comes to a family member they feel close to or when something good happens to someone who is in a lower position than us, either financially or emotionally.”
Won-Pyung bets on the revolution of small gestures to try to achieve balance. Something as small as correcting her body posture encourages the protagonist to change her mood and the writer believes that if we all decided to smile more, we would do better. "There are no excuses. It is something that is learned. You just have to lift the corners of the lips. It may not be a genuine smile, but it is said that our brain secretes dopamine even when we fake a smile. You just have to try."
