Lee Dong-ha’s “Outside the Door,” one of the fifteen volumes in the
Bilingual Edition of Modern Korean Literature collection published on
March 14 this year, revolves around a father and a son who are caught in
an odd situation and have to spend an evening together outside the
house.
The story of the 1992 novella is set in the early 1990s,
when cellular phones were not that common. It begins with a man in his
late 40s, Jong-nam, standing outside the locked door to his apartment in
Seoul.
The man's job is far away, in a remote area, and it only
allows him to head back to Seoul once a month, on the last Friday, to
spend one weekend with his family.
One day, he gets home, this
time without reminding his family of his homecoming. The man knocks on
the door numerous times, but finds himself not being able to get in
because no one is home.
He hangs around the stairwell, waiting
for his wife to show up. All of a sudden, the man hears something
completely unexpected from the stairs above.
“Look here… aren’t you... Naem-i?”
Then,
a very familiar face shows itself. The man recognizes the familiar
voice right away. It's his own father, who always calls him by the
second syllable of his name and mispronounces it as Naem, too, instead
of Nam.
The father had come to Seoul from his own hometown, Daegu, also unannounced, and has been waiting outside the locked apartment.
The
father and son have no choice but to spend the evening together outside
the door in the hallway. The son takes his father to a few places: an
optometrist’s office, the public baths, a restaurant and then a men’s
clothing store.
While at the public baths together, the son
notices a long scar under his father’s armpit that he had not known
about, a scar left by a bullet wound he suffered during the war.
“Outside
the Door,” rather than inside the house, the son begins to see his
father from a different perspective, a father that he has so far
regarded as grossly incompetent for having left his family in poverty.
The son eventually understands the rough times through which his father
has lived, the people he has met and his agonies.
Any resentment or suspicions the son long had against his father eventually start to melt away.