Flowers of Mold

Flowers of Mold

Flowers of Mold is a collection of ten short stories written by Ha Seong-nan. The collection was originally published in Korean in 1999, and later translated by Janet Hong to be published in English in 2019. While featuring separate characters and settings, each story contains different angles of Korean culture and life. Many of the stories share common literary and symbolic themes as well.

"Flowers of Mold"
Short story by Ha Seong-nan
Translator	Janet Hong
Country	Korea
Language	Korean, translated in English
Publication
Published in	1999
Publication type	Print (Paperback)
Publisher	Open Letter Publishing
Published in English	2019

Short stories

The following is a list of short stories included in Flowers of Mold

Waxen Wings

This story follows the life of Birdie, a girl who wishes to fly. In her pursuit of flight, she finds gymnastics and joins a team. She gets better by the day but her advantageous small stature does not last long. She hits a growth spurt in high school and is soon unable to land the flips she could before. She eventually quits the team and begins the focus on a new future as her dream of nationals crumbles. Coping with her new life, she meets a movie store owner and has a brief relationship before he leaves town. Birdie then decides to take on hang-gliding. She feels that she can finally fly as she wished so bad for in her gymnastics days. However, her flight is short lived as she crashes and loses a leg in the accident. From her hospital room she sees a vision of herself when she was small and believed she could fly.

Nightmare

"Nightmare" follows the repetitive raping of a girl on her families farm. The story begins when she wakes up and urges her parents to remember her assault from the night before, but the refuse and claim that she just had a nightmare. She then investigates the pear farm for a man with a cut, hoping that the swing she took at her attacker with a clock left an identifiable mark. She finds a young worker with a bandage and talks to him in private. He gives her shears, daring for her to stab her rapist with them if she is truly being attacked at night. The girl works as a tutor but begins to not show up for work. She travels into Seoul on multiple occasions to dress up and walk along the streets but returns home drenched from the rain. Finally, her attacker comes in the night again and she stabs him in the back with the shears and crushes his head with a shovel. She buries his body in the orchard and the next morning goes to she her parents. However, they can no longer find the body and reassure her that it was just a nightmare.

The Retreat

This story follows the events that take place after a rumor spreads among the Taewang tenants that the owner Kwak was going to sell the building. In an argument with the director following a tenant meeting about an annual retreat, Kwak shoved the director into a glass cabinet. The director crashes into the cabinet and never gets back up. Kwak then frantically attempts to cover up the murder by hiding the body of the director in his car, telling the other tenants that the director is drunk and needs a ride home. His plan repeatedly gets interrupted by questioning tenants and Kwak shifts his efforts to organize a plot to kill the tenants in a freak boating accident. The tenants gather in front of the building prepared for the retreat but are disappointed that the director cant join. They all smile for a picture.

The Woman Next Door

The short story titled "The Woman Next Door" follows the events between a couple and their child and the new woman that moved in next door. Myeonghui introduces herself and befriends the family by borrowing various objects - beginning with a spatula. As she replaces her borrowed objects and becomes more involved in each of family members' lives, the wife Yeongmi begins to forget things: forgetting clothes in the washer, forgetting her son at school, and eventually forgetting who she is. Yeongmi begins trying to memorize countries and their capitals in order to reclaim her life. Despite her effort to fix her memory, Myeonghui seems to replace Yeongmi as a mother and wife by fulfilling the forgotten duties. While the thrill of shoplifting first brought Yeongmi and Myeonghui together, it is also what tears Yeongmi from her family. Yeongmi is caught shoplifting - unsure if it was due to the scouring pads she stuffed into her bra or the gum planted in her shopping bag - and begins repeating the capitals and countries she memorized. Myeonghui comforts Yeongmi's husband and comments that she has cracked. Yeongmi then realizes that it is too late and her neighbor has taken her life just as she borrowed and never returned her spatula.

Flag

This story begins with an electrician being called to fix a power outage. At the location electrical pole assigned, he climbs and finds the clothes of a man and a journal in the pocket of the trousers. For the remainder of the story, it is formatted as said journal. The logs begin with accounts from the owners bus commute to work every day. He notes that he passes an advertisement for a trip to Hawaii every morning. A beautiful woman is featured on the advertisement which the man becomes infatuated with. He spends his days as a car salesman and shining the windows in front of the dealership. One day, the lady from the advertisement appears in front of the dealership and eyes the sedan that is displayed. The man later meets up with old friends and gets drunk, imagining that he arrived home to meet the lady from the dealership named Yi Minjae. However, this was just a dream as he wakes up on the bus. The next morning at the dealership, Yi Minjae appears again and asks for a test drive. The man enthusiastically complies as he wants to sells the expensive sedan and impress the Yi Minjae. But as he pulls of the display, he realises too late that he did not open the glass doors he polished and crashes through them and into a streetlight. The electrician attempts to find the man but finds no success.

Your Rearview Mirror

This story follows a security guard known as the "Mirror Man" (named after the reflective sunglasses he wears). As he watches over the various areas over the shopping center he is stationed in, he takes interest in a woman that admires a grey dress without buying it. She returns to the store every twenty eight days, eventually attempting to steal the dress. The man catches her in the act and scolds her, but does not turn her in. As he lets her go, she leaves a lighter in his pocket, which has a number he can reach her with. Using this number, the man finds her in a club and watches as she performs a magic act. The man learns her name (Choi Sun-ae) and her stage name (Luna), and she asks him to become her partner for her act. Working regularly, the man slacks on his security job, which leads to a pay cut. Deciding to quit the job for the magic act, the man and Choi Sun-ae break into the shopping center that he worked at, stole the dress that she was looking at previously, and drove off. On the way to their next show, their bus crashes. The man looks for Choi Sun-ae in the wreckage, and finds her skirt up, revealing that she is transgender. The man immediately sustains a serious head injury from the seat above him.

Waking up in the hospital, the man learns that nobody died during the plane crash. Asking for Choi Sun-ae, the man is told that there was no one on the bus with that name. He bumps into a young man with long hair claiming to recognize him, but the young man denies it.

Flowers of Mold

This story, sharing the name of the collection, follows a man living in an apartment alone. He hears someone yelling and getting kicked out of the adjacent apartment, 507. After they let, he sneaks down the stairs of his complex to dig through the tenants' trash. He takes it back to his apartment and takes inventory of its contents. A drunk man carrying flowers rings the door, and falls in, saying that he is looking for 507. The apartment goes dark for several days, and the man notices the balcony door is shattered. The woman living there returns, and the man notices the flowers the drunk man had were covered in maggots. The man steals one of her shoes while she is out, and later finds the other one in the trash, thus identifying what garbage is her's. Sifting through her garbage, the man finds a pager number, and calls, but reaches someone else. The man finds 507 being repainted and discovers that the woman has moved out. The drunk man returns again, and they both search outside the complex for a statue that the woman broke the balcony door with.

Toothpaste

This story starts with a flashback. The main character used to be in the military, and spent most of his time guarding a rooftop surrounded by advertising billboards. Back in present day, the guard at his apartment complex hands the man a letter he found addressed to him, but the man claims it is not for him. The man, who is late, steps into the screening room at the advertising company he works at, and watches their new ad for toothpaste. He is in charge of coming up with the slogan for the campaign. Staying after the screening, the man approaches the woman who is on their ad (Choi Myeong-ae) to ask if they know each other. Choi Myeong-ae denies it. The man notices she wears a dress with many buttons. At his apartment complex, the man receives another letter, which describes trying to put on a dress with many buttons on. The man still thinks the letter is for someone else. The next day at work, the company is shooting another advertisement. Following the shoot, Choi Myeong-ae calls the name that had been addressed on the letter to the man. He realizes that she was the star of his biggest advertising slogan, although the slogan never helped her career. They meet again on the bus and the man acknowledges that they had met before, but refrains from bringing up her past career. He admires her smile, which he thinks is going to be famous after the commercial.

Early Beans

This story begins with a man in traffic, waiting for school children to get out of his way as he drives to the mall. He is supposed to pick up gifts and come up with a joke for a woman's birthday. He hits a delivery driver, and they are both injured. While the delivery driver is waiting for surgery, he asks the man to deliver his package for him. The man takes the subway to get to Icheon, but does not truly know where he is going. Three high school girls join him in his car, and they act casually and ignore the man. The man is very distracted by the girls, and he notices that they do nothing to cover up when their skirts expose them. He grows uncomfortable, and the girls eventually leave, with one claiming to have won a bet. They were betting on the man looking up their skirts. After exiting the subway, the man uses a map that the delivery driver made to find landmarks near the destination. While walking to the package's destination, the man catches up to one of the high school girls from the subway, who is the daughter of the client who ordered the package. The man promises not to tell the father if she meets up with him later. They meet, and take a taxi to the mall. The girl disguises herself and leaves him. The man returns to his apartment complex and gets insulted by the woman whose birthday he missed.

Onion

This story opens up with a flash forward of two policemen investigating a crime scene, which they allege is a double suicide. Back to earlier, a man who is closing up a restaurant looks up to see a woman peering in. The woman, looking very weary, comes in and asks for some food. The man prepares fish, but she is startled when the tongue falls out, causing the man to cut his cheek and injure his foot. Flashing back, the woman is at the day care she works at. The woman drives several sick children to the pediatric clinic. At the clinic, she sits down, and realizes that she sat on a baby, smothering it. Panicking, she leaves and drops the kids back off at the day care center. She does not return to her apartment, but keeps running away. She eventually finds herself at a Japanese restaurant. In present day, the man got stitches and a cast for his foot. The man and the woman drive to the east coast together. The woman calls the pediatric clinic to see if the child is dead, but the woman thinks she is prank calling. They both come to a small house, and stay there with the woman who owns it. The man, searching for a job, leaves for the city with the woman. He crashes into a pole.

Themes and Influences

The overarching devices used throughout the collection are primarily the use of rot, heat and claustrophobia. Ha Seong-nan uses these sources of imagery to create the consistent morbid tone throughout the pieces and lend commentary on the Korean lifestyle. Some argue that Flowers of Mold acts as a model of the divide in socioeconomic status as well as the gender norms of the time. Others claim that the collection highlights the issues of urban living in South Korea and the symbolism of apartments in the modern world.

Critical reception

Flowers of Mold received the Dong-In Literary Award in 1999.

See also

• Ha Seong-nan