From the front flap:
Ehwa, now a confident young woman, finds herself in the same maddening situation as her mother: waiting for a man. Her mother hopes for the return of her roaming lover, and Ehwa, in turn, gazes up at the same moon as her fiancé Duksam, a farmer who has gone to sea to seek his fortune so that he can marry her.
Review:
I do honestly want to like The Color Trilogy. I like the idea of a mother and her daughter living together in a rural village in turn-of-the-century Korea. I like learning about food and traditions that are new to me. I like the detailed drawings of the landscape and, especially, the family kitchen. The problem is there’s just so much about the series that annoys me that I simply can’t like it.
The central plot of this volume is that Ehwa’s love, Duksam, has left town to attempt to make a living as a fisherman, and so she is left to wait around until he returns to marry her. Her mother is also waiting for her traveling salesman lover to stop by, so they proceed to have many, many conversations about men and how it’s the lot of women to wait for them. I’m not sure they ever talk about anything but men, actually.
I know that the limited scope of life for a woman in this time and place is historically accurate, and that for a mother to say, “There is nothing better in life than getting married” reflects a period where marriage provided the ultimate in protection for a woman. But still, I can’t help but get fired up by speeches like this:
After waiting and waiting, you begin to lose track of whether it’s the moon or the sun in the sky, and that’s when he comes in with a smile on his face. As soon as you see that face, all is forgotten and you begin chasing after his footsteps once again. That is the heart of a woman.
To be honest, I think a large part of my ire is due to the fact that The Color Trilogy is written by a man. If a woman wrote these things, I’d still be annoyed, but coming from a male author I can’t help but read such statements as downright condescending. Try as I might to view these attitudes through a historical lens, I’m simply unable to get over my knee-jerk reaction.
It isn’t only Ehwa and her mother who are obsessed with discussing men and women. Everyone in town gets into the metaphor that women are flowers waiting for butterflies (men) to alight upon them, and almost all of them talk in language that’s incredibly, ridiculously poetic. In an early example, Duksam says, “I’m going to head for the sea. The sea that’s as wet and salty as your tears, and as bold and clear as your eyes.” Now, I admit that I have little appreciation for poetry, but this sounds to me like something one would come up with as a parody of purple prose.
Every now and then someone speaks plainly, like when Duksam frankly discusses his fear of leaving Ehwa behind, which had me wishing for more of the same. All of the imagery and metaphor might appeal to some readers, but to me, I would’ve enjoyed The Color Trilogy a lot more had it been more straightforward.
I reviewed The Color of Heaven for this month’s Manga Manhwa Moveable Feast. More reviews and discussion of this trilogy can be found here.
To be honest, I think a large part of my ire is due to the fact that The Color Trilogy is written by a man. If a woman wrote these things, I’d still be annoyed, but coming from a male author I can’t help but read such statements as downright condescending.
I think this really comes down to the question of separating what is realistic for the time period and what is the point of view of the author, which are very different things. My greatest beef with the series overall is not the realistic portrayal of the values of the period, but the fact that the author appears to feel a loving nostalgia for those values.
While I find the plight of Ehwa and her mother to be inexpressibly sad, Kim seems to find it beautiful and romantic. That’s what bothers me. This isn’t about the period. It’s about the author displaying his own values, which I find offensive. I think you’re feeling the same way.
Yes, exactly. As I wrote the line about marriage providing protection for a woman, I kept thinking about how Jane Austen deals with the same idea but with much greater success. Though many of her stories concern romance, the necessity of attaching oneself to a man in order to acquire some measure of security is usually not romanticized. See Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice for an example.