Cranes by hwang sunwon reading
•
The northern village at the border of the Thirty-eighth Parallel was snugly settled under the high, bright autumn sky.
One white gourd lay against another on the dirt floor of an empty farmhouse. The occasional village elders first put out their bamboo pipes before passing by, and the children, too, turned aside some distance off. Their faces were ridden with fear.
The by as a whole showed few traces of destruction from the war, but it did not seem like the same by Song-sam had known as a boy.
At the foot of a chestnut grove on the hill behind the village he stopped and climbed a chestnut tree. Somewhere far back in his mind he heard the old man with a wen shout, “You bad boy, you’re climbing up my chestnut tree again!”
The old man must have passed away, for among the few village elders Song-sam had met, the old man was not to be found. Holding the trunk of the tree, Song-sam gazed at the blue sky for a while. Some chestnuts fell to the ground as the dry clusters opene
•
2020 Sejong Writing Competition
Winning Entries :: Essays :: Adult third place
third place tie, adult essay division
bio
Chestnuts, Cigarettes, and Cranes: Transformed Relationships with Landscape in Hwang Sun-won’s “Cranes”
In “Cranes,” Hwang Sun-won uses the chestnut tree, cigarettes, and the cranes as environmental symbols to portray a complicated relationship between Songsam and Tokchae and, through them, the two Koreas. Nostalgia for a bucolic past mingles with the present emptiness of isolation and division, and Hwang emphasizes the inevitable harm inflicted on humans and the landscape through this conflict, even in attempts at peacemaking.
The chestnut tree’s presence in the story primarily reveals Songsam’s nostalgia for a simpler past. On the one hand, the old grandfather’s chestnut tree reminds Songsam of climbing the tree with Tokchae in order to stjäla the chestnuts. It’s a memory with pain (from the chestnut burrs in Songsam’s backside), but also with communit
•
Copy of selected portion of the Essay Competition Rule Page
Senior Division (grades 9-12)
Hwang Sun-won (1915-2000), one of Korea’s great 20th century writers of fiction, published "Cranes" in 1953, just as the Korean War ceasefire was coming into effect. The story has been seen and even criticized for being too optimistic - even naïve - about the possibilities for future reconciliation between the two Koreas.
Topic: In a carefully developed essay, point out those parts of the story that do seem to suggest the possibility or hope of future reconciliation between the two main characters and, by extension, the two Koreas. But noting that now, more than a half century later, hostile actions continue to occur while still there is no peace treaty, show how Hwang’s story might be read as a more complicated rendering of the situation on the Korean peninsula than naïvely optimistic.