Translator’s Note
“You must care a lot about this novel to spend so much time with it,” a new friend who had just learned about my translation project asked me. “What made you choose Blood Sisters for your project?” My answer at the time was something like this: translating this novel was an opportunity to create a productive conversation between two intertwined and porous cultural spheres: America of the late 2010s and Korea of the 1980s. Both spheres speak to struggles with mental health awareness, sexual violence, and hostile political climates. Also, describing and translating the Korean cultural practice of addressing each other by the role one plays (“teacher,” “boss,” “older brother,” and so on) allowed me to meditate on how we as humans seem to encounter one another first through the role we play in each other’s life with its accompanying expectations, and how puncturing the boundaries of those roles (dropping the honorifics and titles, falling in love) can be a precarious and daring act, a site of contact where desire, hatred, and identification take place.
In addition to those answers I’d like to share a personal reason for spending so much time with Blood Sisters. While translating Blood Sisters, I was going through major life events and my mental health was suffering. I witnessed Yeoul the protagonist struggle to navigate a hostile world with no parents, no mentor, and no reference point to give her direction, and I saw how art could become a hypnotizing space of projection where she could trace her own desires. I found myself engaging with the novel in a similar way. I projected my own past experiences—with depression and dissociation and my own negative inner dialogue—onto Yeoul’s, and I experienced an intense identification with her and with a Korea that felt at once familiar and strange.
A few weeks before sending off the final version of the manuscript, while in Korea, I decided to go visit Kim Yideum at her recently opened bookstore-café in Ilsan, Café Yideum. Having lived in the United States for over fifteen years, as regretful as it is to say, Korea has become something of a foreign country to me: I don’t know how to navigate it as I once did, and the food no longer sits as well. After a long, confusing bus ride with multiple transfers, I managed to meet up with Yideum at her Café Yideum, a cozy place brimming with a great selection of books. The posters for the reading series she hosts and a handwritten menu for teas perch on the wall, and a handwritten sign that says BOOK PHARMACY hangs on the doorway. When I asked her what a “book pharmacy” was she explained to me (while preparing some oolong tea) that upon request she “prescribes” a book for her customers after a conversation with them. In a way, I felt like Blood Sisters was the book Yideum Unni* prescribed for me, without either of us realizing. The novel asked me the questions that I needed to be asking myself. I believe there is healing in being asked the right questions and meditating on the answers. Isn’t that the reason why we are drawn to a particular work of art or particular people in the first place? Each encounter allows us to ask ourselves important questions and to search for their answers. On that note, I’m grateful to the books and the people who are close to me in my life. I hope you find in this novel the questions that you need someone to be asking you.
—Jiyoon Lee, April 2019
* Unni is used to address a younger woman or an older sister.
Blue Stockings
I open my eyes. I close them. Shit. Goddamned sunshine. I squint and gaze at the blurry moving object before my eyes. Wavering pale ankles. Long legs that keep extending. And blooming buttocks … Fuck! Let me see the whole you. My head is splitting apart. The woman is facing the window askew; her brassiere is wrapped around her waistline, full with two lovely rolls. She closes the hooks, turns the bra around, and pulls it up to her breasts—her round, full, warm breasts. Her face is hidden by her bushy hair. Turn toward me. Hold me! Kiss me!
Throughout my life I’ve seen countless naked women’s bodies. Beautiful ones. Well, to be specific, I’ve seen hundreds of paintings of women’s nudes. From Botticelli to Courbet to Dali, all their female nudes. I’ve seen them all. Realism, Surrealism, the year of completion, blah blah blah, I don’t really care. I just liked the ones reprinted in high resolution. One day in the corner of the silent library, I put my tongue on the print of L’Origine du Monde. When I did that, it felt like my body turned into wet foam, curling into itself, sucked into that hole—leaving this filthy, noisy world, its pop quizzes and minimum wage.
This live nude painting—here and now—is sensual in her toasty peach-fuzz. “I would never have taken up painting if God didn’t give women breasts in such marvelous ways.” I recall Renoir said something like that, then painted his life away. I probably indulge in women’s nudes as much as he did. It doesn’t really matter whether I see the marvel of the cosmos or merely a voyeur’s object.
The plaster casts for fine arts students that stood along my high school’s corridor were always mottled in graffiti and dirt. As a member of the Fine Arts Club, I was in charge of cleaning them. It was an endless cycle: if I erased the beard off one face the night before, the very next morning a crotch would be covered in pubic hair, a chest covered with twenty nipples. “Lowbrows, they just don’t get art,” muttered the art teacher. He tenderly held the Venus he had sculpted himself, and sleazily slow danced his way into the art room. He shrouded her in a white veil, placed her in the corner of the drawing room, and then told me to lock the door behind me and to make sure to check the lock before I left.
The next day I just had to scream. Oh, Jesus, which one of you perverted motherfuckers crawled in here? Who knocked over our Venus and sprayed fucking semen everywhere? I tenderly wiped Venus’s lips and throat with a rag for a while, but then threw the rag aside and stormed out. I thought about asking my friend to get my brushes and palette from the art room, but I didn’t care anymore. That was it—I was done with the Fine Arts Club where I mostly killed time anyway.
“Keep pushing on as though you just started” was the motto given to the club, but mine was the polar opposite. I never finished anything. It was easier to erase it and start over. Easier than swatting a fly.
There she is between my half-closed lids. “Are you awake?” Jimin Sunbe1 is asking. “I’m gonna be late again.” Brassiere fastened, her form clothed. “See you later!”
“Wait a sec!” I start coughing. I want to say I’m sorry, I want to say I went over the line last night, but the door slams shut. What’s the occasion? She’s putting on a skirt? And even lipstick? Ever since I started crashing at her place, Jimin Sunbe’s outfit was consistent. She always had her hair tied in a tight ponytail, wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and threw on a black jacket and gray scarf. When she added her giant backpack, she looked like a traveler about to go on a trip.
Last night, Jimin, without warning, led a woman with an outfit similar to hers and two men into the room. I was just splitting the hard ramen noodles in half to throw them into a pot of boiling water. I didn’t know we were having guests. Awkward. I crushed the ramen with my fist.
“Say hello, everyone! Here are my dear friends, and this is … well, I’ve talked to you guys about her. This is a talent who hopefully will join our Blue Stockings Club.” Jimin tapped my shoulder as she smiled—her pink chewing gum emerged between her lips. This was the first time I’d even heard of the Blue Stockings Club or anything about me joining it, so I was mostly confused. I turned the stove off and bowed my head to the guests. My big toenails were blue (and they weren’t the only things on my body that were bruised). The woman with a mole on her nose added more water and two more ramen packets into the pot. When she noticed the