There is a street in Edinburgh's Old Town, tucked behind the dental hospital, that most visitors never stumble upon unless they are looking for it. West Port has been the city's second-hand book quarter for longer than I have been alive, a row of narrow shopfronts where the stock spills from shelf to floor to pavement, and where the smell of old paper is thick enough to taste. The street had a rougher reputation once, and older Edinburgh hands will tell you so with a certain relish, but these days it is mostly booksellers, a cheesemonger, and the occasional lost tourist wondering how they ended up here rather than on the Royal Mile. I go there when I ought to be doing something else entirely, which is, I suspect, the precise function of a second-hand bookshop. Last week, wedged between a water-stained Who Ate Up All the Shinga? and a Penguin Classics Silas Marner nobody will ever buy, I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about a Park Wan-suh novel that was not on the shelf at all.
Park Wan-suh, born in 1931 in what is now North Korea, made her literary debut startlingly late, at forty, with The Naked Tree in 1970 -- the war had swallowed her university years whole, and it swallowed her brother too. She spent the following four decades writing, with an unsparing and often very funny eye, about the Korean War and the families it broke. Her 1983 novel 그해 겨울은 따뜻했네 is sometimes rendered in English-language reference sources as Warm Was the Winter That Year; I have taken a small liberty with the title of this piece, since I could not locate a complete published English translation to defer to, unlike her Naked Tree or Who Ate Up All the Shinga? It is, to my mind, the cruellest and best of her war novels, alongside Mother's Stake and, later, Who Ate Up All the Shinga? itself -- an unofficial trilogy of the same wound, revisited each time from a different distance and under a different disguise. I first read it years ago, badly, with a dictionary at my elbow and a very patient classmate correcting my grammar. I have never quite put it down since.
There is a fact about Park's own life that this novel never states outright, though it seems to sit beneath every page of it. During the war, her mother and elder brother were taken north by the retreating North Korean army, and she never saw her brother again. The grief in this book belongs, on paper, entirely to invented people. But I find it difficult to read Su-ji's careful, guilty prosperity without hearing, somewhere underneath the prose, a novelist who understood precisely what a forced separation costs, and who had no orphanage donation of her own to make about it.
The novel opens with a hunger so plain it is almost embarrassing to describe. During the chaos of the January 1951 retreat from Seoul -- the second great exodus of the war, after Chinese forces pushed the front south again -- seven-year-old Su-ji is fleeing with her family along a road choked with carts, soldiers, and other families doing exactly what hers is doing. Her two-years-younger sister, Su-in, nicknamed Omok for her pretty, neat features, keeps taking food from Su-ji's hands, as small hungry children do. In the crush of the crowd, Su-ji lets go of her sister's fingers. It is not, in the text, a decision. It is simply a hand opening.
A photorealistic, documentary-style photograph of a mass of Korean refugees fleeing along a snow-covered road in winter 1951, carrying bundles and pulling carts, a young girl's small gloved hand slipping loose from an older child's grip in the foreground, muted wintry light, natural lighting, shallow depth of field, historical reportage aesthetic.
Their father, a bank clerk named Han Nam-seok, had already vanished months earlier, dragged before a people's court during the North's brief occupation of Seoul and never seen again. So Su-ji and her elder brother Su-cheol grow up on what remains of his savings, comfortably, almost gracefully. They do eventually search for Omok, in their fashion: Su-cheol keeps a private drawer of newspaper cuttings and broadcast appeals for missing persons, scanning them for years the way another man might follow a horse he had once bet on and lost, while Su-ji funnels money to orphanages under a name that is not her own. When Su-cheol finally traces her to a place called Onui-ui-jip, the siblings say nothing. To reveal her, they reason, without ever quite phrasing it this plainly to themselves, would be to unsettle a life they have built rather carefully on her absence. Su-ji even goes so far as to break up her own former sweetheart's brief romance with the sister she abandoned, out of something she will not call jealousy -- of all the novel's betrayals, perhaps the pettiest, and therefore the most convincing, since grand historical crimes are easy enough to hold at arm's length, but ordinary jealousy dressed up as concern for a sister's welfare is a much harder thing to disown. Omok, meanwhile, marries a boiler repairman she meets at the orphanage, bears five children, and dies of tuberculosis after a marriage marked by drink and hardship. Su-ji repents only at the very end, at her sister's bedside, which is rather too late to do either of them any good.
A 2021 academic study of the novel maps this divide almost literally onto the geography of postwar Seoul: Su-ji's family settles into the comfortable, planned neighbourhoods that were reshaping the capital through the 1960s and 70s, while Omok is pushed to its margins, first through the orphanage system and then through the informal, unregulated housing that grew up around the city's edges as it industrialised. The sisters do not simply diverge in fortune. They diverge in space, on a map that Seoul itself was busy redrawing at the time, block by block, in favour of people exactly like Su-ji. It is a useful reminder that this is not only a family story. It is a small, precise portrait of how a nation's growth chart and its private betrayals were, for a good many people, drawn with the same pen. This is not a reading that requires abandoning the novel's interest in guilt and hypocrisy; if anything it sharpens it, since Su-ji's prosperity turns out to be not merely a private inheritance but a share, however modest, in a much larger civic project of forgetting.
What struck me, reading it again this week with rather more Korean at my disposal than I had at twenty-two, is how precisely this mirrors a novel from my own tradition: Ian McEwan's Atonement. Both open, in their way, with an ordinary domestic scene -- a garden, a road home -- that a single act by a child then poisons for decades. Both hinge on that act being, at bottom, a small thing: one careless, one wilfully self-serving, neither of them premeditated in any way the law would recognise. Both indict a class rather than merely a person. But McEwan's guilt is, in the end, private and literary; Briony writes her way toward a kind of confession, however inadequate, and McEwan even lets his novelist-narrator admit, in a late twist, that the reconciliation she has just described to us never happened at all, that she invented it because the real Robbie and the real Cecilia had already died, and fiction was the one place left where she could still make amends. Park allows Su-ji no such tidy reckoning, and Park is not interested in one family's sin alone. A critic I read recently on this novel put it rather better than I could: the book treats the family as both a product of war and a mechanism that endlessly reproduces its logic within its own four walls.
A photorealistic photograph of a well-appointed South Korean middle-class living room interior from the early 1980s, warm lamplight, polished furniture, a framed family photograph with one figure conspicuously absent from the frame's edge, shallow depth of field, natural lighting, quiet domestic atmosphere with an undertone of unease.
I am, as any reader of this blog will know by now, a Scotsman by birth and disposition, and my own culture has produced more than its share of quiet self-deception dressed up as good manners. We are not, on the whole, a people who enjoy confrontation. A Scottish family in Su-cheol's position might simply never speak of the matter again, burying the whole affair under years of strained gatherings and carefully redirected conversation. But there is a specifically Korean architecture to the silence in this novel that I do not think my own tradition quite manages -- a Confucian weight to chemyeon, to the family's collective face, that makes Su-cheol's anonymous charity feel less like cowardice and more like duty rightly discharged. His family goes further than mine would, converting the silence itself into an ongoing, deliberate act of household management, with its own quiet, dutiful budget line. He has, in his own accounting, done everything a responsible elder brother ought to do. He has paid. He has simply not looked her in the eye while doing so. It is a more devastating kind of hypocrisy than the English variety, because it comes dressed as virtue rather than as evasion.
This, I think, is also why the novel has travelled so poorly outside Korea, whatever the reference books call it in English. Han Kang's The Vegetarian, which I wrote about here some weeks ago [https://www.james7fleming.com/2026/07/reading-han-kang-uncomfortable-truth.html], concerns a single body's private rebellion; it needs almost no local knowledge to land its blow, which is precisely why prize juries and foreign publishers can embrace it so readily. That Winter, So Warm needs you to understand something more particular and less exportable: that South Korea's astonishing postwar prosperity, the one the world so admires, was built by people who had, in one way or another, let go of somebody's hand along the road. It is a national self-indictment rather than a universal one, and national self-indictments rarely translate as cleanly as the more interior sort -- commercially, or, I suspect, emotionally, since a foreign reader has nowhere convenient to stand while reading it, no city of their own it might be quietly accusing. We are, at the moment, living through a period in which Korean fiction travels further and faster into English than it ever has before, and I confess I find something quietly telling in which of Park's own books have made that journey, and which have not.
A close-up, photorealistic photograph of a worn secondhand paperback resting on a wooden shelf in a cluttered Edinburgh bookshop, other spines softly out of focus around it, warm afternoon light through a shop window, natural lighting, shallow depth of field, contemplative and nostalgic mood.
I did not buy anything at West Port that afternoon, in the end. I stood for a while with the water-stained Park Wan-suh in my hand, thought about my own boxes of books, lost somewhere in a move I made decades ago and have never quite stopped resenting, and put it back on the shelf for someone else to find. I have never once, in my own comfortable life, had to choose between my own hunger and somebody else's. That is not virtue on my part. It is simply luck, dressed up, if I am not careful, as character. There are debts, I have come to think, that are not settled by finding the right book, or the right translation, or even the right apology. Su-ji learns this far too late. I would rather learn it now, in a bookshop on an ordinary afternoon, with nothing at stake but my own conscience -- which is, perhaps, the only sort of warmth this particular winter has to offer.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Original (Korean Edition): Aladin Bookstore
(No complete English edition appears to be currently in print, so far as I have been able to determine.)
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
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