Sun-i Samch'on = 순이삼촌

Jeju Island, in Korean literature of the late 70s and 80s, is not the honeymoon destination of more recent years. It was a place of poverty, of bitter memories – a place to escape from rather than a destination to visit voluntarily. In Hyun Kil-un’s short story collection Dead Silence published in the mid 1980s, the typical first person narrator is a journalist from Seoul visiting his home town a little unwillingly again after a break of a number of years, possibly decades, to cover a story, in the process of which he ends up learning about the troubles of his and the island’s past.

In Hyun Ki-young’s Suni Samchon, published in 1978 the narrator is a Jeju native who has moved to Seoul and got himself a job with a decent company, married with a child. He hasn’t set foot on the island for 8 years, and he has lost most of his Jeju dialect, speaking instead with a Seoul accent.