A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those same train tracks are Nana’s first childhood memory, a memory that forms how she views her birth mother, her foster father, and her own sense of self. Now an award-winning playwright in Paris, Nana receives an invitation to Seoul from an amateur filmmaker, who proposes a documentary on her adoption, a film that will revisit the fragmented scenes of her past.
Nana had returned to Korea a year earlier as part of an NGO program for overseas adoptees, even showing her old passport to an interviewer with hopes of reuniting with her foster family. The trip concluded with bitter disappointment. But it was the same interview that inspired the filmmaker to reach out. Pregnant, and justifiably reluctant, Nana agrees to shoot the documentary on the promise that she might one day find the meaning behind her previous names. Simple Heart is therefore framed and driven by this promise.
The process of discovery, however, is not as cathartic as Nana first imagined. The definition of the name Munju that Nana had originally lighted upon, “door pillars”, served as a consolation, at least for a time as a root to her place of birth. That consolation later proves to be untenable. The trauma of abandonment manifests once another translation, by way of a different dialect, is revealed to be: “dust”.
A small, useless substance. Particles that must be removed for cleanliness. The final form all living things take before their hollow existence comes to a close. The more I thought about the definition, the greater my suspicions grew that “dust” was the real meaning of Munju. Because I had never settled in one place, blowing around in even the faintest breeze all my life.
Nana’s attention to names is not applied solely on her own. While she is fluent in Korean, names often draw from a past and culture that Nana did not grow up in. Encountering new companions, new places, her initial approach is to ask what their names mean. Cho effectively uses the etymology as concrete allegories that guide the story. For example, when Nana arrives at Itaewon, the place where she stays, she learns that the name stems from the term for violated women who came to the area to give birth—these women are called Itain—“‘the different’, ‘the other.’”
A good deal of tension, too, is drawn from Nana’s persisting sense of being an outsider. A Korean in France, a foreigner in Korea, a girl abandoned can never truly belong. What gives Nana solace is meeting others who were also cast aside by society. What gives Nana strength is the child that she bears, whom she names Wooju.
I am the intermediary between Wooju and the world, the harbinger of their existence to the people of this world, and witness-bound to testify to their process of growing up. I will never neglect these roles and I will never let Wooju contemplate such things as darkness.
Nana’s pregnancy and her reminiscing childhood memories, put against each other, form a line of near symmetry in the book. Another: being raised by Henri, a filmmaker, and now participating as the subject of a documentary. The nun who cared for her in the orphanage had a breakdown similar to that of Nana’s adoptive mother. These lines, then layers, of near symmetry are made implicitly, as part of a greater narrative structure, and explicitly, to signify the protagonist’s division of her own life into Nana and Munju.
Off the screen—that is to say, outside of my life—was Munju. Suppose there was a Munju who had stayed in Korea and aged at the same pace as Nana in France—two parallel lives weren’t completely impossible. On special days, when I was in a good mood, when I kept questioning my good mood until it gave way to a hateful memory, on days when I was overcome, without reason or context, by the premonition that everyone I knew would abandon me, I summoned Munju off the screen as one would reach for a first aid kit.
First aid can only do so much. What Nana undertakes is a proper recovery of broken parts–not as a tidy resolution, but as means to move on.
Those familiar with tales of adoption and identity would recognise the themes. However, the premise of overseas adoption is filtered through a distinct French-Korean background and careful etymological allegories. Written in an understated style of considerable charm, Cho’s latest novel proves the value of revisiting what’s already known.