Ju-Chan & Bruce Fulton, CHINATOWN by Oh Jung-hee

Translators Ju-Chan and Bruce Fulton visit the bookstore for a discussion of their new translation of Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee
About this Event

Translators Ju-Chan and Bruce Fulton visit the bookstore for a discussion of their new translation of Chinatown by Oh Jung-hee, a story collection by the beloved South Korean writer.

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently One Left by Kim Soom, Togani by Gong Ji-young, and Chinatown (2025) by Oh Jung-hee, the first Penguin Modern Classic devoted to a Korean writer. The Fultons’ translations of Korean short fiction appear in journals such as Granta, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and the New England Review. Among the Fultons’ awards and fellowships are a PEN America Heim Translation grant, two U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships (including the first ever awarded for a Korean project), and the first residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre awarded to translators from any Asian language. Bruce Fulton is the editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories (2023), the first volume of modern Korean literature among Penguin UK’s 3500-plus World Classics.

Oh Jung-hee is often considered the grande dame of South Korean literature. Her work has received both the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Dong-in Literary Award, South Korea's most prestigious prizes for short fiction, and has been translated into multiple languages in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.