by Yoon, Paul
It was as though no one had stayed here at all. In the emptiness of the room he knew that she was gone again.
He left the shop, leaving the sign on the door how it was. It was a clear day. The stores were opening. Inside the bakery a line had already formed. Above him, through the open balcony door, his neighbor watered plants while her husband turned the dial of a television.
He climbed the hill. He passed the church and entered the meadow, heading toward the ridge. He waited under the tree, scanning the coast and the farmlands where the horses were already grazing. The road was empty. He raised his hands above his eyes and kept waiting.
He did not hear the footsteps until they were near him. He turned to see Peixe breathing heavily from the climb. The man, dressed in a torn shirt, took his glasses off and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
—There’s still some life in it, Peixe said, tapping his leg with his cane.
He took Peixe’s arm to help him sit but the groundskeeper shook his head. From his pocket he took out a spyglass.
—My mother’s, he said. She found it on the shore. Many years ago. A star in the sand, she called it. She picked it up and looked into it. She swiveled her body. In that circle she saw the silhouette of a man rowing toward her. A fisherman. She married him three months later.
—I used to stand here and use it to watch the camp, watch Kiyoshi tossing rocks into the air. Or look for my father. They fished along the coast. In the shallow water. Shellfish. Sometimes I carry it with me all day. I don’t know why. Here. Try.
Yohan extended the spyglass and looked through the lens. He spotted seabirds on a tall boulder. The flag of the new hotel. The bright red of a T-shirt hanging on a rooftop clothesline.
Peixe tilted his head back and studied the tree.
—I have never climbed this tree, he said.
He rubbed his leg. He grinned. He took Yohan’s shoulder.
He said, —Help, and dropped his cane and leaned his weight against him.
Yohan, laughing, wrapped his arms around the man’s waist and lifted him as high as he could. Peixe reached for a branch. Yohan formed a step with his hands and soon the groundskeeper sat high in the tree.
Yohan picked up the cane and hooked it over a branch. He returned the spyglass and Peixe leaned back, shutting his eyes.
—Yohan, he said. Thank you. I’ll stay here for a while.
He didn’t know how Peixe would climb down. With his eyes still closed, Peixe tapped his arms.
—There’s still life in these, he said, and he waved and Yohan waved back.
He was halfway across the meadow when he heard again Peixe’s voice.
—Try the fishing village, he said.
A wind was blowing. In the distance, high up in the tree, he saw his friend raise the spyglass out toward the water.
• • •
He walked past the harbor and the ships, following the coastal road south. When he was away from the town he left the road and climbed down onto a beach. He continued along the sand, moving with the curve of the shore.
At the base of a high cliff there was a small bay and a cluster of homes beyond a grove. They were shanties and lean-tos with rooftops made of tin, thatch, and some scavenged tiles. Smoke rose from their thin flues.
Men and women appeared. They crossed through the grove and approached the dugout canoes on the beach. They passed him and some nodded as they leaned forward and gripped the canoes and pushed, the hulls cutting the sand.
Near the grove an open satchel was leaning against a log. He kneeled. A winter coat had been folded into it and he saw the worn collar and a frayed sleeve. The color of the fabric had faded. He touched the coat and held the buttons with the anchors on them and he began to cry.
The villagers let him be. He wiped his face. He loosened his necktie and sat on the log beside the satchel.
Yohan spent the day there. He watched families head out into the sea while others returned. He listened to the swing of hinges, footsteps, and seabirds.
A man approached him, carrying a bundle of newspaper under his arm. He was tall and had long, pale hair. His hands were dark from ash. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and offered the package to him. Inside there were six fish he had caught. Yohan shook his head, thanking him, and the man shrugged, placing the bundle into a basket.
In the afternoon, voices of children broke through the trees and they gathered around him, asking if he was the tailor and what he was doing here. They took turns examining his necktie and his jacket lying beside him.
A girl was carrying a soccer ball. Yohan took off his shoes and played soccer with the children on the beach. He ran. They chased him. They left a thousand footprints in the sand.
He helped a family build a fire. He returned to the log and shared his cigarettes with the villagers. A man, hesitating, brought him a shirt and a piece of string and Yohan mended the tear. Then the man brought the clothes of his children and he mended those, too.
Toward the evening he saw a group of small dugout canoes approaching the bay. They came from the south, following the coast, scattered along the water.
Bia was among them. She was wearing a long-brimmed hat made of straw and had tied the skirt of her green dress around her legs. She paddled into the bay.
Around her, fishermen jumped into the water and pulled their canoes to shore. They carried their nets and their buckets of shellfish and climbed the beach toward their homes.
He approached her. He thought she would disembark as well but she stayed, sitting there in the boat as it rocked from the tide. The brim of her hat shaded her eyes so that he couldn’t tell where she was looking.
In that moment he wanted nothing more than to see her face.
—Well, come on then, she said, and lifted her hand.
For the first time he thought he heard an embarrassment in her voice. Suddenly she appeared small in the bay.
So he stepped into the water. He waded toward her and climbed into the canoe. He felt the cool and the damp of her hand as she guided him behind her.
His trousers were drenched. She smiled. She was holding a paddle made of tin and a broken broom handle. An empty bucket and a net lay beside her feet.
She tipped her hat back and paused, turning to him and looking down at her palms.
—Yohan, she said. I’m not very good at this.
She fell silent. The sounds of the village came to them and the girl with the soccer ball stood on the log and waited.
They left the bay, heading out into the ocean. It was not yet dusk, the daylight still bright on them and the water. He was sitting behind her and as they followed the coast toward the hill town, the long shadow of her hat swept her shoulders.
The heat of the day was replaced by a wind. He felt the push of the canoe. He watched the seawater drying on her back. The movement of her hands. The spread of the boat’s wake. The sea was calm and he dipped his fingers into it.
Nearing the harbor, he saw the town as he had that first time. All the ships and all the homes. A thousand windows. And he looked up at the top of the hill, where there was now a star in the tree. It hovered there in the leaves, blinking, and then he lost it.
He thought she would enter the harbor. Instead she continued to follow the coast where a boy was closing umbrellas, one by one, their white and red stripes vanishing.
—Bia, he said, leaning forward. Where is Santi?
But she did not respond, she kept moving, and he thought of rivers. He thought of the ones he had rested beside and traveled across and the ones that had taken the lives of men. He thought of the speed and the shapes of water.
And he said, —Bia. Stay this time.
And she paddled once and stopped. He grew still and as they drifted away from the town he watched the shape of her there, rising. She lifted her arms for balance. Then she made her way toward him, across the length of the canoe, as lights appeared and the evening started.
Acknowledgments
The train came out of t
he long tunnel into the snow country.
—YASUNARI KAWABATA
Thank you to my family, Ethan Rutherford, Nayon Cho, Russell Perreault, Don Lee, Michael Collier, Ann Patchett, Joan Silber, Kate Walbert, Hannah Tinti, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Lauren Groff, Caroline Casey, Jill Meyers, The National Book Foundation, The Bennington Writing Seminars, Sven Birkerts, Victoria Clausi, Dawn Dayton, Brian Morton, Amy Hempel, my dear Bret Anthony Johnston, Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Wendy Sheanin, Andrea DeWerd, Tracey Guest, Jessica Zimmerman, Rebecca Marsh, Jackie Seow, Christopher Lin, Irene Kheradi, Gina DiMascia, Joy O’Meara, Loretta Denner, Jane Elias, Emily Graff, WME, Laura Bonner, Shaun Dolan.
To Marysue (and Thea), for the leap.
And to Bill, always, for the embrace.
Simon & Schuster
Reading Group Guide
Snow Hunters
Paul Yoon
A Conversation with Paul Yoon
You were born in New York City in 1980. How did you prepare to recreate the setting in postwar Brazil that your Korean protagonist, Yohan, inhabits in Snow Hunters?
Colum McCann once said that he’s always interested in writing about “the other.” William Trevor said something similar when he was asked why he often writes from the point of view of a woman.
Brazil, not long after the Korean War, was my “other.” A time and a place that’s a galaxy away from my own life. I think I tend to write about things I know nothing about out of sheer curiosity. In that way, weirdly, I’m more interested in the process of writing than in the end product. It’s far more rewarding.
For Snow Hunters, the start of that process began with reading about Brazil—educating myself on its general history, its major events—though I confess it was less a desire to be historically accurate than a way to immerse myself in an environment, a culture, to learn how to create a certain kind of atmosphere. Also, visual aids are always essential to me. I studied a lot of photographs of Brazil port towns and villages.
In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, you indicated that you have long been interested in the literary form of the short novel. To what extent is the narrative of Snow Hunters representative of that form?
A few years ago I started reading a lot of short novels, one after another. The idea of experiencing a story of a certain length appealed to me. It became a passport of sorts for me to discover books from all over the world, books that not many people I knew had ever read or talked about. I’m thinking of J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, Cesare Pavese’s The Moon and the Bonfires, Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra, just to name a few. It was one of the most rewarding reading periods of my life, not only because they were all amazing books but because I didn’t know many people who were reading those books. They felt like a secret. My own private stash of treasure.
How much these gems ended up influencing Snow Hunters I can’t say. And whether this novel is representative of the form is even harder for me to talk about. The length of Snow Hunters, or its identity, was never predetermined. I simply wanted to write the biggest story I could in the most concise way possible.
But I do think there’s a part of me that wrote Snow Hunters as a response to the many books I was reading at that time. In my childlike imagination I always have a selfish fantasy that a book I adore is a letter written to me. And so I write one back. And eventually all of them find one another somewhere in some dead letter office and exist together, happily, privately, forever.
As an immigrant to Brazil whose understanding of Portuguese is extremely limited, Yohan can’t communicate fluently with many of those he encounters in his new home. Can you describe your experience in advancing the plot of your novel without the benefit of much dialogue?
In my dreams all my characters are mute, so to know right from the start that Yohan’s communication skills were limited was about as close to a dream come true as possible. (That’s one of the many reasons the opening of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a favorite of mine.) I’m the worst at dialogue. It’s a great weakness of mine—getting people to talk. Which probably has more to do with my real-life communication skills, or lack thereof, than anything.
I’m being lighthearted about all this, but having little dialogue, especially in part 1, was not so much a challenge to me as a gift. It was freeing. I focused on images, places, gestures, objects, and so on. Those things had to do a bit more heavy lifting in order to make the story as dynamic and forward-moving as possible. And as the days went on, all those components felt like a kind of communication, between one character and another, between me and the book.
When Yohan is troubled by nightmares soon after his arrival, Kiyoshi tends to him and comforts him. Late in life, when Kiyoshi weeps over a young child’s winter coat, why does Yohan choose not to come to his aid?
There are several moments in this book when Yohan is unable to act. One interpretation is that on a very basic level he is, as a war veteran and a survivor of a POW camp, suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. A symptom of his PTSD is that he has created this wall between him and everything, and everyone.
As I worked on this book, revising it over the years, I began to cut away details about what exactly Yohan went through during the war and his time as a POW. What he witnessed. Some of it ended up in the book, enough, I think, to create a portrait, but I deliberately wanted to leave a lot of white space for those years—because I wanted the readers to imagine it for themselves and because I think it represents what Yohan has been going through since then: his mind is fractured. A good portion of his life has been spent either under occupation from a foreign country—whether that be Japan or Russia—or in the incredible, horrific violence and chaos of wartime.
Over the years he’s built a great emotional distance, a fissure he’s unable to step over. And I think a part of the book is about his slow path toward recovery, his building a bridge to the other side, so to speak.
So there’s all that. But I also think that at the particular moment when he hides behind a curtain and watches this man weeping who has been his guardian in Brazil, he can’t help but think of his own father. How Yohan used to watch him as a child. The enormity of how far Yohan is from his own childhood, how far he is from his childhood home, both physically and emotionally—that gap is so huge he’s completely stilled by it, frozen. It’s too big for him to process. So he turns and does nothing.
Bia and Santi are literally the first people Yohan encounters in Brazil, and he never parts with their gift of a blue umbrella. What compels Yohan to maintain his relationship with them?
I think when he was a boy Yohan was very influenced by the nomadic, restless spirit of the theater troupe, including Peng. And in some ways Bia and Santi’s appearance in the story, which is at first almost ghostly, reminds him of all the men and women and children who would visit his town and his home, playing soccer with him and performing magic tricks.
He has always been drawn to the itinerant life. Possibly the romance or the freedom of it, because Yohan’s childhood world is so small. He lives in the middle of nowhere, with a solitary father. He has no idea the reason the Japanese owner of the farm never visits is probably that the man is fighting in the Second World War. Even when the Soviets come he has no real sense of the political machine that Korea has been caught up in, or the ramifications of a military occupation.
Yohan does end up living a kind of itinerant life, of course, but in ways he never expected. He gets caught up in, for lack of a better word, history, and it leaves him feeling uprooted, unmoored, a bit stripped of himself. I think that’s another reason he is drawn to Bia and Santi, who are homeless and not really a part of this Brazilian port town. There’s a kinship there, all three of them being outsiders.
Why do Yohan’s memories of his friend Peng persist so powerfully in his memory?
For all the reasons mentioned above. Peng is also his one link to the past. So when that is gone, what doe
s he have? I think as Yohan attempts to reassemble his life in the present day, he’s also trying to reassemble his past, and Peng becomes the bridge to the latter.
More importantly, I think Peng lives so powerfully in Yohan’s memory because of guilt. Guilt that he did nothing to help his friend. Guilt for surviving. Yohan knows it could have just as easily been himself who lost his eyes during the bombing. It could have, in the end, just as easily been himself floating down that river. Peng in some ways is the alternate narrative that could have played out for Yohan. He recognizes this. And I think it terrifies him. And that fear stays through the years. What makes someone give up? That unanswerable question sits in Yohan’s head as he struggles to start a new life.
At times in Snow Hunters, as in the scene when the power goes out in the town, your narrative style takes on a distinctly poetic quality. Which writers of prose and poetry have most influenced you as a fiction writer?
Thank you. That means a lot to me. Influence is tricky—I think because we’re influenced by so many things, all the time. I’m like a sponge. Art of all kinds hung bright in my mind during the writing of Snow Hunters—paintings, photography, etc. (The sculptures of Giacometti, for example; or Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, a film set in Argentina.)
I do have heroes, of course, writers whose work has altered my life in significant ways, but there are too many to list here. Certainly Michael Ondaatje is one of them, both his prose and his poetry, everything. Nadeem Aslam is another hero of mine. I also remember reading David Grossman’s To the End of the Land while I was writing this book, and I remember how deeply grateful I felt to have experienced that, and to have his book exist in this world. I love Christian Wiman’s poetry. Frank O’Hara. Jack Gilbert.
I think, whether it be poetry or prose, what resonates with me and what I find interesting are the possibilities existing in a single sentence, a single line. It’s an awesome thing we do: we gather a bunch of words and make things out of them. So to think of how words play off each other is fun to me. It’s fun to wrestle with the rhythm of a sentence, to figure out the emotion of a sentence, to group certain words together and wonder what they might evoke in a reader. Those are the things I geek out about.
