Ithaca College

Walter Byongsok Chon, Assistant Professor of Dramaturgy and Theatre Studies, publishes Scene 2 from his new English theatrical translation – the Korean play The Wind’s Desire by Myung-Wha Kim – in Another Chicago Magazine.

Myung-Wha Kim’s play The Wind’s Desire premiered at the Sanwoollim Theatre in South Korea under the direction of veteran director Young-Woong Lim in 2007. The play portrays a middle-aged married television writer (“SHE”), her lover, a photographer who is twenty-years her junior (“HE”), and her television producer friend (“HER FRIEND”), all living in modern day Seoul, Korea. The play follows the affair between SHE and HE, while SHE tries to pen her next soap opera. SHE needs a hit show, a story that can connect with a broad demographic, and she finds her real-life affair making its way into the story she is creating. HER FRIEND, unaware of the affair and needing a hit desperately, questions the plausibility of an affair between a middle- aged woman and a man twenty years younger. SHE is also a “wild goose mom,” who sends money to her husband and child who are in Los Angeles for the child’s education (“Wild Goose dad” refers to a father who works in Korea while sending his wife and children to an English-speaking country for the children’s education. This is a significant social phenomenon in Korea.). SHE tries to balance her affair, her writing, her friendship, and her family, and finds her art, her desire, her public life, and her secret life all tangled up with uncertain directions and unwarranted consequences.

The translation and the original Korean text are available at:

https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/2021/05/18/excerpt-from-the-winds-desire-by-myung-wha-kim-translated-from-the-korean-by-walter-byongsok-chon/