Most evenings, Hwang In-suk pushes a shopping cart through the steep alleyways of her Seoul neighborhood, followed by stray cats emerging from the shadows to greet her under glowing streetlights and tents in convenience stores.
Her neighbors tend to just see Ms Hwang, 64, as someone who feeds cats on the street. Only a few know that she is a celebrated poet whose work explores loneliness and transience in the South Korean capital.
Her decades of writing span a time when South Korea has cycled through a dizzying array of identities, including that of a country ruled by repressive military dictatorships, a fledgling democracy and, most recently, an economic powerhouse and international cultural juggernaut.
Ms. Hwang said her nightly cat-feeding routine allows her to quietly observe not only cats, her favorite muses, but also her changing neighborhood and the underclass of a megacity increasingly known for its flashy looks.
“I’ve found worlds I wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t fed cats at night,” she said in an almost whisper during a recent walk through her neighborhood, Haebangchon. The street was mostly quiet, except for the occasional car, taxi, or van.
In addition to cats and other subjects, Mrs. Hwang’s poetry documents the milieu of shop assistants, street sweepers, and other night workers. “I don’t even know his face because we only meet in the dark,” she writes of a newspaper delivery boy in a recent poem called “Don’t Know Where You Live”:
He wouldn’t know my face either, but
How come he recognizes me so well?
We live at night
Haebangchon, or Liberation Village, is near Seoul Central Station and what was once the main US military base in the country. The neighborhood was carved out of a forest on a hill after the end of World War II, when Korea emerged from Japanese colonial rule.
Many of the people who settled there were North Korean refugees who arrived during or after the Korean War, said Pil Ho Kim, an Ohio state expert on South Korean cultural history whose father grew up in the area. after he fled the north.
In the decades following the war, South Korea experienced dramatic upheavals, including rapid industrialization, a presidential assassination, and a massacre of pro-democracy protesters. So was Haebangchon, a place initially known as a “moon village,” a term for urban slums built on hillsides.
In the 1970s, South Korean economic migrants helped transform Haebangchon into a hub for small-scale garment factories. It later became more residential and less working class, and began to attract young artists. Many artists’ studios were in turn displaced by cafes as gentrification continued, says Cha Kyoung-hee, 38, who has owned a bookstore nearby since 2015.
Ms. Hwang, who grew up nearby and settled in Haebangchon in the 1980s, has been quietly observing the details of these changes with a keen eye ever since. After studying creative writing at an art institute in Seoul, she settled on a career in poetry and debuted with a poem, “I’ll Be Reborn as a Cat”, which won an award for emerging South Korean writers in 1984. It was the first of many national literary awards she would win over the years.
She said her poetry partly reflects her belief that Seoul is a place where rich and poor live in separate worlds and where the downtrodden are subject to cutthroat competition.
“They weren’t willing to cheat others to get ahead in this society,” she said on a recent walk, her breath escaping in small clouds as she rounded a bend of a dark, hilly alley. The lights of skyscrapers flashed in the city below.
Her poems tend to fuse details of her corner of Seoul, a city of about 10 million people, with the emotions of their wry, melancholic speakers. Haebangchon’s roads are described as “always uphill / like my life”.
But Ms. Hwang is perhaps best known for poems that make wistful, whimsical observations about cats and the people who struggle to understand them. She said about a fifth of her body of work is cat-related.
For the past 16 years, Ms. Hwang has been feeding cats almost every night, usually from recycled instant rice containers. Each cat has a designated eating spot – under a parked car, for example, or between the garbage cans of a restaurant. Some approach her in the manner of a familiar old friend, meowing as they rub against her legs. Others have to be lured out of their hiding places with a soft psst.
Ms. Hwang said her cat-feeding routine started when a single stray dog started showing up hungry outside her apartment. Some of the dozens of cats she cares for now have names; most simply call them “beautiful.”
“I’m doing this because the cats are waiting for me, and no one else is willing to do it,” she said flatly. “It’s a duty.”
But her affectionate manner with the cats – and her many poems about their quirks and personalities – suggest that her relationship with them is more than perfunctory.
Anne M. Rashid, an English literature professor who translated some of Ms. Hwang’s work with a late colleague, Chae-Pyong Song, said she was particularly fond of this passage from the poem “Ran, My Former Cat”:
I didn’t know where you came from.
Always suddenly
you appeared
at a time when no one was around
in a time when time belonged to no one,
hanging on the roof of a rented house
like it comes from my heart
as from the edge of the moon
with a little half cry,
you appeared.
Throughout the poem, which ends with the cat disappearing “to a place where you couldn’t invite me,” the speaker wants to hold or touch her muse but knows that’s not possible, said Professor Rashid, who teaches literature at the Carlow University in Pittsburgh. .
“They bond in their loneliness anyway,” she added.
When Ms. Cha hosted Ms. Hwang for a reading at her bookstore last year, the audience was unusually diverse for such an event, including former local residents who missed it and wanted to hear descriptions of past incarnations. Some cried when they heard her read poems.
Ms Hwang said she shares a small apartment with two sick rescued strays, one named Lauren after Hollywood actress Lauren Bacall. She has no cell phone and has never made a living from anything other than poetry.
“She’s not the type of person to tell people who she is,” said Yang Jung-ok, 60, a restaurant owner in Haebangchon who has known Ms Hwang for years.
Ms. Yang said she has long admired her gentle neighbor for spending so much of her limited income on food for stray cats. But she only heard about Ms. Hwang’s poetry from a journalist who accompanied her to the restaurant and casually mentioned that she was an eminent poet.
On the recent walk, Ms. Hwang seemed surprised that a reporter would be interested in her work and declined an invitation to recite a poem of her choice. “I can’t say which one would make a reader happy,” she said shortly before midnight.
The people in her poems also often keep a low profile. In “Above the Roofs,” the speaker marvels at how the energy in cats’ bodies allows them to soar through the air into “huge territory” above rooftops. Then – in a delicate, almost feline way – she places herself in their midst.
In this city where alleyways have disappeared,
in the alleys above the roofs,
on these alleys above, so to speak,
I carefully place my breath.
Yumi Kim reporting contributed.