The following blog post is by Alexander Branderhorst, an educator with the Milwaukee School of the Arts and a participant in this year’s Great World Texts in Wisconsin program.
“She was the nicest lady!” glowed a student after guest presenter SeonJoo Oh, a Korean paper artist, stopped by my English classes to give students a lesson on working with Korean paper, called hanji. I teach at Milwaukee High School of the Arts, and my students were learning to fold Korean origami, which differs from Japanese origami because it allows cutting, gluing, and using multiple pieces of paper. Students proudly held up their folded Taegeuk, a Korean version of the yin-yang symbol, seen on the South Korean flag.
This year, my students are learning all about Korea as participants in the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities’ Great World Texts program, in which students across Wisconsin will read Korean novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo and travel to campus for the annual student conference. The novel follows a young mother, Kim Jiyoung, suffering from the psychological effects of rampant misogyny. Students from a range of cultural communities have connected to the novel’s portrait of a woman driven to madness by the hypocrisies and inequalities imposed on women.
Students began the unit with little knowledge of Korea, unfamiliar with the Korean War, and with many unable to locate the country on a map. Before any lessons about Korean culture or history, students explored how other female writers have used the idea of the “crazy woman” in pivotal texts including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to expose unfair expectations put on women. Students objected the ways in which women were punished for rejecting traditional gender roles. They lamented, “Women get called crazy whenever they show emotions, but men never get called crazy!” I reminded students, “as we read this book, we are going to see events in Kim Jiyoung’s life that are unfair and confusing and might have led her to a mental crisis.”
Students explored the novel in small discussion groups, reading aloud and then sharing their thoughts on discussion topics of their choosing. Female-identifying students often connected to how Kim Jiyoung had been harassed by a boy in school and shared their frustration with the tired explanation that “he probably likes you.” Students discussed the mental challenges young girls encounter when faced with the idea that boys may hurt you to show you they like you, and the consequences of that thinking.
Students found example after example of contradictory expectations for women throughout the novel—contradictions they often saw in their own community. So, when the Korean paper artist SeonJoo Oh joined the class, students were fascinated to learn that she too had similar experiences as the title character of the novel. She too has struggled with her marriage, her career, and the challenges of motherhood. One of the ways SeonJoo Oh has dealt with this mental strain was crafting with hanji.
Students learned how hanji is handmade from pounded Mulberry bark, to create a special paper with a unique texture. SeonJoo Oh demonstrated how this paper is first cut into strips and then artfully twisted into rope. This rope can then be weaved into fine baskets, figures, or even clothing.
Since SeonJoo Oh’s visit, students have reflected on influential women in their own lives, identifying lessons they have learned from these women, and turned these values into Korean Sijo poems. Sijo poetry is similar to Japanese Haiku, and often uses nature as a way to explore deeper ideas. Students first identified a value they had learned from a woman in their life, before selecting an object from the natural world to symbolize that value on a piece of hanji paper. My students’ poems were full of women’s strength and experience. Students then shredded their papers into one-inch strips. They twisted the hanji strips into ropes, then tied those ropes into knots which they hung on the wall, inspired by another Korean hanji artist Aimee Lee, and her art installation, “Boundless,” at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, WA.
It was a complex experience for students to write poems on paper and then to shed them into strips, but I assured my students that the wisdom of their poetry would be infused in the ropes they twisted. Handling the delicate paper was sometimes frustrating, but once students got the hang of it, their minds calmed and the room filled with the sound of rustling paper. When twisted, the mulberry paper becomes strong and resilient. “The ropes can symbolize how women can be restricted and tied down by unfair expectations,” reflected a student, “but the ropes and knots can also symbolize how strong women need to be.”
For now, the students are eagerly awaiting spring, when they will travel to the UW-Madison campus and share their work with students from other schools. They are excited to meet the author and ask her about the book’s twist ending. And most of all, they want to see what other students were inspired to create.
Alexander Branderhorst, Milwaukee School of the Arts