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At night, Hwang In-suk pushes a shopping cart up and down the steep alleyways of a Seoul neighborhood, chased by a stray cat that emerges from the shadows to greet him in the glowing streetlights and store marquees.
The neighbors tend to consider Ms. Hwang, 64, is the only person who feeds cats on the street. Few know that he is a famous poet whose work explores the loneliness and impermanence of the South Korean capital.
He wrote for decades during a time when South Korea juggled multiple identities, including a country ruled by a repressive military dictator, a fledgling democracy and, most recently, an international economic powerhouse and cultural juggernaut.
Mrs. Hwang says that the routine of feeding the cat at night allows him to quietly observe not only the cat, his favorite muses, but also the changing environment and the underclass of the megacity that is increasingly famous for its bright exterior.
“I’ve discovered a world that I wouldn’t have discovered if I hadn’t fed the cat at night,” she whispers as she strolls through her neighborhood, Haebangchon. The streets are mostly deserted except for cars, taxis or delivery trucks.
In addition to cats and other subjects, Ms. Hwang noted the neighborhood of shop clerks, street sweepers and other night workers. “I don’t even know his face because we met only in the dark,” he wrote about the newspaper introduction in a new poem called “Don’t Know Where You Live”:
He didn’t know my face either though
How did he know me?
We stayed the night
Haebangchon, or Liberation Village, is located near Seoul’s central train station and was once the main US military base in the country. The neighborhood was carved out of the hillside forest after the end of World War II, when Korea emerged from Japanese colonial rule.
Many of the people who live there are North Korean refugees who came during or after the Korean War, said Pil Ho Kim, a South Korean cultural history expert at Ohio State, whose father grew up in the neighborhood after fleeing the North.
In the decades following the war, South Korea experienced dramatic upheavals, including rapid industrialization, the assassination of a president and the massacre of pro-democracy protesters. The same goes for Haebangchon, a place originally known as the “moon village,” a term for a slum town built on a hillside.
In the 1970s, South Korean economic migrants helped transform Haebangchon into a center for small-scale garment factories. Then it became more residential and less working class, and it began to attract young artists. Many artists’ studios have since moved into cafes as gentrification continues, said Cha Kyoung-hee, 38, who has owned a bookstore in the neighborhood since 2015.
Mrs. Hwang, who grew up nearby and lived in Haebangchon in the 1980s, quietly observes the details of the changes carefully. He decided on a career in poetry after studying creative writing at a Seoul art institute and made his debut with the poem, “I’ll Be Reborn as a Cat,” which won the 1984 award for South Korean emerging writers. This was the first of many national literary prizes he would win over the years.
He said the poem partly reflects his belief that Seoul is a place where the rich and the poor live in separate worlds, and the oppressed are victims of ruthless competition.
“They refuse to lie to others to get ahead in this society,” he said as he walked, his breath escaping a small cloud as he rounded a bend in a dark alley. The lights of the skyscrapers twinkled in the city below.
His poetry tends to combine details about the corners of Seoul, a city of about 10 million people, with the speaker’s melancholy emotions. One describes Haebangchon’s path as “always uphill / like my life.”
But Ms. Hwang is perhaps best known for her poems that make strange and whimsical observations about cats, and the humans who struggle to understand them. He says about a fifth of his oeuvre is related to cats.
For the past 16 years, Mrs. Hwang has been feeding the cats almost every night, usually out of recycled instant rice containers. Every cat has a designated dining spot — under a parked car, say, or among restaurant trash cans. Some approached him in a familiar old friend way, humming as he rubbed his leg. Others have to be coaxed out of hiding with soft psst.
Mrs. Hwang said his cat-feeding behavior started when a stray one began to turn up, hungry, outside his apartment. Several dozen cats he now cares to have a name; at least he just calls her “pretty”.
“I’m doing this because the cats are waiting for me, and no one else is willing to do it,” he said flatly. “It’s an obligation.”
But her affectionate way with cats – and her many poems about their quirks and personalities – suggests her relationship with them is more than perfunctory.
Anne M. Rashid, a professor of English literature who translated some of Ms. Hwang and his late colleague, Chae-Pyong Song, said they particularly liked this passage from the poem “Ran, My Former Cat”:
I don’t know where you come from.
Always sudden
you show up
at a time when no one is there
at a time when time belongs to no one,
hanging on the roof of a rented house
as if from my heart,
as if from the edge of the moon
with a little half cry,
you show up.
Throughout the poem, which ends with the cat disappearing “to a place where you can’t take me,” the speaker wants to catch or touch his muse but knows it’s impossible, said Professor Rashid, who teaches literature at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.
“They have a bond, regardless, in solitude,” she added.
When Ms. Cha host Ms. Hwang to read in his bookstore last year, the audience was unusually diverse for such an event, and included former residents of the neighborhood who missed and wanted to hear the description of its previous incarnation. Some cried when they heard the poem read aloud.
Mrs. Hwang said he shared a cramped apartment with two sick, stray rescues, one of them named Lauren after Hollywood actress Lauren Bacall. He doesn’t own a cell phone and has never earned a living through anything but poetry.
“She is not the type of person to tell who she is,” said Yang Jung-ok, 60, who owns a restaurant in Haebangchon and has known Ms. Hwang for many years.
Ms. Yang said she had long admired her gentle neighbor for spending her limited amount of money on food for stray cats. But he only studied poetry Ms. Hwang from the reporter who accompanied him to the restaurant and mentioned that he is a famous poet.
While walking, Ms. Hwang seemed surprised that a reporter was interested in her work, and declined an invitation to read her chosen poem. “I can’t say what will bring joy to the reader,” he said, shortly before midnight.
Humanity in his poetry also tends to remain low. In “Above the Roofs,” the speaker marvels at how the energy in the cat’s body is sent into the air into the “vast area” above the rooftops. Then – in a gentle, almost cat-like way – he placed himself in the middle of it.
In this city where the back alley is gone,
in the back alley above the roof,
in the corridors above, so to speak,
I breathed slowly.
Yumi Kim contribute reports.
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