Frogs, Foxes, and Folklore: Gina Chung on Drawing Inspiration from Korean Folktales

The first stories I ever encountered as a child were Korean folktales, told to me by my parents. As in many folkloric traditions, the boundaries between human, god, and animal forms are porous and ever-shifting in these stories, and transformation and hybridity are frequent occurrences.

There are anthropomorphized animals (the cruel but foolish tiger, the trickster rabbit), supernatural beings that straddle the lines between human and animal forms (such as the kumiho, or nine-tailed fox spirit), and regular human beings who have brushes with the divine (such as the woodcutter who tricks a heavenly maiden into marrying him, only to lose her).

These early encounters with Korean folklore shaped many of the stories in my debut collection Green Frog. For instance, the title story references the legend of the green frog, or chong kaeguri, renowned for his penchant for doing the exact opposite of whatever his mother tells him to do (in fact, in Korean culture, it’s not uncommon for a disobedient or wayward child to be referred to as a chong kaeguri).

In the story, the green frog’s constant disobedience eventually drives his mother to an early grave. On her deathbed, she calls her son to her and commands him to bury her in the banks of their river when she dies. She does this imagining that he will, once again, do the opposite of what she has told him to do, and that he will instead bury her on high ground, a more suitable place for a body to be interred.

However, in his grief and regret, the frog decides to listen to his mother’s last wish, and buries her on the banks of the river as requested. The story concludes with this decidedly dour scene, with a note that this is why 1) all frogs croak in the rain, because they are worried that it will wash away the body of their deceased mother, and 2) children must obey their parents while they are still living.

Throughout my childhood, I was haunted by this story, and in my own adolescent negotiations with my family over who I was versus who I was allowed to be in their eyes, I frequently asked myself how I could make space for myself while also trying to please my parents. I began to imagine a character who, similar to the green frog in the story, can’t help but fail to meet her parents’ expectations, and how, in the wake of the loss of her mother, must forge her own understanding of who she is.

This story became a fulcrum for me as I began to build the other stories in this collection, all of which incorporate similar themes of daughterhood, family, and what we owe to ourselves and the ones we love.

One of the most notable features of folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends are their simplicity. These stories, many of them passed down to us across generations, are compelling because of the recognizable archetypes they incorporate (the evil stepmother, the dutiful daughter, the greedy king, etc.), their straightforward moral arcs, and their use of magic and transformation as catalysts for the plot.

These very same hallmarks also allow for a range of possible interpretations, which is probably why there is a whole subgenre of works devoted to retellings of these old stories—usually from the perspective of the so-called villains, who are often recast as misunderstood, morally complex protagonists (see: Wicked, Circe). Reclamations of reviled archetypes abound in contemporary literature, to the point where these types of stories have almost become tropes in themselves. And yet we still come back to them, because we are drawn to their power and ability to reveal something new about the human condition.

One classic Asian folklore archetype that has been reclaimed as a feminist icon of sorts in recent years is the nine-tailed fox spirit—a supernatural being, almost always feminized, who can also take the form of a beautiful human woman. In Korean folktales, she is known as a kumiho, an evil seductress who feeds off the livers of humans and livestock and is seen as a threat to the patriarchal order because of her power and agency.

In order to write my short story “Human Hearts,” I imagined what an atypical kumiho—one who feels ambivalent about her power and role in the world, and sympathizes with humans despite fearing them—would look like. The resulting story also became a vehicle for my thoughts about how cruelty can be inherited, the nature of external and internal transformations, and how girls and women especially are often compelled to change and shape-shift in order to survive.

Another enduring quality of many folktales is the fact that impossible things are always happening in them. Magic, in the form of supernatural abilities, the intervention of gods, or talismanic devices entrusted to mortals, is the engine that drives the plots of most folktales, and it is often what allows the plot to be resolved and concluded. In other words, magic makes things happen, and as fiction writers, we can use it as a device to explore things that wouldn’t be possible in our world.

For example, in writing my short story, “Rabbit Heart,” I knew that I wanted to explore the odd nature of grief felt for loved ones whom we no longer live near or know intimately. In the story, my protagonist is a timid young girl living oceans away from her beloved Korean grandmother, who tells her folktales to make her bolder. When the grandmother suffers an aneurysm, the girl travels back to Korea with her mother, only to find that the grandmother is now unresponsive, hooked up to life support machines.

This experience mirrored my own maternal grandmother’s death, though in her case, she lingered on for years in a state of post-coma unresponsiveness before passing away. I didn’t necessarily want to write about an experience like this, which was deeply painful for my family, and would have been difficult to render in a short story. Instead, I wondered how I could insert more of the grandmother figure into the story, and what might happen if the protagonist’s wish for her grandmother to wake up and be well again came true, in a slightly over-the-top way.

And so, in “Rabbit Heart,” I gave these two characters a chance to have one last adventure together—they escape the hospital, steal a bicycle, roll down a grassy hill, and go for ice cream, before finally saying goodbye. By allowing magical or impossible things to unfold within the confines of a story, we can imbue a narrative with a different mood or texture, and provide some agency for characters that normally wouldn’t have a lot of power (in my case, a child and an elderly woman).

Folktales are powerful because they are how many of us first experience stories. And while they usually demonstrate moral lessons, it’s important to remember that they were also designed to entertain. While the archetypes, tropes, and devices used in many of these stories might not pass muster in a contemporary literary work, they can provide us with structures and pathways to play with, subvert, remix, and draw inspiration from.

Above all, I think folktales are a great reminder of the fact that there is great freedom in fiction and narrative, that, as long as we retain the trust and interest of our readers, we can make almost anything happen on the page. And what could be more magical than that?

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Green Frog by Gina Chung is available via Vintage.