Sun-Mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is testimony to the fact that there is still space in this world for simple things. How else can one explain the two million-plus sales of a story — about a hen who just wanted to lay an egg she could hatch — written in the most unpretentious style.
Believe it or not, Hwang’s book of Y2k vintage — now available in English — is just that: A story of an egg-laying hen wanting to hatch her egg and see the birth of a chick, left to die, rescued by a mallard, and then finding the joys of motherhood by hatching and raising a duck only to let it go to be with its own.
But beneath the obvious tale of love and longing lies a sub-text that draws attention to the treatment of hens cramped into battery cages for mass production of eggs. These cages — banned in the European Union since 2012 — are narrow cramped spaces that do not even allow the hens to spread their wings and are tilted in such a manner that the eggs roll away from the bird the moment they are laid.
While animal rights activists have made an issue of battery cages to force the EU to pass a law against their use, they are still in vogue in many countries. Trapped in these cages, the birds are denied more than just mothering instincts. They can neither forage nor dust bathe and, in many egg factories, their beaks are cut off; rendering the birds helpless in the remote chance of an escape from the cycle of a caged life to mass culling.
All these issues find mention in Hwang’s story without any posturing or activism. Touching as the story is, one can be forgiven for missing the sub-text. Hwang gently leads the unsuspecting reader to the issues dogging the egg industry right in the first chapter in which the protagonist Sprout — a name the bird has given herself in a world where individual identities do not matter — has lost interest in laying eggs.
“The pride she felt when she laid one was replaced by sadness. She was exhausted after a full year of this. She couldn’t so much as touch her own eggs, not even with the tip of her foot. And she didn’t know what happened to them after the farmer’s wife carried them in her basket out of the coop…. Nor did she know that an egg she laid on her own would never hatch, no matter how long she sat on it.”
Given the text and the sub-text, it is no wonder the book has done so well over the past decade-and-a-half. According to available information, it was an instant best-seller in Korea, and has remained on the best-selling list for a decade. It has also been made into a comic book, a play and a musical besides being translated into 18 languages. An animated film based on the book is billed as the biggest grosser in this genre in Korea.
Essentially, The Hen… has something to offer to a varied readership from children to adults. Written in a very simple and uncomplicated style, it is accessible to children. Adults can relate to the issues of parenting including adoption. For those who want something political, there is the sub-text to be delved into; reflecting on the ethical questions facing mass production involving animals and, in turn, big businesses where the individual is just a cog in the wheel.
The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly,Sun-Mi Hwang, translated by Chi-Young Kim, Penguin, Rs. 299.
