Description: There’s uh Korean cinderella. There is konju patsi. Which is essentially Korean’s cinderella except with a darker ending. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it but if I remember correctly uh Cinderella kills her evil sisters and the mother and gets them killed in the end. For the most part it’s exactly the same as cinderella. It’s a children’s story so it doesn’t say where she came from. Also, it wasn’t a shoe it was something else. I can’t remember what no cause it’s been awhile since i’ve read it or heard it cause you don’t really hear it after you’re little. I have to look over it to remember the exact details. Yeah so essentially she is turned into a noble lady by the fairy godmother. It’s been like ten years. She goes to this festival as a noble and meets the other noble who in the western version is the prince. Usually not a lot of Korean stories involved the king or prince or whatever. It’s probably because there were a lot more nobles and so the stories were a lot more believable. This is just purely speculation but yeah. It wasn’t a glass slipper. It was… if it was a shoe it was a traditional Korean shoe that you wear with some… well Korean traditional clothes are called Hanbok. Yeah and so it’s probably the shoe which is called Chip Shin. The normal people just wear ones made out of straw but the rich ware ones made out of silk or something like that. So, yeah. I believe she leaves her shoe. The noble searches the entire village for her. She ends up killing her step sisters in revenge for being so cruel to her. But if you think about it the original European one’s pretty dark too so…. Cause in the original one if I remember correctly they cut off the step sister’s toe to make it fit. Or no there’s no fairy godmother there were just a bunch of animals. Yeah… and then oh wait never mind. Cinderella dies (he laughs). Her rival pushes her into a lake and then drowns her and then takes her clothes to make herself look like her. It’s like a relative on her mom’s side. Yeah….”

2. He mentioned that he hadn’t heard this since he was a child. It seems like it’s a story that is generally told orally but is also written up into colorful children’s books as well.

3. I walked into his room and asked him if he could tell me some Korean Folklore. He laughed right before he told me this one. It seems like he had a hard time remembering it since he hadn’t heard it in a while.

4. He mentioned repeatedly that it was different and similar to the western version and even went to the extent of mentioning that the western one was the original. It’s possible that it is, but his comment lends a light into his mindset of Western and Eastern thought. He’s almost viewing Western thought as superior to Eastern. This rendition of Cinderella doesn’t end up turning out with a happy ending. It contains some pessimistic ideas whereas other renditions of the story end with Cinderella marrying the prince, this one seems to contain a much more serious final tone.

It can also be found in recorded literature: Climo, Shirley, and Ruth Heller. The Korean Cinderella. New York, NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1993. Print.