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  [Cover Feature] Let’s Meet in ○

  Someone I know once made the following remark to me:      “Don’t you think your stories are a bit. . . Seoul-centric?”      At the time, I assumed that this acquaintance of mine had just recently learned about the concept of “Seoul-centricism” and was looking for a way to make use of this newfound knowledge when he came across my books. His comment seemed to stem from the fact that most of the characters in my novels were Seoulites who wander the streets of Jongno, Gwanghwamun, and the Mapo district, frequenting the hotels, cafes, and independent bookstores in those areas.      I felt a momentary urge to argue with him but refrained. I didn’t want to spoil the mood and had an inkling that it would just lead to a pointless argument. I made an effort to change the subject with a string of jokes, and in hindsight, I think it was very wise to not speak my mind.       *My acquaintance’s remark has stayed with me for a long time.       It’s already been three years. . . My memory has become so clouded as of late that I can hardly recall what I had for lunch yesterday, and I’ve become so forgetful that when I go to my bedside table to get my glasses, I find myself putting on my earphones to listen to music instead. And yet, I somehow still haven’t forgotten that remark. Or rather, it seems like it refuses to be forgotten. I wonder why.     Perhaps my acquaintance’s words pricked something in me. It may have pricked so deeply that it stung, and I decided that I needed to be more careful in the future. Although I dismissed the ridiculous remark with a snort, perhaps I cared more about it than I was willing to admit.      Words hold that kind of power. They’re invisible, intangible, and seem to vanish into thin air the moment they are spoken, as though they were nothing. And yet, some words unexpectedly pry themselves into our minds where they linger and leave a long-lasting sting, like a needle in an acupuncture point.      Thanks to this, the more time goes by, the more I become aware of the fact that I was born in Seoul and lived here all my life, that I am a Seoulite through and through. I’ve come to realize that I’m connected to this city in so many ways, that perhaps we overlap, and that I am almost Seoul itself.       *Looking back, the beginning of my first short story, “In the Same Place,” really does seem to reflect the perspective of a Seoulite. My debut work features a character named Yeongji, who, after getting completely drunk, tells “me” the story of how she ended up losing touch with a friend in the past. She recalls how astonished she was one day after walking from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong to realize it had only taken her twelve minutes.      Yeongji previously thought the distance from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong to be thirty-seven minutes by foot. Ever since she was a child, Seoul had always been a world divided by subway lines in her mind, so the only way she could think of reaching her destination was by hopping on Line 3 at Jongno 3-ga Station and getting off at Chungmuro Station to transfer to Line 4 in the direction of Myeongdong Station.      That’s why Yeongji declined her friend’s request to come meet her at the Seoul Employment and Labor Office in Myeongdong. Her friend, who had gone there to apply for unemployment benefits, told Yeongji that she was shaking and feeling anxious for some reason and that she would appreciate her company. Even though Yeongji was reading a book inside a Starbucks in the vicinity of Nagwon Arcade—a short distance from there—she replied that it was “pretty far from where I am,” adding that even if she were to leave right away, it would take her between forty and fifty minutes, and that she didn’t want to keep her waiting for that long.       The two would never meet again after that conversation, ultimately bringing their eighteen-year friendship to an end.      Yeongji only realized the meaning of the long silence that preceded the end of the call, which was reminiscent of a theatrical blackout, much later. She then got into the habit of recalling this incident about how she fell out with her friend whenever she got drunk.       *This part of the story is mostly based on my own experience.       Rather than focusing on a friendship fallout, I chose to write about the astonishment I felt after walking from Jongno 3-ga to Myeongdong with my own two feet. If my memory serves me right, I was around twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. I was shocked to find out that Seoul was in reality much smaller than I had imagined it to be. It felt kind of absurd to me how such a small area had been divided into distinct zones as though each one was completely separated from the other.      Now, upon deeper reflection, I think that the astonishment I felt at the time did not merely stem from how small Seoul really was.      What came as an even bigger shock to me was the fact that I had been living in Seoul for over twenty years. I must’ve allowed myself to become complacent, thinking that I knew everything there was to know about Seoul. How could there be something that I didn’t know? And how could I not even be aware of that fact? My astonishment arose from having these assumptions I took for granted turned upside down. In other words, I was mostly shocked by my own ignorance.       *Since then, my ignorance of Seoul has revealed itself to me in all shapes and forms. I wonder when it was. . . I was once asked to provide a brief author bio to go along with a piece of writing by the editorial team at a publishing house. Since I had to include my place of birth, I wrote that I was “born in Seoul” without giving the matter much thought. However, the feeling I got when writing that sentence was actually closer to “born in ○.”      Not “Seoul,” but “○.”      Why did I feel this way? Seoul appeared to me to be something akin to an empty circle or a pair of parentheses with an empty space between them.       *Various factors surely contribute to why the place where I was born and raised feels like ○.      For one thing, I don’t feel like I own anything in Seoul. Regardless of what or how much I actually have, I always feel a certain emptiness. Why could that be? Perhaps it’s because I have a feeling that most of the things I’ve acquired in Seoul will not follow me when I leave the city. Those things will remain in Seoul. People might look at me with puzzled eyes or even think I’m pathetic when I leave. They might even see me as a loser or a runaway.      As such, I don’t feel like there’s anything that keeps me intimately connected to Seoul.       The Seoul I know is a city that collapses and is rebuilt every day. It’s like an amorphous organism which has never had a fixed shape of its own. Many of the places where I once lived, frequently visited, and created unforgettable memories have disappeared with the passage of time. They were erased without a trace and replaced with unfamiliar landscapes. This is the way things naturally unfold in Seoul. That seems to be the physiological cycle of a big city. That’s why I always get the feeling that I could be pushed out or expelled from Seoul at any time. One day, if I ever become physically unable to work, or fall ill and become poor, I think Seoul will spit me out.      If that ever happens, I’ll be completely broke.      Not just a poor person without money, but a poor soul stripped of the greater part of its existence. Something tells me that I can’t escape such a fate. Am I the only one? I find myself constantly overcome by this feeling which almost never leaves me.       Is this any different from depression?      Having been born and lived my whole life in Seoul, I might say that it has been no different from having to put up with an unresolvable sense of emptiness. Like living in a place where I could never put down roots, constantly floating some distance off the ground.       *Last weekend, I went to CGV Cine Library at Myeongdong Station to meet my boyfriend.       I took Line 5 and got off at Dongdaemun History & Culture Park Station where I transferred onto Line 4 to reach Myeongdong Station (now that I write this, I realize that I appear to be someone who goes to Myeongdong quite frequently). It was slightly past 2 P.M. on a Sunday, and since three different lines run through Dongdaemun History & Culture Park Station, it was packed with people of all ages and appearances. This includes many foreigners of varying skin tones using different languages. However, since I’m so used to squeezing my way through crowds of people in narrow places, this fact didn’t actually occur to me until writing the words “packed with people.” This particular scene merely flashed before me like a blurry, unfocused photo.      That’s because it’s natural for me when I go up the escalator from one subway platform to another, moving slowly toward the transfer corridor like an object on a conveyor belt, to absentmindedly look over at the other objects—or people’s faces—coming down from the opposite direction only to completely forget about them shortly after.        The city crowds fill me up in an instant only to be discarded at once.      I suck them up like a drain, then spew them back out and forget everything.       I leave no one behind. This sort of sequence repeats itself several times each day. I would have experienced the same thing on my way out of the cinema after watching a movie with my boyfriend and dozens of other spectators, while passing by the thousands of people crowding the streets of Myeongdong on my way to go eat dinner, and again in the subway on my way home.       Getting filled to the brim and then emptied out as though nothing had ever happened.       This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times within me while living in this city called Seoul. That’s why I think of it as being the same as ○. I believe that this Seoul-like ○ has also made me into something akin to ○ as well.       *      That’s why there is some truth when I say that when I write the words “born in Seoul,” I feel as though I were writing “born in ○.”       *When I was first asked to write this essay, I wanted to talk about the beauty of Seoul. However, after writing a few paragraphs, it occurred to me that I was probably not the right person for the task.      I could have written about the daily routine of a city dweller in detail, describing what a day in my life looks like—waking up, getting ready for work, spending a day at the office, and returning home only to relax and go to bed. However, I felt like I wasn’t the right person for this task either.      As I’ve already mentioned, having been born and lived my entire life in Seoul, I’m particularly unaware and ignorant about city life, especially when it comes to Seoul. Hence, it almost feels like ○ to me.      Perhaps that’s why I can’t help but refer to ○ as ○. In reality, it seems like the only way I can address the area inside ○, which is beyond the grasp of language, is through stories akin to thin and faint lines covering up ○.      One might be led to wonder about the point of this essay. . .      Through this piece of writing, I was hoping that someone else might also be able to relate—even just a little—to this feeling I have long harbored. I’m hoping it opens up the opportunity to have a discussion about ○, which is only possible among those of us who were born in a city and lived there for their entire lives. In so doing, we can perhaps cut through the void that surrounds language and, even if just for a brief moment, offer solace to each other. Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski       Korean Works Mentioned:•   Park Seon Woo, In the Same Place (Jaeum & Moeum, 2020)    박선우, 『우리는 같은 곳에서』 (자음과모음, 2020) 

  by Park Seonwoo

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  [Cover Feature] Becoming a Cog in the Emergency Room

  1.I work at a university hospital in Seoul. In exchange for my labor, I am paid a salary that I use to cover my rent and living expenses as a Seoul resident. However, my job is somewhat peculiar—I work in the emergency room, the busiest part of a university hospital. My contract with this institution as an emergency medicine specialist and clinical professor requires me to spend thirty hours a week in the ER. While I have other additional duties, my primary responsibility is patient care. Upon fulfilling these terms of my contract, I receive a fixed salary.       It may seem unusual, but to me, the ER mainly represents a workplace. Treating patients is how I earn my livelihood. I’m nothing more than a cog in the machine of society, made up of many different parts. My role just happens to be in the emergency room. Night or day, holidays or not, the lights in the ER are always on, so I work even when others are resting. The grievances of my workplace are similar to those of firefighters, police officers, restaurant workers, and convenience store clerks—we all serve citizens. While their customers are people in emergencies or who have been involved in a crime, or people in search of a meal, mine are sick patients. As customers, they have the right to make complaints, which need to be handled. Being part of an organization also means you must be mindful of your superiors. In my case, there is the ER director, the chief of medical staff, and the hospital director. In this sense, then, my work life isn’t that different: like everyone else, I experience the stress of working night shifts and holidays, dealing with customers, and answering to my superiors.      There is a common misconception that doctors working in the ER are bombarded with emergency calls. If I meet someone who’s not in the medical field, they ask me how I can be out and about when surely there must be some patient in urgent need of care. What they don’t know is that the responsibility for ER patients lies with the doctor currently on duty. Working in the ER is very intense—we don’t get weekends or nights to ourselves and if we also had to answer emergency calls at all times, our health would be at risk. So, while other physicians who have inpatients must pick up calls from the hospital even when they’re not working, emergency doctors like me are free to use our time off as we see fit: we can take our kids on a day trip to the amusement park, play golf, or go get groceries. We can also travel if we wish to. My main job might be demanding, but it leaves me the flexibility to have a side hustle. In my spare time, I usually read books and write.       Nevertheless, my job in the emergency room is different from others for many reasons, as it is with any profession that deals with accidents and disasters that might occur in our lives. Firefighters and police officers are in the same field as I am. They handle citizens who have faced the most horrific situations, and usually, their last destination is always my ER. While this is my job, patients would rather avoid the experience of ending up in the emergency room. I’ve witnessed many deaths in my workplace and let me tell you: there are certain incidents that only emergency medicine specialists can handle. I’ve been the bearer of critical, tragic news, and effectively communicating with caregivers and bereaved families can take an emotional toll on you. We as doctors have a lot of responsibility in our hands. However, what truly sets a specialist apart from any other profession is the lengthy, challenging education required to reach this point. 2.My path to emergency medicine was almost predestined, so allow me to retrace the steps that led me here. I was born in 1983 in Anyang, just two subway stops away from Seoul. I spent my childhood on the first floor of a three-story apartment building that was later part of an extensive redevelopment project. My father worked in a company, and my mother was a Home Economics teacher, but after she had me, she quit her job to be a full-time mom and manage the household. It was very normal for families back then to choose this option. In the morning, my father went to work, and my mother did house chores. I have a brother, two years younger than me, and we used to go outside to the playground and play with the many other children in the neighborhood, without supervision. I started taking the subway by myself in elementary school. In those times, children were very independent. When I was in third grade, my parents made an important decision: we would be moving to Gangnam.       Gangnam is now one of the most affluent areas in South Korea. It is known for its wealthy residents, luxury department stores, high-end restaurants, and astronomical housing prices. In this piece, however, the term Gangnam extends beyond the area south of the Han River to encompass the neighborhoods of Gangnam, Seocho, Songpa, and others, which are all included in the Eighth School District. It is the enthusiasm for education that gave birth to Gangnam as we know it. When I speak about education here, I don’t mean learning for the sake of learning, but studying to be granted a spot in the most prestigious universities, a door that opens the path to maintaining or elevating your social status. People gather in Gangnam in the hopes of getting into a ‘better’ university, bestowing the area its current fame as a status symbol. When my parents decided to move there in 1992, it wasn’t only in search of a better neighborhood—it was an investment in their children’s education.  The Gangnam I lived in was a bit different from today. For starters, real estate prices were similar to other areas. My parents sold our Anyang house, and they only needed to add around 10 million won to afford a place in Gangnam. The neighborhood didn’t differ much from the one we had left behind. When prices started to rise in 1998, my family purchased a standard-sized apartment, which at the time cost around 200 million won. Nowadays, the same apartment in redeveloped Gangnam is priced at a staggering 3.5 billion won. (In case you’re wondering, my family sold the place a long time ago.) Meanwhile, the apartment we left in Anyang is now worth around 550 million won. Over the years, the price gap between Gangnam and other areas increased dramatically. When we moved there in the early 1990s, it was certainly a hub of ambition, but it wasn’t the impenetrable fortress that it is now.      My school experience in Gangnam was nothing out of the ordinary. I endured the corporal punishments that were the rule back then, the bullying, and the monotonous classes—a mandatory rite of passage. I too had a rebellious phase during my teenage years, but eventually, I adjusted and managed to get through it. As I grew up, Gangnam gradually became the hot spot for education. On the other hand, college entrance exams required no creativity, and success depended on who best endured the dreary routine of shuttling between school and private academies and the strenuous tests they were given to solve. As a result, the academies didn’t hide their use of corporal punishments, grouped classes by test scores, and large institutions with tens thousands of students became the norm. The fairness of entrance exams has always been a huge issue. To address this issue, in 1993 the government introduced the Suneung, a nationwide college admission test that students would take on the same day at the same time, letting the results decide their future. At the time, it was surreal to witness thousands of students flooding the streets on the same day to take the test they had been preparing for twelve years, from elementary school through high school. My family had also moved to Gangnam for that very exam, a decade before it was my brother’s and my turn to take it. This system isn’t much different now.      Throughout middle and high school, I never thought about my future career. In fact, this was true for almost all college-bound students. While your career choices are heavily influenced by your university and major, there’s no guarantee you’ll be admitted to the institutions you apply to. During career counseling sessions I received in high school, all the counselors would say, “First, get the highest possible Suneung score, then you can think about what to do,” making those sessions meaningless. For high schoolers taking the Suneung, universities are ranked in a clear hierarchy. Except for a few campuses in Seoul, adults don’t hesitate to refer to the other universities as ‘crappy’ and label their graduates as failures. Both careers and universities are divided into good and bad—everything categorized by social standing. At the top of the pyramid stood medical schools. With no set retirement age and a guaranteed high income, it was inevitable that specialized professions like this would be the most sought-after. Medical majors are still highly desirable today, but as the competition for admission has become fiercer, but as the competition for admission has become fiercer, the debate over these exams has turned into a contentious and exhausting societal issue. As a student, I followed a conventional path and didn’t receive any special early education, nor did I attend an elite high school, leaving me oblivious to the intense battles of this world. Regardless, I was terrified of becoming a failure, so I listened to my parents and attended school and academies. I was lucky enough to get a good score on the Suneung, which ended up being the only exam I excelled at in my entire life.       During my teenage years I dreamt of becoming a writer. However, my career path was decided solely based on my exceptional science score on the Suneung. It was rare for students with a score like mine to give up medical school. So, at nineteen, I enrolled in university having no understanding of how it worked or what career opportunities lay ahead of me. Seoul is home to eight medical schools, and the lower your score, the further away from the city you have to go. My university was in Gangbuk, and I commuted every day from my house in Gangnam. While the latter was in a newly developed area, Gangbuk was the old downtown where many prestigious universities are located. 3.My future was set—I would become a doctor. Among those who entered medical school, very few chose to deviate from that career path, especially given the difficulty of securing one of the 3,500 spots available amid millions of applicants. Six years of rigorous, rote learning awaited me. Getting to that point had required family efforts and sacrifices, and medical schools had the most expensive tuition fees of all universities. Given all the expectations and financial stakes involved, it was impossible to consider a life outside of medicine.      Graduating from medical school was no small feat either. In just six years, universities must completely transform inexperienced high schoolers into full-fledged professional doctors, equipped with both theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Medicine is a vast field, and you can’t treat patients without actual clinical practice, which was the reason you could end up failing the entire program if you got an F in just one subject. The inhuman amount of memorization required, exam questions that seemed to have answers only the professors knew, the senior-junior hierarchy akin to that of military ranks, and the pervasive drinking and smoking were entrenched in the culture. Although I was at university, the schedule was predetermined, so I couldn’t choose which subjects I wanted to study. Classes that started at eight-thirty in the morning didn’t end until four or five in the afternoon. There was no room for creativity or serious contemplation about the future, let alone time to understand the meaning of the words I was memorizing. I poured all my energy into studying and passing to the next phase—disappointing my parents was out of the question.       After graduation, I entered a year-long internship at a university hospital. I was responsible for handling all sorts of menial tasks and although I learned a lot thanks to the monthly rotations, it was often felt more like labor exploitation. The pay was ridiculously low compared to the hours I worked, and I never really left the hospital. Isolated from society, I did whatever task I was assigned. The university hospital I worked at was infamous for its strenuous internship program, and truth be told, just by looking at the schedule and the intensity of the work, it could be compared to medieval slavery. To this day, the debate continues over whether internships should be retained since, from a rational standpoint, they are not essential. Once my internship was over, I applied for residency. My specialty was determined based on my grades, my exams, and interviews. I had long given up competing for top grades and thought I needed to focus on practical skills. My dexterity was good, so I considered a career in surgery. Instead, I applied for emergency medicine—I wanted to gain experience in different fields and see more of the world. I was twenty-six at the time.       My four-year residency began. If I’d felt like a medieval slave as an intern, being a resident felt like being enslaved during Ancient Egypt. During that period, I spent as many nights awake as I did asleep. I had roughly the same responsibilities as any emergency medicine specialist, but in addition, I had to work under professors to gain (excessive and hard) clinical experience, while reading numerous papers at the same time. After what felt like an endless residency, I had three years of mandatory military service. I went off to boot camp, wore my uniform, practiced close-order drills holding a spoon in my mouth at a right angle, fired rifles, and threw grenades. If you were a Korean man, you were supposed to be able to march in a line and handle a firearm in case of war. (Though I still wonder why the spoon had to be held at a right angle.) I served my time in a provincial area, and after a total of fourteen years since I started this journey, I finally secured a job at a regional emergency medical center in Seoul. Here, for the past eight years, I have been working as a cog in the system, treating people who have fallen from Han River bridges, been stabbed, hit by cars, or caught in explosions.  4.In hindsight, becoming an emergency medicine specialist came about through chance and unavoidable circumstances. My upbringing and academic environment, the rampant competition and hierarchical dynamics, my dreams, and societal pressures all shaped my career path, leading me to my current role at the regional emergency center. It is true that I invested most of my life into doing this, but I don’t regret it. Thanks to these decisions, I became independent in my late twenties, managing to pay rent while juggling my personal life and work. I’m glad that my job, although demanding, is valuable to society. Living a life where I can use my professional knowledge to help the sick and those in discomfort is a privilege that is not easily attained. Working in a specialized field can also lead to many diverse opportunities: as for me, I write, people invite me to give lectures, I am a university professor and occasionally I also offer advice on  hospital policies. When there are unfortunate accidents, the media often seeks out emergency medicine specialists, adding another dimension to my responsibilities. Some of my colleagues from university devote themselves to research, others set up start-ups, and some get a job at a regular company. All roles that contribute to society’s needs. Today as well, I will go to work and meet my many patients, each with their own inevitable story. It is my job and my duty to understand them.  Translated by Giulia Macrì 

  by Namkoong Ihn

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  [Cover Feature] Atop the Foot of the City

  I was born in Seoul.I have lived in Seoul all forty years of my life. I have dreamed of life outside the city on occasion, but never managed to take the leap. Part of it was probably a subconscious obsession with Seoul, which stemmed from watching my parents from the mountains and the seaside carve out a place here with great difficulty. But more influential was the fact that I didn’t have the confidence to live outside this city. I didn’t know much about life out there, and even after learning something of “not-Seoul” from books and YouTube, I was still too afraid. Finding work outside Seoul, too, was an obvious and significant challenge.     Seoul’s population surged rapidly in the twentieth century with an influx of out-of-town migrants. Young people, including my parents, left their homes in the countryside and made it their mission to settle down, get married, and build their wealth in the capital city. As time passed, the population density increased, and with the increase of aspiring Seoul residents, wealth disparity became a serious issue that gave rise to a housing crisis. I moved homes nearly twenty times over the course of my life in Seoul, and for a time, I thought that was normal. Seoul is my one and only hometown, yes, but ironically a place that has never been able to offer a permanent settlement.     The streets of Seoul are packed with high-rise condos. These stacks of households rising into the sky are considered upscale real estate in Seoul—the form of housing and investment that most people dream of. I, too, once dreamed of a condo, as did many people in my life. Most of us gave up as housing prices skyrocketed in the mid-2010s. Young people in particular felt a deep sense of despair and deprivation. National support programs for “young people” in Korea set the age of thirty-nine as the upper limit for what constitutes a “young person.” Denied the opportunity to acquire stable housing in Seoul, young people gave up their dreams for a better future, and now regard marriage and even dating as luxuries they cannot afford. Securing housing and a steady income takes priority above all else, and the long and arduous search for a place to call home is now a solitary rite of passage. It is difficult to find a young person in Seoul who doesn’t have deep concerns about housing. Many young people can scarcely find anything better than a seven-pyeong  studio or a half-basement unit, let alone a condo.      When older buildings are demolished to put up high-rise condos, residents of the old buildings are often displaced from their neighborhoods. I, too, have been displaced. Even now, development forces people from their beloved homes, pushing them completely out of Seoul. And leaving the city with the most jobs in the country feels like being pushed further from not only one’s current job, but from all future jobs to come. The biggest problem is the long, exhausting commute. When nine-to-six isn’t enough and overtime kicks in, the workday feels like a grueling journey worthy of the Fellowship of the Ring. Overwork has long been a chronic problem plaguing Korean society. Many laborers still can’t comfortably leave work on time, let alone take vacation days, without invoking the ire of their managers. As a result, many dream of living close to their workplace.     My short story “The Age of Mijo” features a young person preparing to move out of a neighborhood slated for redevelopment. Mijo, who lives with her widowed mother in a run-down district, is given an eviction notice by the landlord and must seek a new home for herself and her mother, using the inheritance her father left. But because housing prices have skyrocketed in the few years prior to the story, their only option is a half-basement studio apartment.     The half-basement style of housing, now famous thanks to the film Parasite, is extremely common throughout Seoul. Windows in such homes are positioned precisely at ground-level, letting in little sunlight but too much water in the rainy season. The only selling point of these homes is their price. It is often young people with little to their name and the urban poor who end up in such housing. In Mijo’s case, her financial situation is so dire that she can only afford a studio unit for herself and her mother. Far from comfortable, it’s the only option she has. She applies for job interviews, but due to her lack of distinctive experience, fails to attract any attention from hiring managers. Every night, Mijo wonders when she will find work. Being unemployed, she does not qualify for a mortgage, which makes a jeonse-style lease out of the question. There is no hope.Mijo’s problems are twofold: housing and employment, which are two sides of the same coin. Without a stable income, it is nearly impossible to find housing in Seoul. And with no clear solution on hand, Mijo falls asleep each night in fear and sadness. In “The Age of Mijo,” I wanted to indirectly pose the question: is lack of ability truly the reason Mijo is in this awful situation? I didn’t give an answer, because I believe the role of fiction is not to provide solutions but to invite readers to consider the question themselves. My own answer remains unchanged: lack of ability is not the reason for Mijo’s crisis. An individual’s poverty is not caused by simple misfortune and laziness. We begin the race of life at radically different starting points, and poverty is too easily passed on from one generation to the next. What was the government doing while the people struggled in poverty? I don’t claim that all individual failure is the fault of the government, only that we must remember that among individual failures are cases that are not actually failures of the individual.      In a city whose residences clearly display wealth disparity, an individual’s economic failure or success is made clearly visible—yet the self-blame and misfortune that arise as a result are ignored and unaddressed. In the continued operation of a system that makes success and failure so salient, the goal of the majority will always remain victory and the accumulation of wealth rather than solidarity and coexistence. And yet the city remains an attractive settlement for many, and rather than reject urban systems, we embrace them.     It has been several years since “The Age of Mijo,” and I now have a new question: why does Mijo insist on a home in Seoul? The answer is, of course, because most jobs are in Seoul. I am disheartened to see the masses in search of work crowd the cities and settle for nothing else. I, too, am faced with the eternal dilemma, unable to leave the city, but I believe it is important to understand the kinds of lives formed and destroyed by cities.     What is life in Seoul like?     A life of heading to work in the morning and returning home in the evening. A life where everything you ever need can be purchased. A life where you might recognize your neighbors but never know—or need to know—their hopes and dreams. A life hedged in by high-rises and shops and vehicles. A life without time for a stroll. A life where consumption continues into the weekends—and only increases on the weekends. A life where consumption is rest. A life far from green places and seas. A life where trying to get closer to anything comes with the stress of gridlock. A life where sleep-chasing coffee and relaxation-inviting beer must be within arm’s reach. A life where fresh air is a luxury. A life that is often lonely, with the loneliness technically caused by oneself. A life where, even in solitude, one cannot escape the clamor of the city’s machines and vehicles. A life of isolation even while surrounded by people. A life that still refuses to get to know people. A life that enjoys the benefits of public transit but feels suffocated by the sheer density of it all. A life of lying in the dark each night, thinking of all the work that awaits tomorrow. And above all else, a life lived in the home and the workplace. A life where no one can tell if they’re spending so much time at work to live in the city, or if they’re sleeping at home so that they can work in the city.     A day in the life of a city-dweller is oftentimes so chaotic it causes headaches, so lonely it drills holes in the heart, and is almost always a confusing mess of things we do not know or pretend that we don’t know. Do we love city life, or do we live in the city because we have no other choice? Do people who love city life love the elements that make up the city, or do they love themselves, as the individual who endures life in the city? Or do they love their own compassionate selves for forgiving the city?     Suyeong is another character in “The Age of Mijo.” A webtoon artist who works inhouse drawing explicit adult webtoons, Suyeong seethes in self-hatred but continues her work anyway. Although she glows with pride when her skills are recognized, she generally lives in a state of suffering. Each time she meets Mijo, complaints about work flood from her lips. By the time her self-esteem hits rock bottom, she begins to rationalize her work.     Suyeong works in Seoul’s Guro District, which has a long history as an industrial area. In the sixties, Guro was home to wig factories where young women Suyeong’s age put together wigs in small spaces crammed with machinery and laborers by the companies who ran them, demanding more than twelve hours of work each day. Suyeong cites this history and asserts that, as an artist of explicit webtoon content, she simply manufactures a product that is in demand, like the wig laborers of the past. By cleverly referencing the history of her city, Suyeong rationalizes her own work and applies the narrative of the laborer who is sacrificed in the name of progress to her own life. During the writing process, I always felt that Suyeong truly loved the city, unlike Mijo. And she also loved her own compassionate nature, which allowed her to love the city.     When you consider the connection Suyeong makes between the history of urban industrialization and her own work, the natural conclusion is that the city is, essentially, industry. Just like industry, a city requires a constant cycle of production and consumption to operate, and we, its dwellers, keep the cycle pumping. In our workplaces, we are producers, and outside our workplaces, we are consumers. But was that truly an active choice we made? Have we not been robbed of true happiness by the city? But the question of what constitutes true happiness mystifies us, because it is a deeper question that we might have expected at first: what is the nature of happiness? No longer are we able to give simple answers of “love” or “friendship.” Though we are more interested in the self than any other generation in history, so many of us claim that we don’t understand ourselves. Perhaps this is the reason Suyeong likens herself to the history of the city: the city’s history  appears much larger, better defined, and permanent than the history of any individual. The city is less contradictory than a person, with cause and effect clearly and rationally defined.     My personal experience of life in the city formed the foundation for my stories of city-dwellers. I remembered the struggle of house-hunting in Seoul, the despondency upon learning the home I narrowly secured turned out to be too small to accommodate a fridge. When I would tell these stories in public settings, I always encountered at least one reader with a similar experience, our eyes locking in camaraderie. They understood almost perfectly what I wished to say through my work. Through the thoughts and actions of my characters, I sometimes explored ways to live a decent life within the boundaries of the city. These characters eased their despair and anxieties by confessing their worries and sharing their thoughts with others. The act of writing regularly also gave me a great deal of comfort.     As I continued writing about the people who closed their eyes in fear each night, enduring awful living conditions, flitting from home to home like birds without feet, I pictured the things they might dream of. Things that were simply not possible in the city of Seoul.     A house with a large yard. Clean, quiet streets. Neighbors who stroll by without a care in the world. Exchanges of warm greetings. Clear skies and clean air. Walking to work with a spring in one’s step. A workplace without discrimination or violence. Work assigned in just the right quantities, never too much. Comfortable train rides home. Meeting friends without feeling envy or a sense of deprivation. Peaceful, restful evenings. A quiet dawn and a deep, comfortable sleep. . . and if I had written about someone who enjoyed this kind of life, the readers would have encountered not bitter reality but a comfortable dream.     I believe the role of fiction is to encourage us to dream of a better world, not to display the dreams themselves. That is probably the reason my characters are so much like us, people living in reality. If we want to dream of a better world, we need to point out everything that is wrong with reality. What readers dream of after those issues are addressed is entirely up to them.     Each time I take a trip far from Seoul, I find myself wondering—if I were to leave the city, what kind of life would I have? It feels as though the possibility I rejected might be living a life of its own somewhere, in a home outside Seoul. How does that other me wake up in the mornings, spend her afternoons, and enjoy her evenings? Whose faces does she picture in the serenity of night? Where do I drift, body and soul, far from the hectic speeds of the city?     When I return from my trips, those thoughts inevitably vanish. I strike my combat stance and consider what I must protect and what I must seek. The city goes on wanting, wanting, wanting, demolishing low-rise buildings and putting up sleek new high-rises each day. Rather than embrace me, the city looks down on me. Rather than look the city in the eye, I cling, squirming, to the top of its foot. Desperate not to fall, I fill another page of my book. Translated by Slin Jung        KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•     Lee Seo Su, “The Age of Mijo” from The March of Young Geunhui(EunHaeng NaMu, 2023)    이서수, 「미조의 시대」, 『젊은 근희의 행진』 (은행나무, 2023) 

  by Lee Seosu

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  [Essay] Some Women Are Not Welcome

  In 2011, a bright new talent, Son Bo-mi, emerged on the Korean literary scene. That year, she published six impressive short stories, including “Blanket,” “Bringing Them the Lindy Hop,” and “Downpour.” Her work was so fresh and unique that it shook the aesthetic landscape of Korean fiction. What drew such attention and enthusiasm to a debut writer? Her writing seemed unrelated to the traditional belief in realism, which claims to fully understand how everything in the world is connected. It also didn’t align with works that dramatized personal experiences as psychological tales, nor did it define itself as historical realism or as depictions of inner worlds. Instead, her sentences, devoid of moral judgments and emotional flourishes, featured a dry, impersonal style with subtle wit and a blend of fact and fiction, signaling a neutral, minimalist approach. Korean literature had now gained a writer who boldly declared, “I have no qualms about writing what I don’t fully know,” as she wrote in the afterword of Bringing Them the Lindy Hop. Her work rarely featured an omniscient or reliable narrator, emanated no heaviness or intensity, and even the cultural backgrounds of her characters seemed unclear.      On the topic of cultural backgrounds, some have observed that Son Bo-mi’s work is often set outside Korea and has a “translated feel.” However, since her work is published in Korean, it remains part of Korean literature, making discussions about identity and purity of style somewhat meaningless. Modern literary works, shaped by global interactions, can often feel like translations. The notion that literature must represent a nation contradicts the essence of literary creation and expression. Instead, Son’s work presents the potential for Korean literature to be free from the constraints and pressures of national representation. These qualities make her work uniquely captivating, ensuring her lasting impact on Korean literature.       If her first short story collection, Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, introduced her dry charm to the world, her second collection, Cats and the Elegant Night, offered penetrating insights into its characters while evoking a sense of detachment. Random, minor events disrupted the balance of her characters’ lives, creating cracks that shattered their entire existence. Through rich, yet concise character depictions, Son explored the profound question of whether it is possible to truly understand one’s own life and the lives of others.     In Son’s work, stories are rarely told from a woman’s point of view, and when there is a female narrator, she doesn’t know the whole truth. She remains in the realm of misunderstanding and doubt, unable to be “reliable,” even regarding her own inner world. Son’s depictions of “male bourgeois society” and the nuclear family, along with subsequent signs of their breakdown, are complex. The men in her fiction are not oppressive or violent patriarchs, but are usually competent, rational, and privileged elites. However, like the successful film producer in “Ferris Wheel,” they cannot shake the fear that something terrible is going to happen. Their trivial misunderstandings and errors in judgment, especially regarding women, reveal their contradictions, as well as the cracks and lies of their world. However, the women do not fight against the world dominated by men. Instead, they remain as extras in these narratives, or remnants of patriarchy, highlighting the men’s shortcomings and anxieties.      “The Substitute Teacher” stands out as one of the most evocative of Son’s female-centered narratives. “Everything was perfect, and nothing was wrong. Truly, nothing bad had happened.” In detached, precise language, sentences like this reveal the delusions and subtle signs of the protagonist Ms. P’s breakdown, along with her “wrong choices, misguided thoughts, futile hopes, resignation, and losses.” Ms. P becomes a nanny for the son of a young, elegant couple. This perfect family, consisting of a “handsome, polite young father, the lovely, elegant young mother, and the cute, intelligent-looking child,” sharply contrasts with Ms. P’s world of “modest wallpaper, synthetic fiber curtains, and narrow bed,” where she “[eats] alone, [gets] dressed alone, and [sleeps] alone.” Ms. P aims to become a cultured nanny for the couple’s child. However, the inescapable limitation of being a “substitute teacher,” as opposed to a permanent teacher, defines her life. As someone just “filling in” for a time, she is excluded from being officially integrated into the system and is instead used to fill its gaps.      The seemingly perfect couple cannot handle the practical issues of childcare, housekeeping, and caring for a sick elderly mother, so Ms. P steps in, making crucial sacrifices to hold together the life of the couple on the verge of collapse. At times, she feels like a member of the family, embracing their frailty, but these moments are temporary, and she is only “filling in.” Even though there are no devastating tragedies in this story, the instability of life as a “substitute” is mercilessly exposed, as well as the harsh realities of existence. Her pride in once being a teacher, along with her desire for culture and goodwill, are used to compensate for the bourgeois couple’s practical shortcomings. The hidden cruelty and class nuances within the term “substitute,” as opposed to “permanent,” are vividly portrayed in this story.      The issue is Ms. P’s unusual position as an unmarried, aging woman. Part of this family only when she fulfills their everyday needs, she is invited to join them at the dinner table when their demands become overwhelming. However, the couple has never truly welcomed Ms. P as a family member. They harbor subtle disdain for her, wondering, “Why do some women grow old without marrying or having children?” In the end, they pity her and label her life as “sad.” Even the young mother’s words to Ms. P—“Please, consider this your home”—are chilling and deceptive. To this affluent family, a substitute teacher is merely “that kind of woman.” The safe and comfortable bourgeois household cannot be sustained without the labor of such women. This sharp irony, reminiscent of the master-slave dialectic, exposes the anxiety and falsehoods of the nuclear family. “That kind of woman” reveals the cracks and self-deception within the seemingly normal patriarchal order. As outsiders to the family system, unmarried women in temporary positions highlight the fragile core of family ideology.      Son describes her writing style, which blends reality and imagination, as relying on “chance.” This element blurs the line between fact and fiction and plays a key role in shaping her characters’ lives. In her work, life unfolds as a series of chance events or network of coincidences that connect the world. Son’s writing challenges the belief that fiction can explain the world by uncovering a chain of events. Instead, her storytelling becomes a journey to encounter unpredictable moments where meaning loses its power.      Son discovers unexpected ways of mourning while exploring the meaning of existence. Her characters often fail to grasp the true significance of their own lives. Fiction affirms a person’s life not by fully comprehending it but by acknowledging their illusions, misunderstandings, longings, and the gaps in their understanding. Embracing all the chance encounters, fearful moments, and the unknown future a person faces can be seen as a kind of love. In this way, Son’s writing creates a fictional world that celebrates the lives of others. Her work possesses a unique charm that is universal, and readers who discover it will find joy. Translated by Janet Hong       KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•   Son Bo-mi, “Bringing Them the Lindy Hop,” “Blanket,” “Downpour” from Bringing Them the Lindy Hop (Munhakdongne, 2013)    손보미, 「그들에게 린디합을」, 「담요」, 「폭우」, 『그들에게 린디합을』 (문학동네, 2013)•  Son Bo-mi, “The Substitute Teacher,” “Ferris Wheel” from Cats and the Elegant Night (Moonji Publishing, 2018)    손보미, 「임시교사」, 「대관람차」, 『우아한 밤과 고양이들』 (문학과지성사, 2018)

  by Lee Kwang-ho

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  [Cover Feature] Korean SF is Always Korean

  A while back, I received a request from an American magazine to write an essay on the topic of “works that influenced me as an SF writer.” The first works that came to mind were Herman Hesse’s Demian, Korean manhwaga Go Yoo Sung’s Robot King, manhwaga Kim Jin’s Blue Phoenix and Kingdom of the Winds, Japanese mangaka Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy. However, the scholar who translated my essay said that it would be better if I chose works that American readers would be familiar with. I said that if that was the case, I would introduce “works that I like” rather than “works that influenced me,” and, with only Hesse’s Demian remaining from my initial list, I selected Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix, Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat, Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, and Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.     However, during the translation process, what I said about these being “not works that influenced me, but works I like” was removed and the list was ultimately labeled as books that influenced me. (A strange line was published saying that “these are all books I like, apart from Damien” which ended up making me look like a weirdo who was recommending Demian without even liking it!)     Somehow, out of all the authors I mentioned, there seemed to be a strange fixation on Octavia Butler. It led to her ending up on the list of authors who influenced me on my English language Wikipedia page. When a book of mine was coming out in Taiwan, the cover had, “An author influenced by Octavia Butler” written on it (I asked for this to be redacted). and An Italian interviewer once said to me, “So I’ve heard you were influenced by Octavia Butler.” When I realized that essay was the cause of all these problems, I requested it be corrected.     I mean, no matter how much I may respect Octavia Butler, I published my first SF story in 2002, so it would be impossible for an author who was only introduced to Korea in 2011 to have influenced me. None of the books I listed apart from Demian had been released in Korea before my debut.     I made similar complaints in the introduction to that essay as I am making in this one. There is no way that I developed into an SF writer the same way as a Western SF writer would have. Why are they expecting me, a Korean SF writer, to have been influenced by writers “Western people know”?     I once heard it said that, “Previous generations of Korean SF writers depicted all their protagonists as white men because they grew up watching SF with white male protagonists. Starting from the 2000s, Korean SF writers began to try and escape this framing.” I do not agree with this statement. There may have been writers like that, but no more than a handful of people in Korea could be said to have grown up seeing SF with only “white male protagonists.” Ultimately, the works most accessible to Koreans were Korean works.     The first SF work I read in my life was Go Yoo Sung’s Robot King. It’s a series that began in 1977 and, of course, it was set in Korea and the protagonists were Korean. This manhwa even had a scene showing a Korean shamanic ritual and blessing being performed before the first time a robot is piloted.     I have read many SF works and have seen countless SF movies. All of them will have influenced me. However, the influence of works I came across after growing up, no matter how world-famous or highly-regarded the works are, will never compare to the influence of those I consumed over and over again when I was a child who knew nothing of the genre. A work written by a Korean is Korean. Always.I don’t believe that saying Koreans create Korean writings means we are writing anything that comes from our identities as citizens under the country’s administration. I believe that Korean-ness exists on an elemental level beyond embodying premodern traditional religion, ritual, or dress. What Koreans put into their creative writing are things that have naturally formed from being born into and living in this society; they are universal sentiments that occur unconsciously and naturally. Things that are so familiar that I even catch myself asking, “Isn’t that a universal human thought?” But what seems strange and alien to people from other countries is our own uniqueness. Let me show you a few examples. Ex. 1: Public Servants instead of Vigilantes When the Marvel superhero movie series became incredibly popular even in Korea, I heard of an ambitious plan to make “Korea’s Marvel” or the “Korean Avengers.” Every time I heard this, I would say that the Western superhero structure wouldn’t work for Korea, and one time in a meeting I elaborated, “Vigilantes don’t suit Korea. A Korean superhero would become a public servant. Just look at the Hunter subgenre in Korean fantasy.”     “What the hell are the police doing?” is a question that often comes to mind when watching superhero movies. Police are one thing, but how could the government just leave civilians to deal with massive disasters on their own? It’s bizarre even if you try to explain it away as a convention of the genre. The question arises in the Marvel movie, Captain America: Civil War. In this movie we see how registering and regulating superheroes creates conflict among the Avengers. Viewers from the United States see those on Ironman’s side, the side championing the registry, as the villains. Whereas in Korea, we can’t understand Captain America, who is against the registry. We see him as someone who can’t separate private and public issues due to his personal feelings of love for an old compatriot.     This difference in interpretations comes from the historical and cultural differences of these two countries. The United States is a country of immigrants, established by settlers. In the US, no matter how much crime and gun violence occur, there are still many people who are oppose gun control and believe that they must own a gun to protect themselves and their families. It’s only natural in a country like this to imagine a vigilante group fighting criminals.     But Korea is a country with a history of strong governance stretching back to ancient times.  All citizens have their fingerprints registered, and as soon as you are born you are issued a Resident Registration Number (RRN). Without an RRN almost everything in your life becomes impossible; you wouldn’t be able to attend school, to work, earn money, or open a bank account. Korea has become famous as a place where you can leave your wallet or other expensive items in the street and no one will take it since thieves are easily apprehended. And on top of that, even our ghosts can’t release their grudges on their own. Instead of going after the one who wronged them, they appear to the local governor and file a civil complaint to release them from their grudge, but handling these complaints runs the governor ragged.     The Netflix anime series Solo Leveling (story by Chu Gong, illustrations by Jang Sung-rak) is an adaptation of one of the most representative and popular Korean webnovels in the Hunter genre. The Hunter genre was first developed in Korea and is seen as a genre rooted in Korea with Korean heroes. In this genre, monsters usually show up and normal people suddenly develop superhuman powers. These people are called “Hunters.” When a Hunter’s powers manifest, they usually seek out a Hunter’s Guild, take a skills test, and are given a level. The Guild will create teams based on the Hunters’ levels and send them to dungeons where monsters have been sighted. If a team is sent to a dungeon that doesn’t match their level and a tragedy occurs, it is seen as the responsibility of the mismanaged Guild. It’s as if Koreans have naturally made a genre that centers on the type of registry that Captain America stakes his life on fighting against in Civil War.     If we suppose that superhero stories created by Koreans will always have a system regulating superpowers, then the main conflicts in these stories would arise, not from the appearance of a powerful enemy, but rather from the weaknesses or contradictions within the system.     This propensity for Korean SF writers to imagine their heroes regulated within a system can be seen in the Korean superhero story anthology, Superhero Next-door. In Yi Seoyoung’s “Old Soldiers,” those with superpowers are affiliated with the government and fight against “the reds” with superpowers. But after they grow old and senile, they realize that “the reds” were laborers and union members just like them, and the differences between enemy and ally become indistinguishable. In Kim Ewhan’s Superhuman Now, superhumans are able to share their location in real-time with one another through the collective intelligence of the internet, and a vote takes place on a law which would give police powers to superhumans. Ex. 2: Holding multiple beliefs instead of one When I was on a publicity tour for my book in Italy, one attendee at an event saw me standing with my hands placed one in front of the other and asked, “Is this a Buddhist stance?” When I asked my interpreter, they told me that when people give lectures in Italy they don’t speak with their hands gathered in front of them. When I thought about it, I realized that I had been strictly taught at school to stand in the “Gongshou Position.” I was indoctrinated to believe that this is a “polite” stance, and I usually stand this way without thinking about it. But what is the origin of the Gongshou Position? Confucianism?     Occasionally my works shared abroad are critiqued as being “Buddhist” in some sense. I’m not even Buddhist. But perhaps some aspect of my writing might appear Buddhist to Western eyes. This might be the case since, in my eyes, works written by Westerners seem very Christian even if the author says that they are not.     What is our foundational faith? Westerners might believe that Buddhism is the major faith in Korea, but if you look at the statistics, the highest reported “faith” is Atheism (60% according to a 2021 Gallup Korea survey). Among those who follow a religion, Protestantism (17%) and Buddhism (16%) were nearly tied for second followed by Catholicism (6%). A mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shamanism influences the culture at large. The way I look at it, there is no one predominant religion. I think this is a peculiarity of our culture. There aren’t that many countries with such a variety of faiths coexisting peacefully. When I visited Bali in Indonesia, the owner of the guesthouse I stayed at asked me what my religion was. As soon as I said I didn’t have one, the old man was utterly confused. “What do you mean? How can you have nothing you believe in when you could believe in anything?” This was apparently inconceivable in a place where you send offerings to countless gods every morning.     Exhuma directed by Jang Jae-hyun is an occult film dealing with Korean shamanism that is attracting interest all around the world. Musok, Korean Shamanism, is our indigenous faith and a uniquely Korean practice impossible to find in any other country. However, the most Korean thing about Exhuma to me was the protagonists’ differing faiths, and that this difference among them felt natural. In one scene, while the mudang (Korean shaman) performs an exorcism, the undertaker stands next to her and reads passages from the Bible. Lee U-hyeok’s wildly popular serialized occult novel, Exorcism Diaries, which began in 1993, has similar scenes. Of the four protagonists, one has powers based in the martial art of taijutsu, one is a mudang, one is a Catholic priest, and one is a reincarnation of the Buddhist deity Rāgarāja. Qigong, the power of spirits, the Holy Ghost, and divine power are all mixed together, but this is perfectly acceptable in Korean culture.     Rather, a world where only one faith dominates feels weird. Let’s take a look at Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel, The Man in the High Tower. This novel tells the story of a parallel world where Japan and Germany have won the Second World War. Half of the world is steeped in Japanese culture. But when I read this novel, the strangest part for me was that these people used the I Ching to tell fortunes as a regular part of their everyday lives. Not only that, but when a big decision needs to be made, the I Ching is routinely consulted and treated as a significant indicator of the choice. There are people who study the I Ching in Korea too, but most people don’t use it. Even if you were considered an expert in the I Ching it is unlikely that you’d read its answers as definitive. There are a lot of fortune tellers in Korea and they have a variety of fortune telling methods.     The concept of there being one definitive answer is a Western one. It’s the perspective of a monotheistic culture. When Sang-deok, the geomancer in Exhuma, says “Well, not everything facing South is good!” we don’t know exactly what he means, but we know it has something to do with Feng Shui. There is no definite good and no definite bad. Koreans get their fortunes read with Saju and Tojeong Book of Secrets, yet hardly anyone believes that their predictions are absolute. When your Saju tells you you’ve got bad luck in store, you can get rid of it by going to the public baths, or if you’re told that you were born with itchy feet, you can play an online travel game. Taking action like this shows we Koreans don’t presume there’s only one singular sign in the world. Whatever Koreans write is KoreanWhenever people look for something “Korean” they often think of legends, clothing, myths, food, and traditional rituals that have only been passed down in Korea. But I believe that something more meaningful than that is the philosophy that comes from the culture embodied within us. Instead of mimicking other works, good writers will take a close look at their real lives and experiences and use their imagination to draw upon what they find. These are the stories that come naturally only to us.     When I was speaking on national tragedies at the Utopiales SF convention in France, someone from the audience asked, “How can reflections on colonialism be addressed in SF literature?” Very proudly, I replied, “Korea is a country that can only speak on the subject of colonialism from the position of the colonized. Therefore, Korea must tell more Korean stories.” These are stories that can never be created in Japan, which Westerners tend to imagine as representative of East Asia. I have sometimes heard that SF is the literature of Empire. They say that SF tells the stories of powerful nations who dominate the world, who have a sense of adventure and pioneering spirit, and usually center elite white male protagonists who conquer space as they conquered the world, fighting wars and settling on new planets. I have also heard that there may be limitations to what can be imagined in Korean SF literature because Korea does not have that colonizing history. I do not agree. Fortunately, since we have not taken part in the horrors of imperialism, we can write stories that those who do have that history would never be able to write. How amazing is that?     Sometimes I hear people lament that space opera isn’t popular in Korea. It’s a complaint that seems to miss the point. From the start, space operas are not a story we can understand. The stories that Korean people can write well are not the stories of imperialists who conquer space. They are the stories of aliens who must fight back against earthlings who have suddenly appeared on their planet saying they will claim it as their own. We can write those kinds of stories. Because our history comes from an entirely different position. Translated by Victoria Caudle      KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•     Robot King (Wolgan-Udeungseng, 1977)      『로보트 킹』 (월간 우등생, 1977)•     Blue Phoenix (Manhwa Wangguk, 1988)      『푸른 포에닉스』 (만화왕국, 1988)•     Kingdom of the Winds (Daenggi, 1992) 1      『바람의 나라』 (댕기, 1992)•     Solo Leveling (Papyrus, 2016) 2      『나 혼자만 레벨업』 (파피루스, 2016)•     “Old Soldiers,” Superhero Next-door (Golden Bough, 2015) 3      「노병들」, 『이웃집 슈퍼히어로』 (황금가지, 2015)•     Superhuman Now (Saeparan Sangsang, 2017) 4      『초인은 지금』 (새파란상상, 2017)•     Exorcism Diaries (Dulnyouk, 1994)      『퇴마록』 (들녘, 1994) 

  by Kim Bo-young

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  [Cover Feature] Every Possible Thing Bar One: Four Keywords for Recent Korean SF

  Externally Tangent Korean SF has come of age, outgrowing the confines of its genre and spearheading narrative fiction. The Korea Publishing Marketing Research Institute identified the “SF surge” as an industry keyword of 2019, and the trend has only accelerated. How does one explain this Korean-style SF? To ask at the risk of simplification, does Korean SF form a regional, localized subset of SF, or does it carry unique traits as a variant?     In the former case, Korean SF would constitute a subcategory of larger SF history. The genre’s evolution—spanning odes to science and technology, speculative fiction, and Donna J. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)—has yielded key works at each juncture. Korean SF achievements could count as one of those turning points inscribed within the larger category of SF. The diagram would appear as follows:    Figure 1. Korean SF as an internally tangent circle      Literary critic Sherryl Vint characterizes SF by the accumulation, repetition, resonance, allusion, differentiation, and transformation of myriad works. This universal set serves as the individual work’s prototype—the “megatext.” As a set of recurring backdrops, metaphors, conventions, settings, images, and devices, the SF megatext imparts its DNA to all textual offspring. The genealogical metaphor implies that all aspects of the individual text are already found in the megatext. If a text happens to present an entirely new element, the megatext incorporates the newness, turning creation into rediscovery. Megatext is the larger “one” from which all texts emanate—the One.     I do not consider Korean SF to be a megatext child. Korean authors may have referenced SF elements, but instead of being inscribed within, their works stay externally tangent. As two separate categories, SF and Korean SF meet without subsuming the other:     Figure 2. Korean SF as an externally tangent circle      Recent Korean SF, linked to the “feminism reboot” of 2015, diverges from traditional SF. Major authors of Korean SF are mostly female, as evidenced by names on the 2022 SF sales list: Kim Choyeop in first and third places, Cheon Seonran in second place, and Kim Bo-young in sixth place. (Fourth and fifth places went to foreign authors.) Readers of Korean SF are mostly female as well: 66.1 percent.[1] Korean SF stays externally tangent to SF on one side, feminist/queer discourse on the other, an interdependent circle expanding its interface. It bears emphasis that feminist/queer imagination is not internal to Korean SF, nor is Korean SF internal to SF.  Parallel Universe In SF narration, a “novum”—literary critic Darko Suvin’s term for novelty or innovation—typically acts as a nexus between the reader’s empirical world and the textual world. Suvin also defines SF as “literature of cognitive estrangement,” pointing to the novum as the genre’s differentia specifica—a portal into the textual world. By passing through the portal, readers internalize the logic intrinsic to that fictional domain. In recent Korean SF, however, the novum fades in importance. Though placed at the narrative gateway, it hardly represents an object of identification in the Imaginary or a translation of signs in the Symbolic; nor is it the Real prompting moments of anamorphosis.     As mentioned above, Korean SF stays externally tangent to the feminism reboot ongoing since 2015. SF traces its lineage to the white male elite, the masculine knowledge production underpinning science as a whole. Hence the SF staple of the “mad scientist”—but not so in recent Korean SF. Korean SF in the spotlight rarely indulges in the male hero narrative or the masculine trope of tyrannical mad science. Instead, it engages with a new epistemology that recognizes the inherent deficiency, disability, intermediacy, and vulnerability of beings.     In Kim Choyeop’s short story “Laura” from The World I Just Left Behind, the eponymous heroine suffers from phantom pain in a third arm. She tells her lover, “See, even now I feel as though that arm is touching you. When we hug, I use my third hand to caress your cheek. But whenever I realize it doesn’t materially exist, I feel like an interstitial being.”[2] Typical phantom pain—perceptions of a limb that should have been there—would express a deficiency or disability. What about a limb that no one has, a limb that should not be there? Perhaps that is the insight—“presence of absence” (existent sense of a nonexistent third arm) as the nature of being.     This world could be termed a parallel universe, a counterpart world placed elsewhere due to some spatiotemporal rift. The novum in Korean SF serves as a guide to this parallel realm, indicating not difference but sameness.  Undone Science Sociologist David J. Hess problematizes “undone science,” referring to scientific research that is absent. Deprioritized and unfunded, undone science nevertheless holds value for civil society. Hess states that the jostling among political, industrial, and social-movement leaders results in “the systematic nonexistence of selected fields of research”—in short, intentional lacunae of knowledge.[3]     SF stands on the optimistic ground of “not-yet-done” science. When Sherryl Vint defines the genre as one that “has the power to literalize metaphor, to build worlds that capture something true yet unrepresentable in the literary mode of realism,”[4] the trueness in question exists in potentiality, a not-yet space of the future. Science thus comprises three domains: the already done, the not-yet-done (which will be done), and the undone. The second pertains to SF, the third to Korean SF.     Korean SF imagination, conjoined with feminist/queer ontology, establishes itself on the ground of undone science. This science, neglected for being unnecessary, contributes little to communal prosperity and fails to restore individuals to normality. Yet by shedding light on zones of indistinction (where individuals are excluded from the communities they inhabit), this science alone presents those beings in and of themselves without resorting to the logic of selection and exclusion (i.e., normal/abnormal, standard/nonstandard, internal/external).     Kim Choyeop’s Planetarian Bookshop provides a case in point with “Swamp Boy,” a story in which beings connect to a mycelia network. The beings form a collective network of “we”; they function as members (the “ones among us”) of this “we”; they serve as components of both Owen, who retains his neural network of consciousness, and the boy, who consumes the mycelia. They also form the boy-mycelia and neural-mycelial complex (Owen-mycelia). As it turns out, the boy happens to be a clone created to “replace the dying bodies of humans,” and as such, is not a representative human entity. From a scientific point of view, the beings defy logic as they are neither object nor subject of cogito. Therein lies the power of undone science, the new imagination that undermines the theoretical framework of mainstream science differentiating “I” from “you,” “I” from “we.”  Nonsubstantiality Exploring the point of contact between SF and non-SF requires a presupposed concept of reality. This reality, however, varies in meaning. In SF, reality refers to the reader’s empirical world in contrast to the textual world conjured by scientific imagination. In non-SF, reality refers to the world which fiction aims to represent. The former equates to the universe sans novum; the latter, the original universe represented by way of literary convention. These differences notwithstanding, the term reflects a belief in this world as an actuality, not a fantasy. Both realms accept the unconscious premise of verisimilitude underlying literary realism. Yet SF and non-SF should explore the opposite notion that the world does not exist—is that not the theme calling for variation? Consider these examples. The world as propagated by the ruling class (mere ideology) does not exist. The world as described by romantics (mere passion) does not exist. The world as shaped by capitalism (mere illusion) does not exist. The possibilities go on.     What reality represents and forges by that term is a one and only world—simply One. Korean SF features “every possible thing” (à la Gu Byeong-mo in her story “Every Possible Thing”) bar One. Reality, and the world founded upon reality, ceases to exist in Korean SF. Though readers assume the verisimilitude of fictional entities, their substantiality as such remains questionable.     Cheon Seonran’s “Some Shape of Love” follows Rahyeon, a navel-less alien child who falls in love. “Now that you love Minhyeok, you’ll be a boy,” says Rahyeon’s mother. Upon falling in love a second time with a female upperclassman, Rahyeon develops the physical traits of a girl. When under the assumption of reality, all beings take on substance. Boys as boys, girls as girls. Not so in recent Korean SF. Cheon’s protagonist will be a boy while loving a boy, a girl while loving a girl. Note that the bodily transformation does not comply with heterosexuality. Transformation within a cross-sex framework would still presuppose a certain substantiality. The “I” may be mutable, but the other provides the immutable constant. In “Some Shape of Love,” “I” transforms not in relation to a loved one but by virtue of being in love. The “I” leads a nonsubstantial existence. Viewing recent Korean SF as a tributary of the grand SF narrative or of feminist/queer fiction would offer at best a partial picture. Korean SF stays externally tangent to the three categories of SF, feminist/queer fiction, and Korean non-SF. Korean SF rejects both utopian outlook and dystopian eschatology, using the novum not as a genre converter but as a steering device leading to a parallel universe.[5] Not an alternate life, be it optimistic or pessimistic, but an alternate realm. While SF focuses on executable science, recent Korean SF focuses on systematically unexecuted science, probing into that undone domain. Lastly, Korean SF builds on nonsubstantiality. Gone is the vision of a one world that exists or should exist. For in that One lies Mad Adam’s fanatical belief that stifles SF imagination, suppresses feminist/queer plurality, and reinforces literary authoritarianism. Korean SF offers “every possible thing” bar One. Translated by Sunnie Chae      KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•     “Laura,” The World I Just Left Behind (Hankyoreh, 2021) 1      「로라」, 『방금 떠나온 세계』 (한겨례출판, 2021)•     “Swamp Boy,” Planetarian Bookshop (Maumsanchaek, 2021) 2      「늪지의 소년」, 『행성어 시점』 (마음산책, 2021)•     “Every Possible Thing,” Every Possible Thing (Munhakdongne, 2023) 3      「있을 법한 모든 것」, 『있을 법한 모든 것』 (문학동네, 2023)•     “Some Shape of Love,” Some Shape of Love (Arzak Livres, 2020) 4      「어떤 물질의 사랑」, 『어떤 물질의 사랑』 (아작, 2020)  [1]       Kim Yongchul, “In Search of Hope amid Anxious Reality, ‘We Head toward the Surreal World,’” Segye Ilbo, May 7, 2022, https://segye.com/view/20220505512377. [2]       Kim Choyeop, “Laura,” trans. Sukyoung Sukie Kim, Asymptote (January 2023). https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/laura-kim-cho-yeop/ [3]       David J. Hess, Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 22. [4]       Sherryl Vint, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5. [5]       Author’s note: the SF-related term cybernetics derives from the Greek κυβερνήτης, meaning “steersman.”

  by Yang Yun-eui

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  [Cover Feature] Korean SF Now

  When Netflix was first launched, I was able to watch nearly every new science fiction movie and series it offered. These days, however, it has become impossible to keep up with all the new SF content emerging across various streaming services. Aside from Netflix’s offerings, staying current with the latest SF content and all its subgenres (including novels, webtoons, comics, etc.) can easily take up a whole lifetime.      Regarding this sudden rise in popularity, seasoned writers and scholars of science fiction from both the US and South Korea now share a sense of excitement. They note how the genre has evolved from a marginalized, niche interest from just a few decades ago to its current status as a mainstream cultural force. However, there is a notable distinction between the Korean and American science fiction communities. In the US, the genre began its mainstream integration back in the 1960s and 1970s, propelled by blockbuster franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars, and has continued to evolve ever since. In contrast, South Korea experienced this shift more abruptly within the last decade, compressing a similar scale of cultural integration into a much shorter timeframe.      No one doubts that Korea now plays a major role in global science fiction production. Anyone who has followed the latest popular Korean releases will remember notable SF hits from the recent past such as The Silent Sea (2021) or Space Sweepers (2021). As for literature, the preference for science fiction and fantasy over the traditionally beloved realist genre is more notable among young readers on digital platforms. Today, new web novels abound with science fiction and fantasy themes. According to Korean fans of these webtoons and web novels, works that deals with the so-called “R.I.R” (or “R.T.R”, acronyms for Regression, Isekai or Transmigration, Reincarnation) themes comprise more than ninety percent of the bestseller lists. In these works, characters either find themselves in a parallel universe, travel back in time, or reincarnate themselves in someone else’s body. The prevalence of these themes among web-based content underscores the dominance of science fiction and fantasy genres among younger readers, who are the major users of digital platforms.      Most global audiences encounter South Korean SF through these kinds of visual media or web fiction for the first time. This often misleads them into thinking that South Korean science fiction is solely about film and webtoons, without any historical depth. However, the rise of science fiction in South Korea is not just a visual and digital phenomenon. Paying attention to the nation’s literary history reveals a different genealogy. For example, a glance at the annual bestseller lists shows titles such as Kim Choyeop’s The Greenhouse at the End of the Earth and If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, along with Cho Yeeun’s Cocktail, Love, Zombie among the top 25 bestsellers at Kyobo Books, the largest Korean online book retailer, for two consecutive years. SF works by other authors like Jeong You Jeong, Cheon Seonran, Serang Chung, and Bora Chung also grace these lists.      In response to the increasing popularity of Korean science fiction, American book publishers have begun to show interest with many South Korean novels now being translated into English and introduced to global readers. Notable examples include the anthology Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, co-edited by Professor Sunyoung Park of the University of Southern California, a leading scholar in SF studies, and Park Sang Joon, director of the Seoul Science Fiction Archive. This collection includes a range of Korean authors, both young and prominent, from Bok Geo-il, Djuna, Soyeon Jeong, Kim Bo-young, Young-ha Kim, Park Min-gyu, and Park Seonghwan. Additionally, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the National Book Award, with a commendable translation by Anton Hur. Hur has also brought two more science fiction stories to global readers: Serang Chung’s novella Take My Voice and Djuna’s novel Counterweight. Another of Djuna’s collections, Everything Good Dies Here, is anticipated to be published in English by Kaya Press. Other notable examples include Bae Myung-hoon’s Tower, Launch Something! and Dolki Min’s Walking Practice.      These English translations hold particular importance for educators and researchers outside Korea. Before the publication of Readymade Bodhisattva, teaching South Korean science fiction literature in American colleges was challenging. Despite my eagerness to introduce these works and my awareness of the numerous high-quality SF stories from Korea, the absence of English translations made it impractical. Now, thanks to the availability of these translations, I can design an entire semester’s course dedicated solely to South Korean science fiction that includes literature, cinema, webtoons, and VR movies. Students initially express confusion when engaging with these texts due to cultural differences, but they soon adapt and become deeply interested in the unique perspectives that these foreign SF stories provide.      It’s not just me; a growing number of scholars have begun to incorporate South Korean SF literature into American classrooms and academic publications. For example, the Korean Literature Association organized an academic conference on Korean science fiction at the University of Southern California in 2023. The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts released a special issue on South Korean science fiction in 2023. Another academic journal, Science Fiction Film and Television, published its first article on South Korean SF films in 2021. There’s also a noticeable increase in the number of graduate students in the United States focusing their dissertations on South Korean science fiction.      While it is undeniable that the study of South Korean science fiction is expanding, significant gaps remain that researchers have yet to address. A particular concern is the emphasis on contemporary visual media, such as films and digital platforms, while the literary tradition of the genre is often overlooked. Only a few existing research publications on South Korean science fiction, both within Korean and overseas academic circles, focus on key historical texts, such as Kim Dong-in’s story “The Study of Dr. K,” published in 1929, and the works of prominent figures from the 1960s and 1970s like Han Nak-won and Moon Yun-sung. However, these studies primarily examine these works from a historical perspective, rather than through the lens of SF scholarship. Research on the 1980s and 1990s is also scarce, centering mainly on two key figures: Bok Geo-il and Djuna.       In recent years, a noticeable shift has emerged. Sungkyunkwan University has played a pivotal role in this development, hosting two major conferences in Seoul on science fiction as part of its Annual International Forum on Cultural Studies in 2021 and 2023. While still not abundant, more recent academic monographs and articles are bridging the gaps in scholarship in both Korea and the United States.       Will this recent popularity and growth in fictional production and academic research continue in the future, or will it be just a short-lived fad that eventually disappears? To support this ongoing development, it is crucial to cultivate a deep understanding of the genre’s place within its national and global history. As South Korean science fiction experiences rapid growth across all media without sufficient discussion about its unique form and history, the Korean SF community seems to lack an adequate understanding of it as a genre. Addressing the following key questions is essential: What defines science fiction, and how does it distinguish itself from other genres? Is it inherently a Western genre? When integrating this Western genre into the Korean context, what adaptations are necessary, and what are the gains and losses? How should Korean science fiction differentiate itself from its British and American counterparts? Despite its rapid growth, Korean science fiction has not yet fully engaged with these questions.       Then, what exactly is science fiction? Its definition and historical beginnings remain topics of active discussion among scholars, especially within the Western tradition. There appears to be a consensus around two primary theories: one positing that the genre began with Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, and the other tracing its roots to the early twentieth century with pioneering writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Either way, SF scholars generally agree that the genre emerged from Western Europe and then to America before making its way to Korea via Japan.      This has led many recent Korean SF films to reproduce Western SF clichés and narrative frameworks, replacing Western characters and settings with Korean equivalents. The shortcomings of this method are evident in the underperformance of SF blockbusters like The Moon (2023), Jung_E (2023), and Black Knight (2023). Despite significant budgets and high expectations, these films failed to achieve financial or critical success. While deficiencies in creativity and imagination may have played a role, a deeper problem lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre itself. Science fiction, like any genre, has evolved and diversified over more than a century, making it impossible to pinpoint a fixed, timeless essence of the genre. However, it seems that in South Korean film industry there is a prevalent, narrow view as if “hard science fiction”—characterized by elements like alien invasions and AI robots fighting for control of Earth—embodies the “true” and “core” elements of science fiction.       The advent of the New Wave movement in the US and UK starting in 1964 saw writers like Ursula K. Le Guin challenge traditional hard science fiction motifs—such as alien warfare and AI robots—through her works, including The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1985). Similarly, Philip K. Dick, revered as the “Shakespeare of science fiction,” ventured into psychological and philosophical territory, exploring the nuances between reality and virtuality, and the nature of perception, thereby avoiding typical “hard SF” tropes. In response to these shifts, prominent SF scholar Darko Suvin suggested in 1977 that the definition of “science” in science fiction be broadened to include social sciences like anthropology and sociology, alongside the natural sciences and engineering. This led to proposals for new genre labels such as “speculative fiction,” “soft science fiction,” and “lifestyle science fiction” to better capture these broader themes. Today, SF communities often use terms like “speculative fiction” or “SFF” (science fiction and fantasy) as inclusive categories that encompass a wider spectrum of narratives.      As a result, the issue of defining science is intricately linked to the understanding of the genre. Looking back, classic English science fiction, once celebrated as exemplary, often appears unscientific to contemporary readers. For instance, H.G. Wells’s seminal work, The Time Machine (1895), provides no explanation as to how the machine enabled travel to the distant future and back, thus appearing magical to contemporary readers. As we delve further back into the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, authors often embraced commonly accepted scientific beliefs of the times such as alchemy, telepathy, geocentrism, or even flat earth theory. This illustrates how the notion of “science” has shifted and expanded, consequently complicating the task of genre classification.      This issue becomes particularly salient in the context of Korean science fiction. If novels by Wells and Verne, which utilized now outdated or pseudo-scientific theories, are still considered exemplary science fiction works, we must then consider how to classify Korean novels from bygone eras. Such works might incorporate neo-Confucian concepts like Li and Qi to explain natural phenomena, or explore traditional Korean practices like herbal medicine, acupuncture, pungsu jiri (feng shui), or geomancy. Grace Dillon, a scholar of Native American studies, contends in the introduction to Walking the Clouds (2012) that indigenous peoples possess distinct concepts of science. She argues that indigenous practices, from herbal medicine to storytelling and star reading should be viewed as legitimate forms of science, which she terms “indigenous science.” Re-evaluating South Korea’s literary history through this lens can clarify numerous works that, while not traditionally recognized as science fiction, warrant such classification. This approach has the potential to bridge divisions and enrich our understanding by linking science fiction with other narrative forms like fantasy, mythology, religion, and folklore.      The future of Korean science fiction should focus on embedding its narratives within the philosophical, cultural, and mythological fabric of Korea. This approach moves beyond simply transplanting Korean characters and settings into Western narratives. As director Bong Joon-ho articulated during the Oscars in 2020, “The most personal is the most creative.” This ethos encourages Korean writers to craft narratives that are distinctly Korean, breaking away from Western SF structures and conventions. This requires a redefinition of “science” and “science fiction” that aligns with Korean sensibilities and challenges a Western conceptual framework. By applying this new perspective to the past of Korean literature, we can uncover a rich lineage of science fiction, spanning from pre-modern myths and folk tales to feminist comics of the 1980s and occult and fantasy novels of the 90s, and set the stage for an ever-evolving future for Korean science fiction.        KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•     Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction (tr. Sunyoung Park, Dagmar van Engen et al., Kaya Press, 2019) 1•     Cursed Bunny (tr. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2021) 2      『저주 토끼』 (아작, 2021)•     Take My Voice (tr. Anton Hur, Stranger Press, 2023) 3      『목소리를 드릴게요』 (아작, 2020)•     Counterweight (tr. Anton Hur, Pantheon, 2023) 4      『평형추』 (알마, 2021)•     Everything Good Dies Here (tr. Adrian Thieret, Kaya Press, 2024) 5•     Tower (tr. Sung Ryu, Honford Star, 2020) 6      『타워』 (문학과지성사, 2020)•     Launch Something! (tr. Stella Kim, Honford Star, 2022) 7      『빙글빙글 우주군』 (자이언트북스, 2020)•     Walking Practice (tr. Victoria Caudle, HarperVia, 2023) 8      『보행연습』 (은행나무, 2022)•     The Greenhouse at the End of the Earth (Giant Books, 2021) 9      『지구 끝의 온실』 (자이언트북스, 2021)•     If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light (Hubble, 2019) 10      『우리가 빛의 속도로 갈 수 없다면』 (허블, 2019)•     Cocktail, Love, Zombie (Safe House, 2020) 11      『칵테일, 러브, 좀비』 (안전가옥, 2020)•     The Study of Dr. K (Shinsoseol December 1929)      『K 박사의 연구』 (신소설 12월호, 1929)

  by Sang-Keun Yoo

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  [Essay] Trust in Silence

  Is it true that poetry is losing readers because it’s difficult to read? Who can say if contemporary poetry is hemorrhaging readers over an obsession with aesthetics or because of attrition in general readership? Whether poetry has lost readers because poetry is difficult or because poetry went into hiding behind its own difficulties as a reaction to having lost readers (or both), it’s clear to me that this reader attrition problem won’t be solved by simply writing more easy-to-read poetry. It’s the novel’s job to provide readers with entertaining stories, and new media or pop music’s with immediate stimulation to say nothing of movies and games and other stimulating forms of narrative. Poetry, on the other hand, is slow to read and lacking in plot. Even the slightly more popular forms of narrative poetry are weighed down with allegory and elaborate metonymy. (Plus, they’re long, which somehow makes it worse.) Despite this, poetry still strives to communicate, or to be more precise, to present a more diverse array of potentials to communicate. Instead of exploring the fertile lands of mainstream communication, poetry seeks out the arid wastelands on the margins of communication, seeking out undiscovered wellsprings. And to reach such remote emotions and thoughts, one must always be looking at ever more unfamiliar and inhospitable paths.      The poetry of Kim So Yeon is no different. Her recent collection Catalyzing Night, epitomized by a “trust in silence” aesthetic, places her at the very forefront of contemporary poetry. Silence is the extreme delay of speaking, and it also connects to the slowest form of writing and reading. It is the political and aesthetic opposite of immediate stimulation and smooth communication. Before examining the dynamics of her anti-capitalist slowness and her resistance through silence against the absurdities of our age, it is worth noting the position of Kim’s work in our national poetry scene. Any serious reader of Korean poetry should have at least one of Kim So Yeon’s books. If a little hyperbole could be allowed here, perhaps we can designate the sales number of the latest of her books as the “So Yeon Index”—if so, should the Seo-yeon Index fall below 10,000 copies, our poetry publishing landscape is in dire straits. The slowness and frequent enjambment of her lines seem to contradict her best interests by their implicit advocacy of silence. How is it that she continues to attract readers?      With the publication of her work The Bones We Call Tears in 2009, we could, as it does in its afterword, summarize the volume as “the task of subtly and beautifully delaying an answer to preserve its truth.” At a time when social discourse had entered a most mendacious zeitgeist, Kim’s poetry, which candidly confessed to “having spent another century holding the knife to carve out the same expression” (“For the Sake of One Summer”), was welcomed by readers from the get-go for its emphasis on the truth. In The Mathematician’s Morning, published in 2013, the critic Hwang Hyeon-san noted that, “You are practicing an ocean with a handful of wave, and it saddens me you might hear that ocean died a long time ago” and “it is sad that your now is the time wrought from your deepest sadness.” The very next year, the nation experienced several tragedies—on the mountain slopes in Gyeongju, the sea off Jindo, and in terminals and squares. As per usual, all the literature in the world is thoroughly useless against death in real life. But Kim’s helpless sadness found a sympathetic audience with the people mourning their era. Some years later, when ugly prejudice against women and other social minorities blew up in mainstream discourse, she came out with a collection titled To i about a quietly unraveling character named “i.” In every era, Kim has foregrounded the emotional sensibility that readers have most urgently needed.      Five years on from To i, what emotional sensibility are we in need of now? Let’s think of virtual fortunes going up and down by the second, the international and domestic politics that completely change every few weeks, the rapid development of our technologies, and the correlate rapidness of environmental degradation. Individuals and families lose their battles with time, neighbors lose their health and homes overnight, we lose our jobs and our lives. None of the lies, disasters, and hate that made us suffer were resolved—if anything, they’ve accelerated in their course to further ruin our lives. The strategy of Catalyzing Night in the face of such realities is as follows: To assert that “The slow on occasion know to abhor the quick” (“Catalyzing Night”). To “Sleep until late in the morning” and leisurely observe that “Yesterday is finally far enough away.” To spend or waste one’s life researching the lives of “the many stuntmen who moved so naturally in the unfocused background” (“Even the Bones of an Angel’s Wing Is a Formidable Skeleton Up Close”). Or slowing down to let mindless words run on ahead (“Leave Flowers Behind”). Speeding up to catch up to time is a losing proposition from the beginning. If time is indeed money, as the capitalist truism goes, then the easiest way to subvert time and capital is to slow down.      Can we ever escape time’s velocity completely or catch up to it? Kim is not a romanticist trying to escape time toward some ideal, nor is she a foolish realist throwing herself under the wheels of reality in search of a solution. In the face of utter despair and defeat, which is the inevitable result before speed and the power of time, romantic escape and the pursuit of practical advancement are both sentimental musings. The aesthetics of extreme slowness she presents is the only way to sense the profound emptiness of time as a capitalistic value. By not trying to catch up to time, the poet can maintain a disdain for time and transcend it while existing in the midst of it. As “Cave” implies, the cave in which Kim evades time is not a space where sadness is eliminated or a sort existence beyond reality/unreality. It is, if anything, a place of “too much sobbing,” where “Everything is sobbing” because sadness has converged there. Just as all literature turned helpless in the face of the 2014 Sewol disaster, all such sensory attempts to resist the reality of time end up desensitized. But even if we do not transcend the “Dirtied / really dirtied you” here, Kim wishes to stay grounded in reality, vowing to “Let’s stay here / Yes let’s just stay here.” Endlessly repeating her cries until they become “the cries without an ounce of need for sadness.”      This is her strategy: to respond to hurried time with an overflowing laziness of time, to make the cries that contain sadness faint by repeating them. How to realize this enduring of time within time and sadness within sadness in praxis? This is where silence comes in. Kim puts great trust in silence in several of her poems. For example, in “Second Floor Guest Lounge,” the speaker is in a cacophonous situation of “No one just listens anymore” and “The shouter keeps shouting the listeners start shouting” opting for silence in search of the missing piece broken off from life. The “What if . . . / I mean what if . . .” segues into silence, never speaking of this recovery. In a state of absolute despair, the voicing of hope is to instantly condemn that hope to defeat. And yet, simply not saying anything then becomes futile escapism. Therefore, the strategy of the speaker is to go back and forth forever between hopeless defeat and cowardly escape by choosing silence. They think about salvation “about 50,000 times” until they become “a what if,” creating an impossible vector of hope and recovery through endless repetition of praxis. The speaker in “Hide the Falling Rain” believes that they “believe it a little bit more” because “he never told me his name,” which means his name is never voiced, that the speaker has failed repeatedly to call upon his existence, which ironically enables the speaker’s praxis through this “he.”      The speakers in Kim’s poetry do not voice themselves, but in silence, are able to closely observe or slowly embrace or carefully listen. Her praxis of silence is a specific method of imploding time through time and sadness through sadness. This trust in silence is most clearly presented in these lines from “Catalyzing Night”:       Your boiling body      I wipe with wet towels      just as you’ve taught me      and stay up all night      [. . .]      Recalling again      how you cooled my fever      I stay up all night The speaker takes care of “you,” but the method of care is not passed through speech but the memory of action, “how you cooled my fever” in silence, a praxis that was also “taught” to the speaker. This silence is indeed the most Kim So Yeon of words. Translated by Anton Hur        KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•   “For the Sake of One Summer,” The Bones We Call Tears (Moonji Publishing, 2009) 1    「한 개의 여름을 위하여」, 『눈물이라는 뼈』 (문학과지성사, 2009)•   A Mathematician’s Morning (Moonji Publishing, 2013) 2    『수학자의 아침』 (문학과지성사, 2013)•   To i (Achimdal Books, 2018) 3    『i에게』 (아침달, 2018)•   “Catalyzing Night,” “Cave,” “Even the Bones of an Angel’s Wing Is a Formidable Skeleton Up Close,” “Leave Flowers Behind,”     “Second Floor Guest Lounge,” “Hide the Falling Rain,” Catalyzing Night (Moonji Publishing, 2023) 4    「촉진하는 밤」, 「동굴」, 「천사의 날개도 가까이에서 보면 우악스러운 뼈가 강인하게 골격을 만들고」, 「꽃을 두고 오기」, 「2층 관객 라운지」,            「내리는 비 숨겨주기」, 『촉진하는 밤』 (문학과지성사, 2023)

  by Kim Sanghyuk

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  [Essay] Magnolia Melancholia

  Sometimes, rapturous futures are only reached after passing through the most terrible of nightmares. Having captured the attention of Korean readers with her creative story structure for many years, Choi Eunmi shows time and time again that dark things lurk beneath the beauty and happiness of everyday life. Simply put, beneath the many layers of life is a sea of terrifying and violent emotions. In Magnolia Sutra, for example, one of her most famous works, Choi depicts through fairy tale-like imagination the cycle connecting life and death, a deterministic world view, as well as the heredity of bad karma between a mother and daughter. Choi borrows the forms of fairy tales and fables in her story about a girl named Mulian who inherits the sins of her murderous mother. In this instance, Choi chooses the safest method for depicting violence of a most frightening world. Subverting traditional tropes used by fairy tales, like good triumphing over evil and justice prevailing, this story ends with a picture of a cold, emotionless world.    The magical world of fairy tales, which easily resolves conflicts and contradictions, is completely deconstructed by Choi’s icy gaze. Choi is perhaps more aware than anyone about how resentful violence and inescapable hatred are facts of life in a world where people must coexist. Heart-warming endings are not enough to solve the complexity of this world. Literary critic Kim Hyeong-jung’s reading of Choi’s somewhat pessimistic and masochistic gaze as an “allegory for hell” accurately presents the brutality delicately woven into her novels. Life-disrupting death and fiery, bone-engulfing hatred are the reality of our world.    The aesthetic of this novel is paradoxical because it paints Mulian’s melancholic life with the sweet fragrance of a magnolia tree. We cannot deny the pain and violence that Mulian faces, but there is immense beauty in how the novel depicts these realities with metaphors that conjure myth and fairy tales. She uses the most beautiful language to paint the most violent world.     In The Ninth Wave, her follow-up to Magnolia Sutra, Choi showed real-world, social concerns through a story about a proposed nuclear power plant and the regional social conflicts that surround it. By her second short story collection, A Person Made from Snow, Choi’s fiction began to address different problems from those of earlier works. In particular, she makes careful observations about the way in which the pandemic negatively affected daily life, pouring into her novel the various practical concerns that arose during that time. Choi’s gaze, which was already astutely aware of the violence of the world, shifted focus to confront the various catastrophic situations brought about by the pandemic. The deep valley of emotion that forms when social affects like isolation and transmission, fear and viruses, vaccines and social distancing, come into contact with personal conflicts is an important driving force in bringing out unexpected narratives.    Of the many such works, “Here We Are, Face to Face” tells the story of married women who during the COVID-19 pandemic, must cope with an increase in caretaker work. Constantly checking for fevers, proving their vaccination status, using debit cards from the government filled with emergency funds—the women in this novel, who are all in their forties, are denied a comfortable space to exist because of their unique status as mothers and workers in dual-income families. For these women, who work as workshop owners and public transportation assistants, the scope of their work doesn’t allow them to separate their private and public lives. For example, the soap making workshop that the main character owns begins from a “home workshop,” and Sumi, a female driver, has two things demanded of her at the same time: driving and assisting people onto the vehicle. Furthermore, the burden of housework invades their workspace and destroys their efficiency of labor. And even when they take just a short break from work, they cannot help but think about housework, like repairing the air purifier or restocking the refrigerator, and thus do not even know what it means to separate work and home.    The women in her novels cry out in frustration, complaining that no one has taught them how to raise children under such conditions; they urinate blood because they overwork themselves attempting to achieve perfection both at home and at work; and they specially prepare vegetable juice for their husbands, whose blood test results can either make or ruin their day. Not only do they have to endure intense labor that blurs the line between private and public, but they also must endure the intense emotional fatigue of being child caretakers. What can save these women who have died many deaths while fighting with their children, their husbands, and themselves?     Married women struggling for survival naturally lean on one another, but this relationship can never provide them with utopian solidarity because, as Choi’s stories show us, greed and envy will eventually re-isolate people. These women yearn for a safe place, but the pandemic has converted personal homes into virtual classrooms. Beyond the screen of a laptop, we witness the safest of places—a house—collapsing at the sound of a woman’s pain.     Precarious sounds, walls crackling and crumbling, fragile objects breaking—all of these reflect the reality of women who become isolated in the depths of pain they can never share with anyone. And yet, Choi goes one step beyond this terrifying awareness of reality. By simply staring into the face of other women who are in the same pain, women can overcome some of these feelings of isolation. Through a mirror that shows us that inherent in all of us is animosity and rage that threaten those closest to us, we see that Choi’s gaze has come to realize the violence of reality in a different light than before. Hers is not a world that ends with a cold-hearted message about violence, but a story about us as individuals who fully recognize the violence lurking in all subjects.     And going beyond making observations about the precarious reality of women, Choi also depicts in a new light the sex of women. In Yours Truly, female friends who raise their children together eventually hold each other back. For example, we have the following scene, in which Jin-ah takes out a pack of frozen breastmilk from the freezer, thus confessing to the first-person protagonist of the story that she is defined by her past and her sex as a mother:     “Jin-ah, if you leave it out like that, all of it will melt.”    Jin-ah doesn’t budge.    “I’m going to thaw all of it today. I’m going to thaw it all and pour it out. Just like you pour water into the kitchen sink.”    As Jin-ah says this, she picks up and hands me the stack of papers lying next to us on the chair, her face looking like a good student who used to get perfect marks. Day 9, Day 30, Day 56, Day 98. . . Lactation times for each breast, milk quotas to achieve weight goals, stool and urination counts for the baby. . . All of this diligently recorded over seven months, not a day missing.    “This is the milk that was inside my body back then,” Jin-ah says. “It’s the last bit of breastmilk I could have fed the baby. The milk I squeezed out of my body while crying all night watching my sleeping baby. Back then, every day was a roller coaster of emotion. These are six frozen lumps of me from back then, of Yoony from back then. And now I’m going to thaw them.”    Jin-ah’s hair is stuck to her cheeks with sweat.     “This is me. . . This is everything.”    Goodbye. I’m positive that’s what Jin-ah said. Goodbye, Yeong-ji.     Jin-ah has stored her breastmilk and all the history surrounding it, in a freezer for more than a decade. She puts this milk and history out on a table during a hot day to melt. Hidden in this scene, is a strange type of affect, furiously going back and forth between the maternity, childcare, friendship, and affection of women. Through this scene in which frozen lumps of breastmilk turn to sticky liquid, Choi makes the reader reimagine the relationship between Jin-ah and the protagonist of the story. In other words, this precarious relationship will disintegrate, collapse, or remain all right. Choi discovers a region that no one else who depicts female relationships has been able to discover. It is neither an amicable nor a hostile relationship, but a complex relationship between married women who are navigating maternity and their sexuality as women.    Thus in Person Made from Snow, violence and pain are no longer inherited, as they were in Magnolia Sutra; they melt smoothly. Now, as the critic Kang Ji-hui has noted, the violence in Choi’s novels has transformed into “something like liquid or gas, melting and evaporating with the flow of nature, as opposed to legends with rigid worldviews.” This transformation from a threat that stubbornly persists in the world into something that accumulates and then melts can be understood as a slight relaxation in Choi’s grim perception of reality.    Choi’s persistent gaze toward violence is not a cold-hearted resignation that leaves violence as violence, but a desperate struggle to find survival within violence. The novel Face to Face, Choi’s most recent work and a full-length novel that expands upon the aforementioned “Here We Are, Face to Face,” demonstrates a commitment into the future of her study of the sensations after violence. Just as Choi once wrote, we must view life from the bosom of deep time, as if those whom we sensed during the pandemic are both the same people who lived before it and the same people who will live after it. And I trust this commitment of Choi’s. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert  Korean Works Mentioned:•   Face to Face (Changbi, 2023)      『마주』 (창비, 2023)•   A Person Made from Snow (Munhakdongne, 2021)     『눈으로 만든 사람』 (문학동네, 2021)•   The Ninth Wave (Munhakdongne, 2017)     『아홉번째 파도』 (문학동네, 2017)•   Magnolia Sutra (Moonji, 2015)     『목련정전』 (문학과지성사, 2015)

  by Chunglim Jun

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  [Cover Feature] Such Small Moments

  “When will you rest?” I’m asked this quite often these days. Well, when will I rest? I’ve been teaching more college courses since last year, and on off-lecture days, I work at a bookshop. I spend three weekdays on campus, two at the shop. On weekends, I write and catch up on chores. The potted plant I’d recently received as a gift withered from neglect. It was a birthday gift . . . During busy spells, I don’t take a single day off. Sudden free time makes me anxious as I wonder if I’ve forgotten to do anything. I believe I’m in control of my time and tasks, but lately, they’ve been nipping at my heels.    I enjoy the reading and writing—even the other related tasks can’t be separated from the life I wish to live. But now I know. I’m beat. It took me long enough to see it. Reading is no longer a pastime but an extension of work. Sometimes, I suspect that I’m deceiving myself, conforming to assigned roles instead of working with self-agency.    After lecturing at the college located a four-hour round trip away, I muse on the subway ride home. I want to distance myself from this life. I want to go someplace far away. Maybe that’s why. Traveling is my only pause. The only bright spot in my busy routine comes with choosing a city and making plans to visit. Every day, I scour the internet for flights and accommodations. No matter if the trip falls through. Imagining is enough to pull me slightly beyond my quotidian force field.     I recently traveled to Tokyo. I looked forward to one thing—staying open to chance. To empty myself of thoughts triggered by controlled situations, embracing chance sensations instead. The beauty of travel lies in those moments that let you shed routine-hardened senses. But they now seem harder to cast off. For one, there’s my smartphone . . . It keeps information at my fingertips, but at times, I long to leave it in a drawer as I voyage away. Wanting to at least leave my laptop behind, I stayed up late working the night before the trip. I finalized my students’ grades and pre-ordered books for the bookshop. I double-checked everything to preempt work-related texts and calls. Later, I walked through customs, imagining the impossible: Could I have traveled without my phone?    Tokyo was the fifth Japanese city I visited. I had put it off, making the belated journey after seeing Fukuoka, Nagoya, Okinawa, and Kyoto. (I always used the Korean pronunciation “Donggyeong” for “Tōkyō,” getting teased for an old-fashioned habit supposedly betraying my gukmin-hakgyo-era upbringing.)[1] Outside the window the sun was setting as I took the Narita Express to Shinagawa Station. I overheard several non-Japanese languages—Chinese, English, and French. The eager voices chattered while I dozed off. The late-night work had taken its toll, it seemed. I arrived at my lodgings barely awake.     I was struck by the sheer number of people in Tokyo. The Shibuya Crossing and Akihabara Electric Town were inundated with pedestrians, and all the restaurants I stumbled on had long lines as if according to script. Like a scene from The Truman Show. Awed by the crowds, I stared and wondered where they came from. Instead of relaxing, I grew tenser than usual, even wishing to return straight home.    I mulled over my previous trips. Does the fleeting getaway from familiar routines and settings lead to any rest? Am I not being my own taskmaster, utterly exhausted as I trudge back to the hotel and collapse into sleep? Outside the window, the Tokyo Tower gleamed in the distance with several metro lines passing by in the background. Thoughts crossed my mind, one after another. Being too intent on rest, I was hardly enjoying my trip. Rest by compulsion. The pressure of time and tasks had been replaced by my coercive self pushing me across the sea.     Until age nineteen, I grew up in the countryside. The hillside village had only three buses a day going into town. Looking back, the place had enjoyed clear boundaries of rest. Seasons and weather separated work from repose—as an entirely “natural” consequence. For instance, farmers would leave the fields and head home at sunset, and once the cold winter set in, they would allow their bodies enough rest for the coming year. Nature affected the on-off switch of daily activities, and those rhythms set the pace for managing life.    On days without work, Father looked after plants and animals. His time was divided almost equally between work and care. Even on off days, he rose at dawn. He built a chicken coop in a corner of the warehouse, and when two farm dogs had puppies at the same time, he cared for nearly twenty pups. Father was delighted when I was given a jujube sapling for helping at a friend’s orchard. The friend’s father said it would take time for the sapling to bear fruit in our yard. Our family took turns looking after the sapling. Whoever had time watered it and kept the base free of weeds. As the seasons passed, we gathered around on holidays and spoke about the tree. Within three years, it bore fruit.    In the summer, villagers sat by the stream to escape the heat, and in winter, they swept the snow at dawn, exchanging greetings. Together, we worked and rested. The city, where I could work anytime, pressured me to work all the time. The sleepless, insomniac city disrupted my sleep.     Outside central Tokyo lies a neighborhood called Kichijoji. I chose that quieter place for the last day of my trip and woke up early to catch the train. I watched the tall buildings through the window gradually give way to single-story houses. Having boarded an express train bypassing Kichijoji, I got off at the next stop, Mitaka Station. I decided to walk the extra distance. The paths were quiet, and cyclists passed by now and then. I saw locals walking their dogs and reading newspapers in the park. Aside from my travel companion, no other tourists were in sight. My edginess eased. We spotted a used bookshop on the way and stepped inside. The front counter was empty, and even as we browsed, no one arrived. My friend chose several story books in the children’s section while I reached for pocket-sized paperbacks. We had made our selections by the time the apparent owner emerged, adjusting his glasses. He took his time tallying the prices on a calculator. Once the books were in our backpacks, we left the shop.    As we neared the small goods and vintage shops of Nakamichi Shopping Street, I saw several places leisurely opening for the day. No rush, no hurry. At a playground with a stately elm, a child squealed and skipped around. My friend and I bought donuts and ate them on a bench. The child left while we sat in the sunlight. A chilly breeze rustled the tree. Perhaps it was for these moments that I traveled. Small moments, an hour or even ten minutes at most. And for the places where those times gathered.    Tokyo had plenty of old cafés that seemed to stand still in time. I walked in the door, finding the streetside bustle fading like a distant memory. Shown to a table, I was served a hot towel and a glass of water. My eyes ran over the posters and faded patches of wallpaper as other customers came and went. Some of them were reading, some were waving at others and joining them, some gestured at each other mid-chatter, and some peered gravely at their phones. I ordered the “morning set,” a Japanese café staple, and sipped on a cup of their “blend coffee.” Ambient jazz melodies and hazy indoor air. Now that I’ve left Tokyo, I remember the place as a cozy nook overlaid with small scenes.     “Did you rest well?”     My travel companion and I asked each other on our return flight. In my daily life, I make different attempts to rest well or empty myself. At the end of those mostly failed attempts, I look to the next try with quasi-resigned hope. One does their best at work, but can they do their best to rest? In his book The End of Work, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin predicts that more free time and less working time will establish new lifestyle modes in the place of traditional culture.[2]  This points to the possibility of surplus time encompassing time for leisure or self-enrichment—in short, the possibility of rest.    When asked, “What do you do to rest?” most people say, “Nothing,” but that’s easier said than done. To do so, one must do nothing at all. I recall doing the following to rest:    1. Gaming. I once spent a fortnight shut in at home, gaming. I buried myself in the game without going out to see anyone or stopping to work. With my PlayStation plugged into the TV, I barely budged from the armchair. My daily routine went sideways, but my mind was somehow refreshed.    2. Watching TV dramas. When a minor surgery kept me homebound for a month, I binge-watched drama series. My friends had recommended several shows. I’ve been hooked ever since, and now I have several OTT subscriptions.    3. Sleeping. I used to get my sleep in one stretch. But with intervals of sleeping and eating, sleeping again and eating . . . the slight regret over time spent asleep is now compensated by the sense of being recharged.As one would expect, resting bears on the question of how to spend non-working time. Free time will only increase in the long run. Not working as much as others used to make me an anomaly, but now I seem to go against the norm by not taking proper rest.    I recently took up table tennis. In part for the exercise, but I also longed for physical learning. While writing my manuscript, I made a few resolutions. First, to separate work from rest. To work with greater focus and switch off to relax. Next, to ward off emptiness and ennui by seeking out new interests. To find occasions, not necessarily big or grand, that move my soul. Finally, to embrace the surplus nature of unproductive time. Doing nothing may be a challenge, but I can still free myself of guilt. These are my only wishes as I embark on 2024. Translated by Sunnie Chae  [1] Translator’s note: the term gukmin hakgyo [elementary school], a remnant of the colonial era, was changed to chodeung hakgyo by the Education Act Amendment Act No. 5069 in December 1995. [2] Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1995), 221. 

  by Min Byeonghun

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  [Cover Feature] Letting Go and Living with Mold

  Living through COVID-19, a global pandemic, we all came to have a unique story of our own, one that could be shared with others. In 2020, the year marking the sweeping spread of the pandemic that upended the conventional human way of life, my own daily life didn’t change much. I read and write for a living, which I can do well enough without leaving the house or meeting people face to face. I continued to work from home as before, corresponding with my editors through email. The swimming pool I used to frequent daily closed down, though, so I spent more time walking instead, going out to the neighborhood park when it wasn’t crowded. The class I taught was switched to online at the start of the spring semester, but since the class was small, I invited the students to my place from time to time to have class and lunch together.    The most notable change in my life during that time was that I won access to a community garden patch overseen by the district office, and became a city farmer for the first time in my life. Around the end of March I plowed the soil; in April I planted seedlings of lettuce, tomato, eggplant, crown daisy, cilantro, and peppermint; I also sowed seeds of rucola, canola, carrot, dill, and radish, and waited for them to sprout. With the coming of May, the crops grew taller by the day, drinking in the sunlight and the warm air. In June, flowers blossomed, dazzling my eyes. I dug out the flowers by the roots and shared them with some fellow gardeners, then brought the rest home and put them in water. I placed a row of transparent bottles along the white wall and filled them with dill, tall with an abundance of yellow blossoms. I learned through the garden patch that flowers of edible plants are just as beautiful as decorative flowers. I had brought nature—the work of my own hands—not only into the kitchen but into the entire house as well, which quite pleased me.    So passed spring, and summer arrived. The rainy season that year was uncommonly long. In the central region of the Korean Peninsula, where Seoul is located, it lasted for fifty-four days, from 24 June to 16 August—the longest on record since 1973. Day after day, I would alternately close the windows when it rained, and open them when it cleared to let fresh air in.Mid-August, toward the end of the rainy season, I noticed a suspicious stain on the wall next to the study window. I went up for a closer look and saw three round spots of mold. Appalled, I immediately searched for how to remove mold, then wiped them away using a rag and diluted bleach solution. I was to leave on a three-day trip the next day, so it would be disastrous for the mold to spread with all the windows of the house closed and no one home.    When I came home I found that the spots of mold, to my horror, had returned in exactly the same color and size as before. I was utterly dismayed, but I mustered my strength and once again got rid of them. Then I went into the kitchen to cook and have my first meal back home. Feeling refreshed after getting rid of the mold, I wanted to set a nice table; I opened a cabinet drawer and took out a wooden spoon, which I don’t use very often. But something felt off; I took a good look at the spoon and found green mold along the edge of the oval head. A disheartening thought froze my mind: was it possible that everything in the house made of organic matter was covered in mold? I never used an electric fan or air conditioner, as the cold, artificial air didn’t agree with me; during the unprecedentedly long rainy season, the stagnant humidity in the house might have given rise to mold in unchecked corners.    I promptly threw open the kitchen cabinet doors and inspected the inside of each cabinet. My gut feeling had been right—a thin layer of mold had formed not only on the wooden spoons, but also in the grooves of all the wooden articles such as a bamboo wicker tray and a plate carved from a log. Even so, up to that point, I was ready to tackle the mold. At once, I pulled out all the household articles in the cabinets and sterilized the cabinets with alcohol. I washed the dishes, let them sit in diluted bleach solution for a time, then rinsed them again with water. Tiresome as it was, three days should be plenty to complete the task, I thought. I felt lucky that only the wooden items had been affected, and was relieved that the books remained untainted. Talking to a friend on the phone, I joked around and laughed, saying the books must be unscathed because I didn’t read much.    After cleaning the kitchen, I started on the study. As I dusted off the bookshelves, my eyes fell on the hardcover volumes in the original languages. To my astonishment, molds of different colors—white, green, yellow—lined the angular edges of the fabric covers. The molds were markedly different in color and shape from the ordinary kind that arise in the bathroom or kitchen when it’s not regularly cleaned, and the sight of them sickened me. I had never seen a life form of their kind before. Rubbing my arms to ease the goose bumps, I tried to cool my head, and making an effort not to shut my eyes, I went through each and every book on the shelves. Mold had taken over a good number of them, not only the fabric-covered ones but the paperbacks as well. A volume of Walter Benjamin’s work in English revealed, when I lifted its dust cover, white mold inside the hard covers and on the spine. Without hesitation, I shoved it into a paper bag. Avital Ronell’s Stupidity in its original English was ruined as well. Quarantining Benjamin and Ronell in the paper bag and throwing them out the door, I wept for the first time because of the mold. Not because the beautiful thoughts and words had been corroded by something so trivial as mold; my feelings of loss and grief were for the words underlined in inks of various colors and the notes in the margins. The traces of those days in which I had so struggled to make sense of the abstruse texts had been stolen by the mold. What had been taken from and become lost to me were not certain volumes by certain scholars, but those days of stupidity.    Calming myself, I walked past the shelves of books in English and looked through the books in German and French. My heart raced, as I didn’t know how badly the paperback books had been damaged; then I realized that funnily enough, the damage differed in degree depending on the publisher. The pages of the dark blue Suhrkamp editions of philosophical works being fungi-resistant, were clean though faded yellow. Thus the entire collection of Benjamin’s works in German, as well as Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics, survived. So did the peach-colored Gallimard paperbacks and Folio editions. As for the French PUF editions, however, pretty green mold had developed along the spines; so the works by Foucault, Laplanche, and Kant were expelled. Scrutinizing the shelves, I grew increasingly cold and desensitized, feeling no regret at tying the books up in bundles and dumping them. Distancing myself from mold was the most critical issue at hand, and I no longer had any qualms about mechanically eliminating, expelling, and isolating what had been tainted with mold.     Now came the time to examine the shelf of Korean books. I noted that a shimmering green-gray mold had accumulated on all of the Workroom Press “Proposals” series. I’d never seen mold of such beautiful color before. It resembled rust on ancient bronze artifacts. In admiration, I yearned to contemplate it in silence. These books, I never wanted to dispose of. With each publication of the series, the editor had arranged a gathering with the translator, which I’d attended every time and took notes, in the book, of the translator’s words. Discarding the books was like discarding the vividness of those moments and the words, which I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere ever again. I searched online to see how to restore books contaminated by mold and learned that librarians in Japan use gauze fabric dampened with 75 percent ethanol solution to wipe books with. I tried the same method to bring the “Proposals” series back to life. But the mold on the covers, made of imported paper, and on the inside of the spines was so persistent that I couldn’t let the books stay in the room with the other articles. In the end, I gave up on restoring them, and shed a flood of tears as I relinquished them. Hearing the news, the editor shared my pain. I sent her the dozens of peach-colored Gallimard editions of Maurice Blanchot as a sign of our days of friendship. So I sent away without hesitation even the ones that had survived—hoping that they’d live long in a safer environment.    In the end, though, I couldn’t be wholly indifferent or cold-hearted. As I tied up the severely damaged books, I felt as if my heart were slashed with a knife.It kept raining, even when the rainy season had supposedly ended. September came and the fall semester began, but I wasn’t done cleaning mold. Typhoons raged one after another. Rain fell without ceasing, and the disinfection took forever, with the mold ever multiplying. It was no longer a matter of picking out contaminated books to discard. I had to give the shelves some breathing space. I began to throw away unmarred books at random as well. Otherwise, the infested books would spread mold onto the books that were yet untainted. I scrapped all of Lacan’s Seminar series. A whole shelf was emptied, along with a period of my life. I got rid of all the German books on philosophy, too; I wouldn’t read them anyway. Hegel’s Aesthetics, I sent to an artist friend of mine. I asked my acquaintances if they wanted any of my Penguin paperbacks, and sent the books out in the mail. I threw out the signed copies of books that authors had sent me. I had no choice. The authors knew what I was going through and said they would give me another copy when things returned to normal.    I threw away so many things. I had to let them go, without condition. I had to create empty, quarantined space in order to salvage what still had life in them. I had to, to let myself live.Neighbors I hadn’t interacted with before learned about my situation, as I was constantly going in and out of the house to chuck loads of stuff, clutching an umbrella to protect myself from the typhoon. One of them, who lived a floor below, invited me over when I was all scruffy and offered me a meal. When I was absorbed in sterilizing the books, she would knock on my door and hand me something to eat. She sympathized with me, saying it must be heartbreaking for someone who studied books to have to throw them away.     Where had the mold come from? From the natural produce of the organic garden patch which I had so greedily brought home? Probably not; no trace of mold was detected at the front door, where I would leave the bag, straw hat, and rubber boots I used in gardening. On the other hand, the study, which had suffered the most serious damage, faced a mountain through the window. The mountain was thick with trees, but just outside the window there was no tree, only weeds in an empty lot. According to the neighbor who lived downstairs, there had been several acacia trees there up until a year ago, but the green space management at the district office had them felled. After the trees had been cut down, rainwater seeped through an embankment into her house during the rainy season one year. My guess is that with the trees gone from the forest, whose thriving trunks and weeds had made for a healthy, self-regulating ecosystem in which growth, development, and decomposition occurred in a cycle, the fungi in the humid air carried by the wind infiltrated my window; the mold spores that would have been kept at bay by the trees settled in my room and extended their power with the long rain.    Three years have passed since, but the mold hasn’t been completely eliminated. The mold has done no wrong. All it did was fly when the wind blew and grow when it was humid, according to the order of nature inherent in itself. No matter how much I wiped at it with ethanol, the spores, invisible to the naked eye, stayed hidden in unseen corners, ready to run rampant when the air began to stagnate and grow moist. When I spot such corners, I once again feel the need to empty my space and allow the air to flow. When the air begins to circulate again, of course, so do the spores.    In 2020, I experienced something irreversible that manifested itself in a powerful way through human factors—such as a climate catastrophe that included a long rainy season, frequent typhoons, and forest logging—that tangled with nature in the form of mold on the books in my room. Since that summer, as is the case with all inflection points in life, my idea and substance of life have never been the same.  Translated by Yewon Jung 

  by Kyung Hee Youn

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  [Cover Feature] Breathe, Live, Rest

  When I saw the painting Breathing Space, I remembered feeling like I was taking a deep breath. The piece was part of a solo exhibition, Wandering Mind. The painting depicted a person leaning against a small window of a large building, gazing at the sky—the artist’s way of saying that sometimes a small window can become an unexpectedly vast breathing space. The sky stretched beautifully above the building, its hue a poetic blue.      I, too, have moments where I do nothing but space out. On such days, I make a conscious effort not to plan anything or assign tasks to myself. I silence my alarms and sleep in; when I wake up, I give the house a thorough cleaning. I take in the tidy surroundings and gaze out the window—sometimes sunrays pour in, while at other times snow falls in large flakes. During those times, I don’t turn on the TV or play music. I savor the freedom to spend time in my own space. I observe the people passing beneath my window, simply letting myself  feel the quiet flow of time. The days I purposely spend in idleness fill my heart with a strength that eludes me on my most productive days.     Until a few years ago, I didn’t know how to properly rest. I constantly thought about what needed to be done the next day, or the manuscript I’d be working on at the time. One day, I woke up, and my neck felt stiff—I couldn’t turn to the side. At first, I brushed it off as a result of a bad sleeping position, but as days passed, the symptoms worsened. Stretching only seemed to amplify the pain, expanding from my neck down to my shoulders, and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. I went to see an oriental medicine doctor who pressed and prodded my neck, shoulders, and back. His diagnosis was as follows: “You frequently experience tension-related pain in your neck and shoulders, don’t you? It’s because when you do something, you pour yourself into it, which results in a tension build-up.” I almost fell to my knees at how accurate his observations were. It was like he had read my mind.     He emphasized the importance of concentrating during the day and fully relaxing at night. He told me that I unfortunately wasn’t able to unload the burden from my shoulders, which caused me pain. “It’ll get better over time. But you shouldn’t try too hard. When you’re resting, you need to let the burden go. Otherwise, your back will keep hurting.” I hadn’t even realized how hard I was pushing myself, and that my body was already overloaded. I was used to my frequent back and shoulder pain, and when I started hearing a popping sound in my jaw whenever I opened my mouth, I just thought it was a symptom commonly experienced by people in modern society and neglected it.     From then on, I began carving out dedicated time away from work and writing. For a while I threw myself into swimming; these days I opt for an occasional run. I head out at night and just run for about twenty minutes, without a set route. Running at night has its charm—you can hide your face in its shadows. What’s surprising is that I’m not the only one; many others walk or run in the darkness. Running is good for the heart, lungs, and legs, but it’s especially beneficial for your mental well-being. Focusing on each step gives me a temporary escape from my worries. Afterward, I feel light and refreshed in both body and mind.     I’ve also started learning the violin as a hobby, and I’m being consistent about it. I take lessons once a week and practice the pieces I’ve learned whenever I find the time. I don’t mind if I’m not good at it—it’s something I do for fun, and I enjoy it as such. When playing a piece, there are rests in the sheet music. These rests are periods of absolute silence, and when the next note comes along, it’s that much clearer. In the passages where the music needs to be delicate and soft, you have to play more quietly so that the emphasized notes stand out. Well-played music has good moments of rest.     Rather than trying to excel at everything, I’m practicing letting go of a few things. I was lying in bed, listening to a podcast, when one of the speaker said something I empathized with a lot: “In South Korea, from the moment you open your eyes until you close them, everything is all about competition: catching a bus, taking the subway, making a restaurant reservation.” Though this may not apply to all countries or cities, I believe it holds true for many places that have developed as fast as Seoul. Long commuting hours, repetitive labor, constant crowds wherever you go, a life of never-ending competition. Even when you’re resting, you crave more rest, and just taking a breath feels draining. At morning rush hour, the commuters’ faces on the subway carry a particular weariness. Sometimes they argue, hoping to get a seat. They’re all on edge due to how exhausted they are. I, too, have spent a few years among them.     I’ve worked as an editor for a decade now and made my debut as a poet seven years ago. Last year, I edited the highest number of books in my entire life. In the summer, I also published my second poetry collection. It wasn’t a new way of life for me—I was used to scrutinizing other people’s manuscripts and coming home to look at my own, but for the first time I was sick and tired of it. It became hard to make simple decisions; I didn’t have the will to do anything; I woke up in the morning crying for no reason. I wondered if that was what burnout felt like.     For a while, I did little else besides pour my heart into the violin. I hardly wrote or read, but I found myself drawn to reading several books related to music. Music revealed new territories for me. Reading Show Me Your Hands, I slowly delved into the inner world of a pianist, and with Lev’s Violin: An Italian Adventure, I envisioned countless violins, each made of different wood, each with their own unique timbre. Reading Schubert, I discovered all the failures the world-renowned composer had faced. Knowing that others have failed brings a smile to my face: it means that they were serious about their dreams and struggled to make them come true.     I feel that, rather than success, moments of failure are needed; instead of constantly pushing forward, we need periods of rest. For me, rest is a time to regain a pure perspective on the world. After a deep rest, I find that the words trapped in me start bubbling to the surface. I become eager to reveal what I’ve seen, what I’ve thought, and what I’ve experienced in my subconscious.     Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to realize the increased importance of a good rest. Koreans habitually go to work even during a typhoon or push through tasks when feeling unwell. But we are not machines—we’re humans, and as such, it is impossible to keep producing and creating without taking breaks. We know this, and yet we live as if it were possible. Rest is a fearful concept for me, even though ironically, I always long for it. I always think, “What if quitting my job and stopping to write means I won’t be able to start again?” I know that pausing doesn’t cause the world to collapse, but I’ve always had this irrational fear. Now my neck and shoulders hurt, my back is damaged, and on some days, my mind is so exhausted that I fall apart completely.     I have asked my poet friends what they do when they take a break. One of them mentioned isolating at home and immersing themselves in a movie or book they’ve been longing to watch or read. Another said they go camping or take a short trip somewhere. All their ideas were nice. How wonderful would it be to light a fire in the woods, grill and eat a delicious meal; or bury yourself in a beloved book—splendid! I, too, used to relax while doing the things I enjoyed. Do what I want, read what I like, eat something tasty, go to my favorite places. However, when true burnout hit, none of these activities seemed possible. I needed a time devoid of plans, a moment to pause everything and do nothing.      At the end of the year, I took my remaining vacation days and enjoyed an extended break until the new year rolled in. I stood in front of the window—as I stared at the large snowflakes, it almost seemed like they weren’t falling down, but instead, rising towards the sky. Like music played in reverse. I thought it resembled the rhythm of life. My puppy was asleep on my lap; gazing at that serene view brought peace to my heart. I’ve always enjoyed going to the library, the swimming pool, the museum, or just wandering around aimlessly, yet I liked this freedom of being alone, doing nothing, meeting no one, with no music or media.      Now, I’ve finally come to understand the beauty of this solitude, one that I do not need to rush to fill. I don’t need to go to cool places—a stroll around my neighborhood brings me a new joy. Instead of constantly reading books, I’m happy to take a break from all kinds of texts for a while. While being surrounded by friends is great, savoring the solitude of being alone is also perfectly fine. Once I embraced this mindset and spent my time resting at home, doing nothing, I began looking at my routine and the familiar places I frequented under a new light.     I’m not talking about resting in preparation to move forward, to take a leap; rather, it’s about indulging in unadulterated rest for the sake of resting itself, a complete acceptance of the nothingness that is the self. It is the freedom of existence, of reverting to an amoebic state, a form with boundless potential. This kind of rest brings me back to my innate self. Back to my childhood; to my early twenties when I was passionate about so many of the things in the world; to the days when love was the sole occupant of my heart; when I looked at the world with more simplicity; when writing brought me pure joy.     Writing is sometimes like a motionless swamp that offers no answer or reaction. Embrace that lack of an answer, let the emptiness sit there. Do not fear loneliness—step willingly into it and spend time with it. When I ceased fearing loneliness and heeded the doctor’s advice to lay down the burdens from my shoulders, I finally could slip into a deep, dreamless sleep.     Good rest isn’t merely a gesture in preparation for optimal movement, much like emptying your mind isn’t just a preparatory process for filling it up again. In Korean, 잘 쉰다 means both “to rest” and “to inhale and exhale.” So, 쉬다 (“to rest well”) means “to take deep breaths, exhale, and empty the body.” This implies that resting your body leads to resting your mind, which then leads back to resting your body in a seamless cycle. I wonder if leaving the empty spaces created by rest untouched isn’t just another way of saying “to be alive.” To rest essentially means to live—not to excel at something or to have a busy life, but rather to feel the happiness and fullness of simply being alive; to focus on the present state of both the body and mind.     In September, for my birthday, I went on a trip. I wrapped up all the work at the company, finished the manuscript that had held me captive until dawn every day, and escaped to Yeosu; the sea I saw there was the most wonderful I’d ever seen in my life. It took me four hours by train and then a little taxi ride to get to my accommodation, and once I got there and opened the curtains of my hotel room, the sea glittered beautifully in front of my eyes. I looked down to see the locals walking along the colorful street that followed the stone wall. At last, outside of Seoul, I could enjoy the different scenery and lifestyle of another city. It felt like a breath of fresh air after being stuck in the daily grind of commuting between home and work. With no particular plans, I strolled around with a little jump in my steps; I ate a patbingsu, looked at the cats, and relished the joy that complete relaxation brings.     During these empty times, I feel new stories and new desires emerging. The beauty of emptiness. Poetry knows this very well—its charm lies in the space between the lines, after all. Rather than the act of adding, I find the gaps left by subtraction more fascinating. Poetry is a game, a confession of your inner self, a reflection of all things of the world. It’s ironic, but after I spend periods without writing anything, my poetry becomes better, and I feel that the act of writing becomes more precious, and more fun.      During my experience with burnout, I learned that any weary heart finds restoration through proper rest. You don’t even have to work hard for it. Whether it is love for someone, an open heart towards the world, generosity towards others, a desire to write again, or a yearning to stand tall—all these feelings will eventually resurface. All you need to do to rekindle them is to bask in these moments of pure rest. I didn’t want to escape from work or writing; rather, I always wanted to break free from the monotonous landscape that was “me.” I didn’t realize that this person I knew as myself, who looked the same every day, was undergoing a constant process of internal change.     Someone once asked me, “Why do you write poetry? It seems lonely.” Back then, I couldn’t provide a proper answer, but now I think I can. Poetry allows one to peer into the solitude of one’s inner self, to appreciate life’s empty spaces. It’s the joy of filling the spaces between the lines by leaving some deliberately empty. Only after a good rest do you come to realize the multitude of answers that are out there. Translated by Giulia Macrì 

  by Ju Minhyeon