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)