Young adult literature, which took off in earnest in the 2000s, seems to have solidly established its place in the Korean publishing industry. Most publishers now award young adult literature prizes, which can open doors to the literary world for the winning writers and propel the winning works to the top of the bestseller lists. As writers who debuted with young adult fiction make forays into existing literary circles and writers who are already active in these circles try their hands at writing YA, the literary world’s divisions are beginning to disappear. I’m an example of the second case, as I started out writing fiction for general audiences and now write fiction for young readers as well.

        As a writer, the term “young adult literature” doesn’t fully resonate with me. Although I realize that this categorization was born of necessity, I worry that the label implies a dividing line between different age groups that determines which readers would appreciate a work of literature and which would not. To me, the term “bildungsroman” feels more intimate than “young adult novel,” and seems to come closer to the essence of the category. When I was younger, readers went straight from children’s literature, which consisted mainly of fairy tales, to general literature with no such category as “young adult literature” as a transition. Looking back at my reading experiences as an adolescent and now as an adult, I can tell that reading is not something that happens sequentially according to age. As a teenager, I read things considered inappropriate for minors like Camus and Dostoevsky, and now that I’m an adult, I choose books according to my desires and needs at the moment, often revisiting and rereading Andersen’s fairy tales, The Little Prince, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

        The books available when I was a young adult were nowhere near as diverse as they are today. Young readers were mostly encouraged to read the designated classics of world literature, or abridged versions, for their cultural edification, and most of those books were translated Western works. Despite the declining reading population, the diversity and richness of the books available on the market is greater than ever before. Readers can choose from not only those classics, but a variety of contemporary stories by current Korean and international writers. The range of topics covered has broadened to include issues facing today’s Korean youth such as school problems, multicultural families, climate change and the environment, and other issues present in Korean society and globally. In addition, science fiction and fantasy—once classified as genre fiction—have naturally entered the fold, further widening the literary spectrum.

        I write both general fiction and young adult fiction, but writing a young adult novel doesn’t mean limiting my target audience to adolescents. Just as I don’t believe the reading process follows the same sequence as age, I don’t want to view young adult literature as less than literature for adults. Teenagers who read a lot may have a deeper sense of literature and a better understanding of the world than grownups who do not. Whether an adolescent or an adult, a reader’s different tendencies aren’t a matter of age but of individual preference. In that sense, I completely agree with Borges, who said that “the masses are an abstraction.” While each individual’s reality certainly exists, it becomes nearly impossible to determine a majority when these individuals come together as a collective. This is even truer in the realms of literature and art, which are enjoyed according to each person’s individuality and tastes.

        The same way the author of an apparently feminist work would not have imagined an audience made up solely of women, the authors of The Little Prince or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would not have written these stories with only young readers in mind. Whether a story is told from the perspective of a child, a fox, or a penguin, in the end, writers cannot help but tell stories about universal human concerns.

My novels Then One Day, A Refugee and Bursha belong to the young adult literature category as well, but they are stories that can be read by anyone of any age and gender. In fact, as a writer, I hope a larger general audience discovers these stories. For one thing, these novels center around refugees and migrants, meaning that rather than covering a topic that young adults would like and find interesting, they tackle an issue that Korean society as a whole ought to take an interest in. If we think of them in terms of movies, then books dealing with this sort of subject matter would be a lot like indie films.

        Although it may not currently concern young people, the reality of a multiracial and multicultural society as symbolized by migrants and refugees is one that Korean youth will soon have to face. According to OECD standards, South Korea has already reached the threshold for being considered a multiracial country, which is having a foreign population that accounts for more than 5 percent of the overall populace. However, not many Koreans seem to realize this. The second generation of multicultural families will soon join the ranks of the “older generation,” and Korea, which is facing the worst population cliff crisis in the world, is now in dire need of migrants. The older generation, myself included, has long been engrossed in the myth of a single-race Korean nation, and while for us it can be emotionally difficult to acknowledge this new reality, things are different for the current generation of young adults. They are already experiencing this multiracial and multicultural society, and their position will require them to take on leading roles in this society going forward. In this sense, Then One Day, A Refugee and Bursha are well-positioned as works of young adult literature.

        The entire world has been in conflict over the refugee issue for the past several decades, but due to South Korea’s unique geographical position as a peninsular country on the far end of Northeast Asia, the country has managed to keep its distance from this issue for a long time.1 However, beginning in 2018 with the case of the Yemeni asylum-seekers in Jeju, Korea has begun to face the fact that it is no longer free from these concerns. Then in 2021, when Afghanistan came under Taliban rule, the Korean government actively accepted nearly 400 Afghan refugees under the status of “special contributors.” From the perspective of European countries that had already taken in millions of refugees, this number was laughable, but from a Korean viewpoint, taking in even this many refugees can only be considered a bold choice.

        Then One Day, A Refugee and Bursha are some of the first novels in the Korean literary realm that deal with the refugee issue, which for so long was seen as having nothing to do with Korean society. When I wrote Then One Day, A Refugee, the refugee issue had not yet fully reached Korea. The Yemeni refugee crisis occurred a few months after the book was published. While both novels deal with similar subject matter, there is a key difference between them. Then One Day, A Refugee tells a story about refugees with a Korean character at the center, while Bursha focuses primarily on a refugee family.

        Then One Day, A Refugee is a bildungsroman about a young boy named Min who, after living a rather nomadic life accompanied by his older sister Haena, is left in the care of a refugee center and comes to live among refugees from all kinds of cultural backgrounds. One day, Haena—feeling betrayed by her boss at the convenience store where she had been working part-time to support her younger sibling—steals the store owner’s car and drives off into the night with her brother in tow. She is driving aimlessly around their island when they are stopped and questioned by a young police officer. The officer knows that the car has been stolen, but seeing the situation that Haena and Min are in, he decides to look the other way. Later, when the officer encounters them again, he realizes that Haena cannot properly care for her brother. The officer remembers that there is a refugee center located on the island and tells Haena about the place in detail, comparing it to an “international school.” With his convincing, Haena decides that she would be better off entrusting her younger brother to the care of a public institution like the refugee center. In the end, she leaves Min there.

        It turns out that the refugee center is planning a weeklong English camp for children of local residents to help ease some of the anxiety and animosity the locals feel toward the center. Haena urges Min to participate, then leaves to find work. The manager of the center is surprised to find a child left alone without a guardian even after the camp has ended. Unlike most children, Min entertains himself and doesn’t seem to be waiting for anyone to come back for him. The manager looks into this unusual situation and learns that Haena, who is listed as the boy’s guardian, is not his older sister but a single mother. As the center’s staff struggles to figure out what to do with this Korean child who is ineligible for admission as a refugee, they ultimately decide to look after him until his guardian shows up. This is how young Min comes to live together with refugee families from all over the world. But the other families at the center are there temporarily, staying only until their screenings are complete. One way or another, they all eventually leave the center, whether in high spirits with a group whose refugee status has been granted or in low spirits as one of the asylum-seekers whose petitions are denied. This novel follows young Min as he comes of age, repeating this endless cycle of first meetings and farewells as he waits for Haena to return.

Bursha, meanwhile, is the story of a Muslim refugee family that has been living in the departure hall at Incheon Airport for several months. As a peninsular country located on the edge of Northeast Asia, South Korea can only be accessed by plane, making the airport essentially the border for refugees. The family—made up of two parents and their four children—have decided to head to France after passing through various refugee camps in a number of different countries, only to have their plans thwarted midway due to an issue with their broker. After a series of twists and turns, the family spends every last bit of their savings to travel to South Korea, their last hope. But when they arrive, they are denied entry at the airport. With nowhere to return to, they must apply for refugee status and live at the airport until the screening process is complete. Because they have so many children, the family is given special consideration by the immigration management office and allowed to stay in the departure hall rather than the cramped repatriation waiting room.

        The little ones are incredibly happy to be living in the airport’s fancy departure hall full of duty-free shops, so different from the refugee camps—all choked with dust and the smell of gunpowder—that they have passed through so far. They even have a designated section of the hall to stay in, but late at night when airport security thins out, the children leave their designated zone and wander around. At the end of a long line of stores selling luxury goods is a waiting room with glass walls, through which the children can see the outside world. There, looking down at the airport runway and hangars, they pass the time talking about their dreams and waiting for the day when they can finally set foot in this new country. Meanwhile, the children’s parents need some way to support them. The mom sells handicrafts to passengers to earn money, while the dad reaches out to different human rights groups to try to get the family recognized as refugees. As they seek their own ways to survive, they become neighbors to the people in the departure hall. The mom becomes close with the cleaning lady who offers to help them, the children get to know the employees in the duty-free shops, and the eldest daughter, Bursha, forms a connection with a young Korean man working in facility management at the airport. In the process of accepting his help, romantic feelings blossom between the two. Along with episodes from the family’s day-to-day lives in the departure hall, memories of the refugee camps where they once lived, stories of life in their hometown, and family secrets are unveiled one by one.

        Then one day, the pandemic strikes and the airport is closed down, leaving Bursha’s family alone in the departure hall. When the brisk steps of travelers coming and going are cut short and the lights in the duty-free shop windows go dark, the departure hall is completely transformed. Bursha sympathizes with the people in the outside world who are now living in the same state of lockdown and isolation that she and her family have been enduring. Although the novel depicts the dramatic story of a refugee family living in the unusual space that is the airport departure hall, it can also be seen as a bildungsroman that captures the changes in each family member as they adapt to an unfamiliar environment to survive.

        Even though I chose to write this novel, Islamic culture was rather unfamiliar to me, so I had to look through many materials related to Arab history and culture to pen this story. Since it was a culture that, to most Korean readers, would have felt as out of reach as if it was behind a huge wall, I had to pay a lot of attention to making that culture and the sentiments of people from an Islamic country come alive through the characters as best as I could.

        After Bursha was published, I was sometimes asked the following question: “Of all the kinds of refugees, why make them Muslim?”

        I think the answer lies within the question itself. For Korean readers, one of the most unfamiliar cultures, and therefore one of the hardest to embrace, is none other than the culture of the Arab Muslim world. However, in reality, Muslims and Koreans have deep historical ties. The first people to make the name “Korea” known to the world were merchants from Arabia during the Goryeo dynasty. At that time, trade with Islamic merchants was extremely active. As Goryeo came under Mongol rule, many Arab people who belonged to a high-ranking caste in Mongolian society called the “Semu” actually came to live in Korea, and there are records showing that some of them were appointed positions as officials in the Joseon era.

        Whether they like it or not, Koreans will have to live in this multiracial and multicultural era going forward. Despite the longstanding myth of a single-race Korea, recent rapid developments in biological genetic analysis have already scientifically disproven this idea. Since four hundred thousand years ago when humans began leaving the African continent, the history of humankind has been a history of migration. Because of South Korea’s geopolitical location on the periphery, the country has not had many migrants coming through for a long time, but now the doors have opened out to a world in which Korea, too, is a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural nation. The only thing left is for Korea to step over the threshold.

Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris

Pyo Myunghee is the author of the short story collections Exit No. 3, Housemate, My Neighbors’ Wellbeing, and As If Nothing Had Happened, as well as the novel The Gold Rush, along with titles for younger readers including Off Road Diary; Then One Day, A Refugee; Bursha; Are You a Carrot? and more. She is the winner of the Changbi Prize for New Figures in Literature, the Oh Yeongsu Literature Prize, the Kwon Jeongsaeng Literature Prize, and the Shin Kyuk-ho Charlotte Literature Prize.

Korean Works Mentioned:

Pyo Myunghee, Then One Day, A Refugee (Changbi Publishers, 2018)

표명희, 『어느 날 난민』 (창비, 2018)

Pyo Myunghee, Bursha (Changbi Publishers, 2023)

표명희, 『버샤』 (창비, 2023)

1     Editor’s Note: The status of North Korean defectors is considered distinct from that of refugees, both legally and in popular Korean discourse.