The 2018 film Park Hwa-young, directed by Lee Hwan, sparked intense discussion for its unprecedentedly raw depiction of the lives of runaway teenagers. In the movie, the eponymous Park Hwa-young (played by Kim Ga-hee) insists her “family” of runaway youths address her as “Mother.” Her small, rundown apartment, where she has been living since running away from home at the age of seventeen, becomes a hideout for all the neighborhood’s delinquents. Hwa-young actively embraces her role as mother, cooking instant ramen for them and doing their laundry. She does all this with money from her own mother (Hwang Young-hee), which she extorts through physical threats and verbal abuse. The irony is that Hwa-young’s obsession with being addressed in this way is only a vain attempt to fill the void left by her own abandonment. In truth, there is nothing motherly about Hwa-young’s position in the group. She is more a doormat than a family matriarch. Even her closest friend, Mijeong (Kang Min-ah), exploits Hwa-young’s emotional vulnerability for her own personal gain. To keep favor with her abusive boyfriend Young-jae (Lee Jae Kyun), Mi-jeong uses Hwa-young both as a maid and a scapegoat. And despite being the victim of Young-jae’s violence, which he uses to maintain dominance in the group, Mi-jeong clings to him to maintain her own position in the hierarchy, only leaning on Hwa-young when it suits her. The acts of kindness she does show Hwa-young are trivial—going on a trip to Wolmido together or doing her makeup. The relationship is little more than a transaction of convenience, ready to be abandoned at a moment’s notice. The children only turn to Hwa-young when they need to, using her as a means to an end; no one truly respects her. Her repeated question, “What would you guys do without me?” is understood by the audience as mere bravado; the reality is that no one genuinely needs her.

        Hwa-young becomes aggressive when interacting with her mother, teachers, and welfare supervisor. She brandishes a knife at passersby and defies the police when they try to corral her. She acts like a trapped animal, baring her teeth to keep those who are trying to control her at bay. But somewhat paradoxically, such wild behavior has no sway in the group. In a reversal of “kiss up, kick down,” Hwa-young confronts adults with violence and uses whatever means necessary to protect her territory out in public, but among friends, she becomes (quite literally) their punching bag and maid. Hwa-young’s depiction as a fake mother to children who lack domestic stability symbolizes both the absence of patriarchal family ideology and the desperate struggle to fill that void. The movie is an unflinching depiction of the catastrophe that happens when such voids are filled by unnatural and insufficient means.

        Toward the end of the movie, Mi-jeong is sexually assaulted by a man she meets for transactional sex, and when Hwa-young intervenes she is raped in Mi-jeong’s place. Despite suffering such extreme abuse, Hwa-young never abandons her position as scapegoat—even though Yeong-jae and Mi-jeong beat the man to death, it is Hwa-young who takes the fall for the murder and is sent to prison. Her tragic sacrifice illustrates how familial roles can be violently twisted when performed outside the traditional social safety net.

        Even after everything she goes through, Hwa-young’s life shows little change. She still allows delinquents to sleep in her cramped apartment and eat her ramen. If there is one difference, it is that her motherly persona is now somewhat deflated. Meanwhile, Mi-jeong has started with a fresh slate and become an aspiring actress whose main worries are weight loss and her busy shooting schedule. She offers no apology to Hwa-young (who now has a criminal record because of her) and ignores Hwa-young’s offer of a cigarette, as if the two had never smoked together. Mi-jeong not only calls her by name, but when Hwa-young refers to her old title as “Mother,” Mi-jeong denies their past by saying, “My mother is doing well. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Faced with Mi-jeong’s betrayal, Hwa-young lets out a hollow laugh. Her only choice now is to return to her chaotic life cooking for runaways without ever earning their respect. Just as Mi-jeong suggests when she tells Hwa-young, “You haven’t changed a bit. You’re just as I remember you,” the last two images of Hwa-young—confused silence and self-mocking laughter—portray someone who has returned to the beginning, without success or growth: an image of anti-growth.

        Park Hwa-young leaves us with an unsettling glimpse into a world in which parental care is not sacred or even meaningful, but is simply wasted. It refuses to offer a hopeful resolution of familial restoration or reconciliation; it is a quiet observation of the ruthless survival strategies of adolescents whose relationships are solely based on self-interest and exploitation. For these children, family is already a broken illusion, and any attempt to replace it only perpetuates a cycle of violence and abuse. In this way, Park Hwa-young is a microcosm for the gloomy reality faced by those Korean teenagers of the twenty-first century who are running around in circles, with no growth or future. Indeed, the movie does not end like a traditional coming-of-age story; instead, it achieves its bleak aesthetic through exposing a world marked by stagnation and aimless wandering.

        Unlike Park Hwa-young, the heroine of Kim Bora’s House of Hummingbird (2019), Eunhee (Park Ji-hu), seems like a typical middle schooler. She has two parents who run a rice cake shop in Daechi-dong, an older brother named Daehoon (Son Sang-yeon) who dreams of getting into Seoul National University, and an older sister, Suhee (Park Soo-yeon), whose only interest is her love life. However, Eunhee’s life is filled with alienation and isolation. Her parents shower her studious brother with affection while ignoring or even condoning his frequent abuse of Eunhee. Even her sister shows little interest in her. Eunhee looks for comfort in her relationships with her best friend Jisuk (Paek Seo-yoon) and boyfriend Jiwan (Jung Yoon-seo), but these, too, end in painful experiences of betrayal and loss. Of course, there are rays of hope in Eunhee’s life. When the new Hanmun teacher Youngji (Kim Sae-byuk) arrives at her school, Eunhee feels respected by an adult for the first time. She also meets an underclassman named Yuri (Seol Hye-in) who expresses admiration and affection for her. But after just one semester, Youngji dies suddenly in the Seongsu Bridge collapse, while Yuri starts to ignore Eunhee. This leaves Eunhee wandering aimlessly again.

        House of Hummingbird creates a unique aesthetic by blurring the causal relationships between events, obscuring each scene’s individual meaning and creating loose juxtapositions. The director portrays Eunhee’s life not through clear turning points and climaxes, but through an accumulation of subtle emotions and incidents, thereby dismantling the cause-and-effect logic of traditional coming-of-age narratives. Every event in Eunhee’s life seems significant, but none has a singular, fixed meaning; instead, fragments of episodes and emotions appear and disappear at random, quietly emphasizing that growth is nonlinear and chaotic. Scenes in which Eunhee’s father suddenly breaks into tears upon hearing that she will need major surgery, or when her brother becomes emotional at the dinner table as he realizes the whole family is safe after the bridge collapse, have undeniable emotional power but resist interpretation because of the audience’s memory of previous scenes of domestic abuse, inflicted by the father on the mother and the brother on Eunhee. Rather than responding to her father and brother’s tears by drawing closer to them, Eunhee appears confused and distanced. Paradoxically, it is not at home but the quotidian peripheries—at the Hanmun academy next to school, in a neighborhood where people have been evicted from their homes, in the corner of the schoolyard with friends, outside the entrance to the apartment complex where she says goodbye to her first love—that are elevated as key emotional coordinates, becoming the core sites of her growth narrative.

        In House of Hummingbird, the scenes of the Seongsu Bridge collapsing and of neighborhoods disappearing due to redevelopment projects function as points of connection between collective trauma in Korean society and individual experience. The image of Eunhee and her sister standing by the river and gazing out at the site of the collapsed bridge is a poignant visual reminder that individual lives are inseparable from social and historical events. Eunhee’s personal coming-of-age narrative acquires universality through this connection to collective memory. Indeed, the film asks a philosophical question: how do we remember the past while living in the present, at the intersection of personal growth and history? The film is not just set in 1994 for cheap nostalgia; that year is symbolic of the convergence of collective trauma and personal loss for Korean people, and events like the Seongsu Bridge collapse show how unimaginable disasters can suddenly shatter ordinary people’s lives. At the same time, their presence in this film demands from viewers the ability to transcend the boundaries of time and feel past events as if they were happening now.

        In Eunhee’s life, events are accidental and unpredictable, and they result not in clear growth or achievement but the development of empathy and ethical sensitivity. When Eunhee shows empathy for others’ pain during a conversation with her mother, the film suggests that growth does not necessarily come from success and accomplishments, but through human connection and empathy. In departing from the conventional coming-of-age narrative of male adolescents overcoming hardships to achieve success, House of Hummingbird presents the possibility of a new form of subjectivity. That is, the movie uses episodic interplay and polyphonic detail to reflect the fractures of contemporary society through the life of a girl, exploring the intersection between personal development and collective history.

        Park Hwa-young and House of Hummingbird both incorporate coincidence to create decisive turning points in the plot, disrupting the causal logic that underpins the popular growth myth. For example, Hwa-young’s sexual abuse and incarceration result from Mijeong’s plans going awry, while House of Hummingbird is upended by Youngji’s sudden death on Seongsu Bridge. Both protagonists’ trajectories deviate from traditional formulas, subverting male-centered coming-of-age narratives. Indeed, it is through the eyes of young girls that patriarchal authority is dismantled and the ethics of relationships are restructured. In contrast to contemporary anti-growth narratives about teenage boys, which tend toward despair and cynicism, House of Hummingbird uses a gendered perspective to redefine what it means to grow up, allowing Eunhee to be reborn as a new subject who uses the experience of pain to cultivate empathy and solidarity. A key example of this comes after Youngji’s death, when Eunhee tries for the first time to understand the emotions behind her mother’s comment, “It feels strange without Uncle.” This scene illustrates the other side of growing up—the development of sensitivity to others’ pain and cultivation of an ethical consciousness—suggesting that growth doesn’t need to be tied solely to accomplishment. However, the protagonist of Park Hwa-young ultimately strays from the path of growth, and the film’s critical message becomes this derailment itself, demonstrating how without institutional support and protection children will mimic adults and end up destroying one another. However, the smile on Hwa-young’s face at the end of this tragic anti-coming-of-age tale doesn’t serve the cruel purpose of giving us false hope, but serves as a question mark interrogating how one person chooses to love. It suggests that self-sacrifice might, in fact, be a matter of active choice.

        Both of these young women are searching for a way to live with the wounds left by patriarchy and capitalism, but we never get a clear solution. These anti-coming-of-age films about young women dismantle the grammar of traditional coming-of-agestories, searching for the possibility of a new subjectivity for life in a fractured era. Park Hwa-young, a radically apocalyptic take on the void left by the collapse of the family and community, shows both the danger and the possibilities of distorted substitute families created by youths in the absence of traditional family structures. In contrast, House of Hummingbird, as a lyrical poem suggesting new ethical growth through ripples in the fabric of everyday life, searches for the possibility of emotional maturation that embraces loss and pain. The narratives of these girls who do not grow up show not simply stagnation, but rather stories that progress differently from traditional coming-of-age formulas. In that way, you might call them attempts to make us imagine a new type of ethic for solidarity and responsibility in the wake of the collapse of the myth of growth.

        In the late 2010s, a distinctive anti-coming-of-age narrative centered on young women emerged. These narratives brought an absence and failure of growth to the forefront. Whereas conventional coming-of-age stories depicted a protagonist’s journey of self-discovery and social integration—often reaffirming patriarchal authority and capitalist ideals of success in the process—the young women in these films either reject that system from the outset or fail to assimilate into it. In doing so, they subvert the traditional growth formula, raising fundamental questions about conventional systems. By choosing stagnation and deviation over progress, these characters hint at other possibilities for development and successfully expose the falsehoods of patriarchal values. Park Hwa-young and House of Hummingbird reject the norms of growth narratives shaped by patriarchal expectations and move toward anti-growth, offering a deep reflection about a reality in which the “way of the world” demonstrated by the traditional bildungsroman is no longer valid. Both films give detailed depictions of how, when the ideals of growth demanded by patriarchy and capitalism are no longer realistically viable, young women can both represent that impossibility and the search for different possibilities, forcing audiences to rethink the meaning of growth and maturation. These female characters do not grow up, but their anti-growth is not mere regression or failure. Instead, it can be seen as an unconscious refusal of the dominant order and search for alternative forms of subjectivity. In that sense, by not following familiar arcs of growth and achievement, their stories suggest that “it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” as Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Or, as in Lu Xun’s “My Old Home,” that “originally there was no path on the ground—yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears.”

Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

Cho Hyungrae Cho is the author of the collection of critical essays, Misery in a Godless World. He writes extensively on fiction and film. He is a member of the editorial board on the quarterly Munhakdeul and serves as assistant professor in the Division of Korean Language, Literature, and Creative Writing at Dongguk University.