The short story collection The Age of Benign Violence is already the third book by Jeong Yi Hyun released in Russian, following the novels Sweet City of Mine and What You Never Know. One of the likely reasons for the strong interest in the author abroad is her pronounced focus on globalized contemporariness: her characters are devoid of distinctly specific national features and are placed in conditions perfectly familiar to the middle class worldwide. Therefore, Jeong’s works have a rather low entry threshold, despite their thematic and emotional depth.

  The tone of the collection is set by the very first lines of the first story, “Miss Cho, the Tortoise, and I.” The protagonist, a nearly forty-year-old employee at a nursing home, admits to fearing the future: he prefers not to talk about what might happen, hoping that by doing so, he can avoid it. His ideal life is to lie in bed with a soft toy kitten and stroke its head. Most of the main characters in other stories also want to control absolutely everything and to prevent events that unsettle established routines, disrupting the “natural” course of things. However, controlling everything is impossible, so they need to narrow their worlds as much as possible.

  Just as it is natural and soothing for the nursing home employee to listen to the grumbling old man from room 1206 every day, the only right choice for one of the two heroines of the story “It’s Nothing” is to endanger the life of her premature granddaughter and think only of her daughter’s grades. For the other, it is to devote all her efforts to obtaining compensation for the exploded lid of a frying pan and not to care for this very baby. Also motivated by the same desire to cement her existence, the woman in the story “Ferris Wheel at Night” has been working in a school she has disliked for twenty-five years, but is willing to stay there until retirement.

  The essence of most of these protagonists—who are mainly women— revolves around exhausting work and the need to meet the increasing demands for a quality life: everyone strives to gather all kinds of evidence of their success, and no one wants to lose and end up on the periphery. Under the guise of caring for its members, society dictates how they must live within the confines of narrow and uniform boundaries that deprive them of individuality and sometimes humanity. For example, Jeong describes the institution of marriage in a highly unromantic way. Love exists only for the young, and afterwards economic expediency, shared bills, real estate, and children take the place of love as the connecting links between men and women.

  The so-called “benign violence” begins in childhood: with the parents’ readiness to sacrifice their children’s happiness for their predicted future stability and security. Children appear as the projections of the social fears and desires of the adults, like modeling clay. Adults themselves willingly mold their children into suitable figures and actively use the services of the education system to accomplish this. In the story “Forever Summer,” the mother limits her daughter’s food intake and sends her to prestigious international schools where the girl faces insults or, at best, indifference. The mother from “Anna” chooses an English-language preschool for her son, where children are expelled if they speak their native tongue, and there the boy experiences constant stress and becomes completely silent.

  But a person’s existence in Jeong’s stories is not as bleak and predictable as it might seem. Life always finds a way to elude control, because new people regularly enter it. And we need them, because occasionally they knock the ground from under our feet and reveal our humanity. Sometimes your father’s ex-lover gets in touch with you and later gives you her giant tortoise (“Miss Cho, the Tortoise, and I”). Sometimes you meet your soulmate in the most unexpected corner of the world, even if you two may have to part ways soon (“Forever Summer”). And sometimes behind the door of the most ordinary apartment in the most ordinary building you encounter a pain you could never have imagined (“The House in a Drawer”).

Dmitry Rumyantsev

Editor, Translator