Many works of Korean literature address issues of economic disparity and poverty head on. As depicted in the global hit film Parasite, the threat to life that is poverty sometimes causes families to forge deep bonds. Having to join forces to survive and the closeness of living in a tight space, whether it be small, old, or half underground, pressurizes the family, squeezing the members together. The five family members in Jeong Yi Hyun’s You Don’t Know, on the other hand, are wealthy. There’s plenty of space in their multi-floor villa in Gangnam. They can lead their lives without really seeing each other, so they can be complete individuals. And they can each can sink entirely into their own private worlds, their secrets kept secret.

One Sunday afternoon, the youngest daughter, eleven-year-old Yuji, vanishes from their home. At that moment, the adults who we’d expect to be home, who should have been home, were not there. Yuji’s mother, her father, her stepsister and stepbrother from her father’s previous marriage, all have something suspicious about them, and we start to wonder if those suspicious backgrounds have something to do with Yuji’s disappearance.

We could say that what makes them suspicious are the things they lack. Yuji’s mother has lived in Korea for a long time, but grew up in a family of Chinese merchants, speaking Chinese. She gained Korean citizenship through her marriage, but maintains a deep relationship with Min, a man she met in university who grew up in the same sort of household. To her and Min, Korea is both a home and a foreign country, and the Korean language is both their mother tongue and a foreign language. The uneasiness of being rootless haunts her wherever she goes, and while her family has noticed that she hesitates for a second before speaking in Korean, they never realize the meaning behind that hesitation. Even after getting married and giving birth to Yuji, she does not end her relationship with Min, and she never expresses her unease to her family. Her husband, Yuji’s father, never discusses the details of his business with family. Yuji’s stepsister is unstable and cannot control her emotions. She hurts herself, behaves aggressively to others, and seeks out sex with partners she barely knows. That may be because she grew up being told she was born from an unwanted pregnancy, or it may not. The human mind doesn’t give up simple answers under analysis. But the one thing that is clear is that she should have received psychological care at an earlier stage, but instead her problems were ignored until she became an adult. Her stepbrother got into medical school but doesn’t attend his classes. He maintains a strange distance from his kind and dependable lover, hurting her. He’s intelligent and sensitive enough to realize what he’s doing, and, as if to punish himself for that, begins committing crimes that benefit no one.

All of them are bound by the things they lack but refuse to directly acknowledge. The longer this goes on, the greater these deficiencies grow, and yet they all continue to ignore them.

The family, a group of people who live in the same house, joined together by blood and marriage, should bring their hearts together as one, and live with mutual trust. This ideal is most likely little more than a delusion. Even if there were once families that looked like this, weren’t they premised on patriarchy and a familial version of jus sanguinis that ignored inconveniences such as human rights (it’s questionable whether such a concept even existed), and were only able to maintain themselves by expelling without any chance for debate all who didn’t fit their definition of family or questioned their authority? In the modern era, it’s become common sense that individuals have the right to pursue their own happiness (putting aside whether that’s been realized or not), and the unconditional chains of blood and patriarchy have been loosened. This has led to situation where whether blood relations, married, or strangers, individuals must build their relationships with each other as individuals. And in such a situation, what is necessary for individuals to become family? Ethics, reason, imagination, to hope for another’s happiness while recognizing that they have inviolable boundaries. And to achieve any of these things requires dialogue. But that’s not such a simple process.

The adults, once in denial, could bring together their deficiencies, share everything, and become a true family for the first time to bring back Yuji. But no, in this story they make no such effort. They all worry for Yuji and hope to save her but, out of fear of the absolutely irrelevant, continue to struggle alone. They variously hire a detective, cling to a shaman, hand out fliers, and seduce the detective. They refuse the help Min offers. They never make up for the lack within themselves. In the last scene, they are a smiling family. Or at least look like one. But when I noticed that they had not shared a single one of their faults, nor comforted each other in the least, when I realized that the only one aware of their regrets and the gaping vacantness within each of them was none other than myself, the reader, I felt an icy wind blow through my heart.

Translated by Kalau Almony

Hiroko Oyamada

Author, The Factory (New Directions, 2019)

The Hole (New Directions, 2020)

Winner, 2014 Akutagawa Prize