2018–2021: From the Sargasso Sea to the Seas of Jeju

Having suffered from years of subway commuting, I decided to move closer to work. When I made that determination a reality and began walking to and from work, I found freedom beyond my wildest imagination. I finally understood what it meant to enjoy my evenings. Who knew I didn’t have to fight for my survival every weekday night?

    I thought to myself, What should I do? There’s a badminton center nearby, I could try that. Or billiards, I’ve always wanted to learn . . . No, maybe I could pick up a second language. Everyone says it helps prevent Alzheimer’s.

Eventually, I decided to join a book club that was recruiting members online. My timing was perfect. The club had run for about five years, and only recruited new members at the beginning of the new reading cycle once a year. I will hereafter refer to this community as the Sargasso Book Club.

    At the Sargasso Book Club, members would vote on books to read, then get together a month later at a café in downtown Seoul for two hours to discuss their perspectives. Then we would go out for dinner and drinks. The book we read my first month at the club was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I’d never heard of the author or the novel. When I looked her up, I learned that she had once dated a well-known businessman. Oh? My interest piqued, I opened up the book. I was so moved I ended up sobbing.

    I wouldn’t call myself well-read, but I read more than fifty books each year. I always took a bit of pride in my eye for books. But that conceit was shattered by A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was the first book I read with Sargasso. It was a pleasant shock. I was bursting with excitement as I attended my first offline meeting. It was a little awkward at first, but the tension melted away at dinnertime. It was a shame that we were having pig trotters—I wasn’t sure I wanted my new friends to see me tearing at pork hooves with my teeth on our first meeting, so I resorted to nibbling away at tiny bits of meat. I was hungry. But the conversations we had were wonderful. At the afterparty, I was expecting new book recommendations and updates about our favorite authors, but the book club members exchanged convenience store ice cream recommendations and gave updates about their pet cats instead. But I didn’t mind. I felt as though I had always been part of that community.

    Several months later, the Sargasso Book Club voted to read the book I had nominated. My expectation of all-around praise for the book was dashed, but I didn’t find it unpleasant. The book club taught mean invaluable lesson: that people will walk away from the same book with different responses. By this point, I was not only attending regular meetings,but was also a regular at unscheduled meetups. We would gather at Hangang Park and bring drinks and snacks to share. Sometimes we would talk about literature,but more often than not, we talked about other things. But even those moments when we didn’t discuss books or authors somehow felt incredibly literary.

    What were literary moments and experiences anyway? I wondered why watching the sun set over the Han River and listening to someone talk about a country I’d never set foot in felt like a literary moment.Was it because I was listening to someone the way I read a literary work? Or because I was among other people who loved literature?

    Then the pandemic began, and as with many other offline communities, the Sargasso Book Club went on a long hiatus. The hiatus unfortunately coincided with my struggles with depression—caused largely by the physical and emotional exhaustion from fifteen years of work, but partly, I think, by the separation from the Sargasso Book Club.

    After quitting my job, I spent all my time lying around at home, until my husband dragged me off to Jeju Island one day. I was too lethargic to plan anything, and my husband had also brought me there not because he particularly wanted to travel, but because he wanted to get his wife out of bed. Before I knew it, I was standing in Jeju Airport. We had no destinations or plans, and our luggage consisted of a few clothes, a couple of books, and a yoga band. We had only booked accommodations for the first three nights, at a small hotel in Seogwipo. Outside the window was a quiet four-lane road lined with palm trees. I laid out cushions by the window and lounged around reading for two whole days. Sometimes I would look up and stare at droplets of rain drawing lines of water down the glass, and when the rain stopped, we would go outside and take a stroll around the hotel. When our legs got tired, we would enter a nearby café, and when we grew hungry, we would eat at a nearby restaurant. It was on one of those walks that we discovered the Sammaebong Library a short distance from the hotel. We wandered the aisles and browsed the shelves, then sat in the lobby reading the books we’d brought from home. We had delicious, affordable food in the library cafeteria. We would walk, we would read, we would read, and we would walk, and all that time, we almost never went online. We had so much time on our hands because we didn’t visit our usual internet communities or local tourist destinations. My husband and I just sat together to read at our own pace. Those hours we spent were silent, comforting, and warm.

    That was when I realized that reading together didn’t necessarily mean reading the same book together. Being in the same space as another reader, and working together to create a space for reading, in my mind, was a literary experience. We spent nearly a month in Jeju, slowly taking in the locale, and the trip remains in my memory as a literary experience in and of itself. When I returned to Seoul and faced down the piles of delivery boxes outside our door, I took a deep breath. I would use the strength I got from the sea at Jeju to think. And from spring to summer of 2021, I asked myself again and again: how should I spend the rest of my life?

2022: Under the Waning Crescent

I wanted to do something I loved. Something that gave back to the community. The Sargasso Book Club was the answer. I wanted to share that feeling of fulfillment I got from the book club and from the Jeju seaside. I wanted to encourage people to read, or at least keep books close at hand. First, I considered why I hadn’t joined a book club until the age of forty. I had always loved books, ever since I learned to read at the beginning of elementary school. Was it because I was an individualistic person who didn’t like group activities? I used to think of reading as a solitary activity and wasn’t fond of reading in a group. Every Korean student remembers literally reading the exact same books (school texts, in other words) with other people. We were told to deduce the author’s intentions and memorize the order of events. Reading together meant that we weren’t allowed to think or feel differently about the book. We had to censor ourselves and consider beforehand if it was all right to express our opinions. Another reason I ended up joining the Sargasso Book Club was that moving closer to work had given me more spare time. Reading can be a luxury for anyone working in Korea, which is the unparalleled OECD leader in average work hours, and where average commute times are one hour and thirty minutes. It’s not easy to hold up a book instead of a smartphone when you’re standing exhausted in a subway car bound for home.The Sargasso Book Club met near my workplace and my home. Being able to regularly hang out on Friday evenings for three or four hours in a café in downtown Seoul would, again, be considered a luxury for many people. Geography can be a real obstacle to literary experiences.

    Then what if I founded an online book club? A community where the Sargasso Book Club, and maybe other book clubs like the Caribbean Book Club or the Gibraltar Book Club, could recruit new members and talk about books regardless of time and place. Where we could talk about books anytime, anywhere, and sometimes veer off into discussions about clear autumn weather. Couldn’t I somehow transplant that literary feeling from the Sargasso Book Club onto the internet?

    Maybe I could build a website where the very first page tells the visitor, You are among fellow readers. I wondered if other people, like me, found comfort in not only discussing books, but in observing other people discuss books. It was with these thoughts in mind that I founded Gmeum (www.gmeum.com), named for the waning crescent moon. The community does not ask members what schools they attended or what companies they work for. The profile page only has one mandatory field: the most important book of your life, which is publicly displayed on your profile. The most important book of one’s life is, bar none, the best insight into a person’s character and outlook.

    Unlike other community platforms, Gmeum does not have a “Like” button. It also has no emoji support. I don’t want this community to devolve into meaningless popularity contests. This is a space where people can feel comfortable expressing their opinions and responses in written form. Whenever I hear someone say, “I love how Gmeum has no hierarchy,” I see that people have gotten sick and tired of the endless ranking of perspectives that plagues other platforms.

    Important conversations would be preserved in text format and made open to the public. I always found it sad to think that the verbal conversations we shared at the Sargasso Book Club might fade away,left only as a fleeting memory for the few of us who shared those moments. But here, the voices of readers will remain as a massive database of knowledge,which is why the name of the community is not the Gmeum Book Club, but the Gmeum Knowledge Community.

    In the 1980s, the traditional folktale Chunhyang was read as a story that emphasizes the importance of a woman’s chastity. Today, the same story is read as a story of a woman defending her sexual agency. If the social context behind the reading of a book can completely change its interpretation, imagine how many interpretations might be facilitated by a book club, which brings together an assortment of people with a wide range of backgrounds and values. I want to collect their myriad perspectives and open them up for anyone to read easily.

    I want to read other people’s thoughts about books, and add my perspectives to theirs. Slowly, we will build up a community of knowledge. I think about how exciting it would be to discover a book I’m reading today in book club discussions decades old. How exhilarating it would be if I could read those discussions and contribute my perspectives, broadened by theirs?

    Each reading cycle at Gmeum takes up to twenty-nine days. Twenty-nine days is the moon’s orbital period, and enough time, I think, for a person to finish reading one book. Reading cycles that goon forever tend to turn book clubs into purely social communities.

    Although it is wonderful to see people come together online over shared interests, I want Gmeum to be a subject-oriented community,not a socially-oriented one. Each reading cycle has a clear end. That’s why I call Gmeum an SNS [Korean for social media—Ed.] community—not in the sense of “Social Networking Service,” but rather as a “Subject Networking Service.”

    We also started hosting offline sessions on the last night of each lunar month (the night of the waning crescent), taking place at 7:29 p.m. at a local bookstore in Korea. As the events are meant to support local bookstores and the community, they do not charge an entrance fee. Local bookstore owners have been incredibly generous in offering their spaces. So far, we have had waning crescent sessions at three local bookstores in Seoul, Busan and Suwon.

We’ve also published the collection of recommendations, Because I Like Korean Novels 2,which introduces little-known works of Korean fiction, and invited the authors introduced in the book for online meetings with readers across twenty-nine days. Unlike offline book talks, these events allow even introverts to ask authors questions with ease, even trivial ones. The remote nature of these events, and the absence of direct messages, also takes some of the burden off writers’ shoulders.

    The website still has some hiccups, and I still make mistakes every day. And I have no way of knowing if this experiment will be a success. But each time a user tells me, “Thank you for founding Gmeum. I’ve always needed a space like this,” I feel a sense of salvation. I have faith that in a community like ours, people who read together can become literary experiences for one another.

Translated by Slin Jung

Kim Hye Jung graduated from the Department of Urban Planning and Engineering at Yonsei University. She worked for more than fifteen years at companies like Siemens Software before launching the reading platform Gmeum this year.