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  [Review] Where Are All Those Pronouns Going?

  When we think of Oh Eun, the poet and his poetry, the first thing that comes to mind is wordplay—a childlike delight in playing with language. Of the many forms wordplay can take, Oh Eun’s poetic technique and voice are most defined by homonymy and the maximization of its effect. An example is the way he freewheels through the many words that share the pronunciation “seol”—New Year’s Day, tongue (頍), speech (飹), snow (馯)—all in a single poem, displaying a sophisticated sensitivity to language, an effervescent tone, and a distinct aesthetic sense. This is the poetry of Oh Eun we’re all familiar with, a realm of his own where no one else can approach him. (Incidentally, Korean homophones rarely carry over nicely into other languages. This will be the greatest challenge facing any translator of Oh Eun’s poetry.)                But while his poetry reads very much like a child’s innocent play, this doesn’t mean it can be passed over with a cursory glance. Whether intentionally or otherwise, it imparts a sense of weighty thematic concerns lying beneath the surface. The desire and lack levied upon individuals under the capitalist system, the social class conferred upon a person at birth and the inequalities arising from it—at the base of his poetry is a series of topics far removed from light wordplay. A tone of sadness, stemming from not only human limitations but the limitation of all beings in this world, prevents us from passing over it lightheartedly. Especially in his most recent work, we find this tone of sadness lying densely at the deepest level of his poetry.         His most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, once again effortlessly blends this characteristic levity of voice, depth of thought, and undertone of sadness, but a new feature is apparent as well—the intensive use of pronouns. The word “pronoun” appears in the title of the collection, and the table of contents is a lineup of identically-titled poems named after the pronouns “There,” “That,” “Those,” “Them,” “He,” “You,” and so on, while even more pronouns overflow from the main text. Before we dig in to this rich feast of pronouns, let’s take a moment to savor the concept of the pronoun itself.         According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, a pronoun is “a word used in place of a person or thing’s name. Or, the term for the part of speech referring to such words.” Put simply, it is a word that replaces a noun. That is, a word that presupposes a noun. We could go as far as to say it is a word that can exert no power without a noun. Without the noun for a thing—for instance, a chair—a pronoun like this or that ends up referring to nothing or to anything at all. Our ability to use a given pronoun with confidence presupposes that there is already a noun ascribed to its referent. Occasionally, there are times when we struggle to remember the noun—when we can clearly picture the thing but can’t remember its name—but this is another case in which a pronoun is useful. The pronoun steps in to take the place of the noun, however insufficiently, until we can recall the name of the thing. Or when we’ve encountered a thing for the first time, and we don’t yet know its name or still haven’t come up with a name for it, then a pronoun comes in handy. In this sense, a pronoun is a faithful complement to a noun.         On the other hand, sometimes pronouns are used in a way that flips their presumed role as a replacement or auxiliary on its head. In other words, there are moments when we witness an inversion of the hierarchical perception that the referent comes first, followed by the noun, followed by the pronoun. Such scenes play out occasionally in philosophy and literature, and to an extreme in Oh Eun’s poetry. The abundant pronouns in The Pronoun for Nothingness are evidence of this.         To break the hierarchical order of referent-noun-pronoun, Oh Eun’s poetry goes on the offensive against nouns, as in, “The starlight appeared and the star was gone / The mountain bird sang and the mountain went away / The seawater swelled and the sea dried up // Like a word forgetting its meaning / The moment it’s pronounced” (“That”). Here, “star,” “mountain,” and “sea” all function as names for things and play the role of denoting their meanings as well as referring to them, but the moment the word is uttered, what disappears is the star, the mountain, and the sea—that is, the thing itself. As soon as we realize that the noun is unrelated to the real object it presupposes, the pronoun which takes its place also loses its relation to the thing itself and the noun which names it, and the frame of the hierarchy is broken. The noun and pronoun become equal in being nothing more than words. There is no serious distinction between them, as they can both be separated from the thing itself at any time.         Since a word is only a word, it cannot maintain unique coordinates. It takes on a different meaning with each use, in each new context and situation. How unstable, how uncertain is the meaning of “person” in the lines, “Lucky to be a person, and / Even luckier not to have been” (“They”)? Staring down the fact that each person in this poem is every bit as unstable and uncertain as the pronoun they which collectively replaces them, Oh Eun’s poetry does not restrain its offensive to nouns only, nor even to language as a whole, which nouns might be expected to represent. The referent of language, the thing itself, is just as hard to pin down. When someone signs off on a new place because it has three windows, only to discover on moving day that the three windows have become two (“He”), is this simply a misperception? Or did the thing itself change? Either way, the outside world is no longer so easy to trust. You can never be sure when things will change, when perceptions will change, when language will change.         When “They only looked away for a second / And this ceased to be this / This gave up on being this / They go back into the bathroom / They search the utility closet up and down / But this never shows back up” (“This”), the unstable mutability of the world/perception/language represented by this applies just as much to us—both the thing itself and the concept—as well as to me—both thing and concept. When we use the word us, we may grow close enough to share secrets, but this we is only a temporary result, unable to go beyond the we “outside the parentheses” (“We”). Whether the real we sits outside the signifier we or the signifier we sits outside the real we, in every moment that we are referred to as we, we grow more distant from us. A we  wrenched further apart with each invocation.1 And this situation cannot simply be avoided by me.         For instance, in the lines, “Alone / In the bathroom // All by myself, and still / It was an effort for me to smile” (“Me”), myself is wrenched apart from me, whether the signifier or the thing itself, imparting some sense of why I can only ever be other to myself. The somber but not unfamiliar realization that it takes effort to move myself, just as it would to move another, produces a keen sense of the futility of the desire to name, describe, or capture the thing itself. And when you are “born a proper noun but [. . .] often called a pronoun,” and live out your life hopping from adjective to numeral, verb, determiner, adverb, and so on, this is why the last thing you have to say is something like a self-pitying sigh: “Oh, this wasn’t the sentence!” (“You”). We wander through so many sentences only to find the wrong one. As long as we live, we will continue to choose the wrong sentence, and the final sentence we choose to sum up our lives is bound to be wrong too.         This predicament resulting from the unbridgeable gap between language and thing, sign and object, signifier and signified, leaves a bitter aftertaste. But Oh Eun’s poetry does not stop at bitterness. Bitterness is only one of the many flavors his poetry can offer. And there is one more that must be discussed—sadness.         For instance, let’s take a look at the first poem, “There.” The fact that “cheerfulness” appears twice in such a short poem might lead us to imagine the speaker’s cheerful face, but the speaker’s attitude as he greets his father’s ashes “as cheerfully as possible” isn’t so simple. At the most basic level, the there where the speaker’s father resides must be the charnel house that holds his ashes, but ultimately this there is a place that cannot be reached by the living. Only in death does it become a part of one’s lived (?) experience. It is a place that can’t be approached by the language of life, but which we yearn to speak to, if only in life’s language. The speaker doesn’t want to say anything particularly special. Just a cheerful phrase like, “I’ve been doing well.” Or a word of grief, sadness, or longing that he’s been holding back with cheerfulness. The thought that he’ll be headed there one day too. The promise to live with “precipitously overflowing cheerfulness” if only for the sake of his father, who departed first for “that far off day.” Reading over poems steeped in this feeling, we realize why this poetry collection overflowing with pronouns had to be titled The Pronoun for Nothingness. And it is the poet’s foreword that reminds us of the foundation of loss and absence that sustains  the collection: “In the place of loss, there was is.”            As long as we live, “Nothingness will forever knock on former somethingness” (“Those”). This “former somethingness” not only refers to a past presence, but also strongly suggests that all presence is momentary. No one can escape the fate of staying for only a moment before moving on. And once we recognize that this moment of presence is premised on absence, all the pronouns in these poems suddenly read as if they refer back to absence. We realize that, as we go through life naming, memorizing, and forgetting the names for things, the pronouns that accompany us can ultimately only refer to nothing—nonrelation, namelessness. And we accept the bitter but unmistakable fact that, even in our way of referring to the that, there, and then which can only be called nothingness, human knowledge can’t help but rely on a pronoun. There’s no other way; all we can do is call it what it is. There, at the final destination of life, is that. Sometime, you will be there, as will I.  Translated by Seth Chandler   Kim Un is the author of the poetry collections including One Sentence, Your Unknowable Heart, and To the Blank Page, and the essay collection Everyone Holds a Sentence in the Heart, the poetics collection Poetry Does Not Speak of Parting, the literary criticism collection Beyond the Writing of Violence and Allure, and the reader’s memoir, Reading Old Books. He has received the Midang Literary Award, Park In-Hwan Literary Award, Kim Hyeon Prize, and Daesan Literary Award. He is currently a professor at the School of Creative Writing, Seoul Institute of the Arts.   Korean WORK Mentioned:• Oh Eun, The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)   1     Translator’s Note: This is a play on the Korean words “uri” (辦葬 – we, us) and “yuri” (嶸葬 – isolated, separated, divided) which are near homophones/homographs, further suggesting the inherent divisions within any us. I’ve attempted to translate this through the visual similarity of “we” and “wrenched,” but the effect is difficult to reproduce.

  by Kim Un

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  [Cover Feature] A New Ethic of Anti-Growth Narratives about Young Korean Women in the 2010s

  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.

  by Cho Hyungrae

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  [Cover Feature] Human History is a History of Migration

  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.

  by Pyo Myunghee

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  [Cover Feature] The Dangers of Alienating a Character

  My novel The Book Club Paper Folding Club started with a simple idea. I belonged to a book club when I was in middle school, and there was an incident in the school library involving a ghost. The memory is so intense that I couldn’t forget what happened for a long time, though I never thought I’d make a story out of it. I’m not sure why I decided all of a sudden to write about the incident of the ghost in the library that occurred so long ago. I’d intended to write a story about paper folding. A few years before I wrote the novel, an acquaintance gave me a book on paper folding, to my great delight; since then, I’d harbored the idea of writing a book about it. Then one day, the incident with the ghost from my middle school years merged with this idea, giving life to The Book Club Paper Folding Club.         My own experience with the ghost in the library is a far cry from what takes place in the book. I toned it down quite a bit to integrate it into the story; what actually happened was more brutal. My original idea went like this: Seyeon, the main character, and her friends are folding paper in the library when they see a ghost outside the window. While chasing it, they run into a peculiar woman dressed in a hanbok. I expanded the story so that the woman asks Seyeon to make her a paper crane. Seyeon agrees and gives the woman the paper crane she makes, which the woman burns. Just then, Seyeon spots the ghost she had seen out the window, but both the woman and the ghost vanish without a trace. Even as I wrote it, I didn’t know what secrets lay hidden in this passage. I simply wrote what came to mind. After the strange woman and the ghost disappear, Seyeon attempts to return to the library, but succeeds only with the help of a paper panda she’s folded.         I finished writing it as a short story and sent it to Changbi Publishers, who had asked me to write something. As I wrote the story, which later became the first chapter of The Book Club Paper Folding Club, I became attached to Seyeon and her friends Momo and Sora. I also wanted to untangle the mystery concealed in the story. Who was the girl that appeared outside the library window? Who was the suspicious woman in the hallway? And why did she ask Seyeon to fold a paper crane for her?         Whenever a question comes to me while writing, I search the Internet. I looked up “paper cranes,” and came across something that held my attention. The origin of folding cranes and making wishes, it said, had something to do with war. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Japanese sent Korean boys to fight in the war as soldiers; at the same time, they established origami clubs in elementary schools, and had schoolchildren fold paper cranes that were sent to student soldiers, encouraging them to do their best to bring victory to Japan. I’m still not certain as to the authenticity of this tidbit of online information. But as soon as I read this unconfirmable story, I realized that the reason I started writing The Book Club Paper Folding Club was to write precisely that kind of story—a story about young people who lived during the Japanese occupation.         But I still didn’t have the slightest idea what sorts of things I’d uncover through writing it. I tend to come up with a secret first, then write a novel in order to solve it. I don’t write stories whose endings I already know from the get-go. For me, the beginning of a story lies in a secret, and when the secret is unlocked, the story, too, comes to an end. A number of mysteries are intertwined in The Book Club Paper Folding Club. Together with Seyeon, Momo, and Sora, I took my time working out the mysteries.         Of course, I knew more than the three girls did. First, I knew that their present-day school overlapped the school of the past. Seyeon’s was an old school, which had existed during Japanese rule. I’d decided that there was a paper folding club in the school in the past as well as in the present, and that the members of the club from both eras would meet in the second half of the novel. Even when I was about halfway through writing it, I’d planned on having Seyeon witness something shocking in the second half; the plot included the deaths of the club members who had been young at the time of the Japanese occupation.         As I began to write the second half, however, something held me back from letting the plot unfold. I felt reluctant; I just couldn’t do it. I was unable to write a single sentence for months on end. So I went on looking for reference works about schoolgirls during the Japanese occupation. To write the novel, I had to know how the youth of the day—girls especially—spent their time, what they looked like, and what was on their minds.         As I searched, I stumbled upon one surprise after another. I never would have thought I could write a historical novel before I started working on this one. My knowledge of history wasn’t deep enough, and I didn’t feel up to doing the research. I didn’t think I had any interest in history. But the novel kept pulling me toward the early twentieth century. Just as Seyeon came to meet girls from the past while unraveling the mystery of the paper crane, I became increasingly drawn into the past.         The biggest shock was my own ignorance. The idea of independence activism by female students brought only the patriotic martyr Yu Gwansun to my mind. Why had I thought that the March First Movement was the only one of its kind? Reading through the materials I found, I learned that such movements had persisted throughout the Japanese occupation of Korea. In addition, I learned that women did not merely help male independence activists as their assistants but engaged in autonomous, self-directed activities, and led independence movements by girls as well.         As oppression by the Japanese Empire intensified, educated women who had studied abroad in Japan returned to Korea and taught girls in schools. These women—once girls themselves—now became teachers passing on the spirit of resistance and independence to their students. It was a rare thing back then for women to attend school. So girls who did had a strong sense of duty or responsibility that they should use the knowledge they gained to give back to their nation.         Writing The Book Club Paper Folding Club stamped out my prejudice and ignorance. I was more than aware of names such as An Junggeun and Yun Bonggil, but I hadn’t heard much about Kim Maria or Hwang Esther. I wasn’t familiar with the Society of Patriotic Women or the Pine and Bamboo Society, either. Before writing this book, I had no idea that there had been countless women independence activists and organizations, and that these women didn’t just support their activist husbands, but led their own efforts to contribute as much as they could.         As I worked on the novel, I was able to form a more solid picture of girls who lived during the Japanese occupation. I couldn’t find much material on schoolgirls of the era, but one book was of great help to me: The Movements and Daily Lives of Schoolgirls in Gyeongseong During the Japanese Occupation. This compilation of essays by various researchers is based on newspaper and magazine articles of the time, helping the reader picture the lives of girls back then. This book taught me something else I hadn’t thought of—that there were hair accessories, shoes, and such that were popular among schoolgirls at the time. Before reading this book, I had considered only the idea of girls being oppressed. I had only been able to imagine Yu Gwansun, especially in the midst of suffering.         Girls living in the Japanese colonial era participated in anti-Japanese movements with a yearning for independence, actively protesting. But they were also greatly interested in things like hairpins and shoes—just like girls today. At last, I was able to picture an ordinary middle school girl, not only a victim of oppression. It was around that time that I made a visit to the former Jennie Speer Memorial School for Girls in Gwangju, where a girls’ independence movement actually took place. The memorial hall, a building remodeled based on the school that existed during the Japanese occupation, displayed materials on girls who took part in independence movements. I went into a classroom and found pictures of students from that era on the walls. Some were taken during school trips, and others during classes, like one with students huddling around a science experiment. I saw a group picture of students who had been released from jail, where they had been imprisoned for engaging in activism, but most of the photographs depicted students at school, carrying on their daily activities. Those faces—the moment I laid my eyes on them, the second half of my novel underwent a major change. I realized I couldn’t write a scene in which students with such faces were killed. That would take the novel in the wrong direction. The students didn’t die. They survived, and they must have gone on to endure difficult times.         Some, of course, did not make it back. I wrote the second half of my novel thinking of both the students who made it back, and those who didn’t—both in the present day and in the past. I didn’t know how to pay tribute to them. As I wrote The Book Club Paper Folding Club, I was finally able to pay them a tribute in my own way, small as it was. Each time Seyeon made a paper crane and burned it at the shrine, I was there with her.         Less than a week after I got back from Gwangju, I was on a train, where I came upon something I would never have expected. There was news on the TV, saying a woman named Kim Deokhwa was to receive an honorary high school diploma from Gwangju Speer Girls’ Middle and High School, her alma mater, eighty-five years after the year she was supposed to graduate. The scene from the news remains vivid in my mind. In 1937, when Korea was still under Japanese rule, Kim Deokhwa refused to take part in Japanese shrine worship and was unable to graduate. A group of students had withdrawn from participation, as a result of which the school closed down. The refusal was their way of protesting Japanese rule. The timeline coincided with that of my novel. Those were the students I was writing about.         I was concerned that ending the novel with “girls who returned” would make it too much of a fantasy novel. But when I saw the news, I was able to find confidence in the ending. They came back, I thought. They really came back. All the girls who returned, and those who didn’t—history no longer seemed like just the bygone past. In writing my novel, I had a powerful realization that the present and past are intimately connected: that the people of the past have never been severed from me, not for a moment, but have always been with me.         Customer, my third full-length novel, was a turning point for me. I began writing more stories centered on young people than on adults. Before, I’d always failed to write young adult novels because I’d see the teenage protagonist as someone separate from me. But in that book, something changed. For the first time, instead of thinking of it as a young adult novel, I simply let a teenager tell the story. Now I write with myself as a teenager in mind, because my own teenage self still has a big place in me.         If you write a young adult novel that objectifies young people, the novel risks becoming a container for a moral message. A young adult novel can deal with ethics, but I don’t want to write one whose purpose is to preach my own ethical ideas to young readers. Likewise, I don’t want to write about the youth “as they should be.” Though I’m grown up on the outside, my teenage self still lives inside me, with issues and concerns yet unresolved; writing a novel is my way of doing my utmost to work them out. They may be either ethical or emotional in nature. It typically takes several years to resolve an issue, and the result is a book.         It’s impossible, I think, to peg down the traits of Korean youth. When I was young, whenever I heard grownups trying to figure out my generation, I felt that everything they said was off the mark. I don’t, of course, think an attempt at academic analysis of a certain generation is entirely meaningless. But that isn’t what I want to accomplish with a novel. I always think of one person: the one inside of me. And the kids who were with me in the classroom during my school days. I recall the faces of the youth I ran into on the street. I don’t want to flatten them because I lack imagination. I think of their desires. I think of the desires, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and concerns I had as a youth. Culture changes with time, but I’m interested in the human aspects that do not change. We sympathize with, and are moved by, even letters or stories penned by foreigners centuries ago—because certain elements that make us human remain unchanged even now, centuries later. The same is true for myself, both as a youth and as an adult. I have undoubtedly matured in some ways, but many things haven’t changed. In some ways, my younger self was better than I am today. What I consider most important in writing a young adult novel is not to alienate the youth. The moment you do, the character becomes flat. I have a similar approach to themes: a story whose ending I already know doesn’t hold my interest at all. I enjoy the process of unfurling a story centered around a character I have yet to become familiar with, a problem to which I have yet to find an answer. I like to draw unresolved issues from a well of the past, and figure them out along with my past self. That is probably why I keep on writing novels with young protagonists. Translated by Jung Yewon   Lee Jongsan received Munhakdongne’s Fiction Prize for College Students  in 2012. Her works include the novels Customer, Mud, The Book Club Paper Folding Club, The Cat and I, and the horror story collection What’s in the Empty Shopping Bag.   Korean Works Mentioned:Lee Jongsan, The Book Club Paper Folding Club (Changbi Publishers, 2023)이종산, 『도서부 종이접기 클럽』 (창비, 2023)Lee Jongsan, Customer (Munhakdongne, 2017)이종산, 『커스터머』 (문학동네, 2017)Seoul Historiography Institute, The Movements and Daily Lives of Schoolgirls in Gyeongseong During the Japanese Occupation (Seoul Bookstore, 2020)서울역사편찬원, 『일제강점기 경성지역 여학생의 운동과 생활』 (서울책방, 2020)  

  by Lee Jongsan

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  [Cover Feature] The Everyday: How I Write Young Adult Novels

  6:50 a.m. By the time my morning alarm rings, my wife has already left for work on her bike. I’d like to stay in bed longer, but my day awaits. I listen to the news on my phone while preparing my son and daughter’s breakfast. My daughter is twenty years old, and my son is in his last year of high school. Once everyone is ready to go, we get in the car and I pull out of the parking lot.         Every morning on the way to work, I call my father. He tends a small farm in the countryside. There are spinach and potatoes in his greenhouse, beehives at the end of his mid-sized crop field, and ten chickens in a coop by his shed. I call him on the way to drop off my kids, putting him on speakerphone so he can hear his grandchildren’s voices. When I ask how his annual health exam went, he responds flatly. “It doesn’t make any difference anyway.”         The road is busier than usual, and I’m getting nervous that I’ll be late. Luckily, the traffic signals are on my side. I drop my son off at his high school and my daughter, who’s severely autistic, at the station, where she’ll take the subway to the community welfare center.         Finally, it’s time to go to work. At the stoplight, my mind drifts to the novel I couldn’t finish yesterday. The protagonist is a high schooler preparing for a debate that will be broadcast on a radio show. Today, I have to make the final touches to the debate scene. Will it end with a triumphant victory, or without a clear winner? I imagine the protagonist’s nervous expression as she climbs the stairs to the radio station. She’s going to win, I decide as the traffic light turns green.         After passing the intersection, I drive for another ten minutes until I reach the vicinity of an apartment complex, and a run-down elementary school building comes into view. Pouring out of the crosswalks, a herd of elementary school children moves toward the school’s front gate. I cautiously pull into the parking lot. This school building is where I teach a class of twenty-four sixth graders.         Readers who come to my author meet-and-greets sometimes ask me which identity is more important to me, teacher or author. I respond that both identities hold equal importance, even adding one more to the mix: I’m not only an author and a teacher, but also the parent of a child with a disability.         I enjoy writing. I also enjoy being around kids. And I enjoy spending time with my daughter. I’ve been an author for nearly nine years now, an elementary school teacher for twenty-three, and a parent to my daughter for twenty. Writing never gets any easier, but I’ve grown more seasoned through the years. My morning commute is easy enough, and when I step into a class full of students, every day is different.  And while my wife and I have had some hard times while caring for our daughter, we made it through the worst of it a few years ago. Sometimes I think about all I’ve been through up until this point. Over the years, there have been times when I’ve gotten overwhelmed by the stress of writing novels, teaching, and even parenting.         When I step into the classroom, I immediately spot one of my male students sitting in the front row, writing something in a workbook.        “What are you up to?” I ask him.        He looks up a bit awkwardly.        “Homework.”        “Homework? I didn’t assign any.”        “It’s from cram school.”        He’s working on a problem sheet meant for middle schoolers.        “Isn’t it a bit early for homework?”        “I have a lot to do.”        I set my bag down on my desk and glance back at the student. His puffy eyes tell me he didn’t get much sleep.        “That can’t be easy,” I say, trying to sound comforting.        “I’ve been doing this for two years, so it’s not so bad now,” he replies coolly.        I see.”         My response feels hollow. I get settled at my desk and scan the rest of the classroom. Thankfully, more students seem to be playing than studying. Ten years ago, there might have been a handful of students in each class who attended cram school. Now, all but a few spend their evenings and nights sitting through afterschool classes. Some of them even study middle and high school material while still in elementary school. All this is done in the hopes of getting good grades and getting accepted to prestigious universities. Whether up close or from a distance, it’s always saddening and frustrating to observe the way South Korean society pressures elementary school kids to prepare for the college entrance exam.         Polarization is occurring on all fronts of South Korean society. Nine out of ten students attend high school with the goal of going to college. While an overwhelming majority hope to be admitted to a university in Seoul, only a small percentage are. Parents are frustrated with curricula that overemphasize the college entrance exam, but pressure their children just the same because they’re worried about their futures. I’ve heard that English-immersion kindergartens for children three and up are booming, and heard of dual-income households in which one spouse spends their entire month’s wages on private education.         Triggered by looming anxiety about the future, parents of elementary schoolers push their children to start studying for the entrance exam as soon as they enter middle school—regardless of whether they’re any good at studying. Once their kids reach high school, they burn through their savings paying for private tutoring and compete fiercely with other parents to ensure their child’s success. High schools practically revolve around the top ten percent of students with the highest grades. While not all students experience the worst of this cut-throat culture, countless youths across the country grow up under the pressure to perform well academically and be accepted into prestigious universities.         The classes I teach, however, have very little to do with the entrance exam. First period is language arts. Last week, we had a class on poetry. I prefer to teach using fiction instead of textbooks, and this week I’m going to be sharing a novel I wrote. I hand out one copy to each student, then read aloud from the front of the class. I read with feeling and emotion, switching voices when the characters change. I try to capture the rhythm of each sentence. The students see the words, listen to my voice, and quietly ponder the occasional questions I throw in as they recreate the scenes and characters in their mind’s eye. Since I use the novels I write in my classes, I don’t consider my writing and teaching to be completely separate from each other.         A bell tone plays from the ceiling speaker, announcing recess. I give my students extra break time as a reward for their good attitude during class, and the rigid classroom atmosphere instantly turns bright and airy. I take a cool sip of water to soothe my throat, which is sore from reading.         My gaze settles on my class of twenty-four students, all reclining in their seats and enjoying the break. I scan the room to see if the students are getting along with one another and whether anyone looks gloomy or under the weather. Hardly a month has passed since the new semester began. The boy who was doing homework earlier is now sitting on the floor playing a board game with his friends. The girls are gathered in a circle, playing duck-duck-goose. There isn’t a single student in my class who doesn’t strike me as adorable. It hits me that I’ll be spending the rest of the year with these kids. How will it feel to send them off on graduation day?         I’ve turned my attention to the schoolwide messenger app on my computer when a student approaches my desk.        “That was so fun,” she says.        “What was?” I ask, knowing full well what she means.        “Reading your book.”        “Really? It wasn’t too difficult?”        “Yeah. I like your books.”         South Korean youth literature, comprised of young adult and children’s literature, is neatly categorized by the age of its target readers. First and second graders read elementary children’s books, third and fourth graders read intermediate children’s books, fifth and sixth graders read advanced children’s books, middle and high schoolers read young adult novels, and so on. But kids who enjoy reading seem to disregard those guidelines entirely. High-level sixth grade readers tend to pick up young adult books, and occasionally I’ll see one of my students bring in a book written for adults.         After finishing my classes for the afternoon, I quickly pack up and walk to my car. I’m anxious to get back home to my daughter, who will be home alone after coming back from the welfare center. I drive home as fast as I can and swing open the front door.        “I’m home!”         My daughter rushes over and squeezes me in a bear hug. We both break into laughter, relieved to see each other home safe. The next thing we do together is prepare dinner. We’d spent the night before excitedly discussing what we wanted to eat and prepping ingredients for dinner. Two nights ago we had shrimp cream pasta, and yesterday we enjoyed some dumpling soup. Today’s menu is dried pollack tofu soup with an omelet on the side.         By the time my daughter and I are finished setting the dinner table, my wife and son arrive back home. My son’s looked much more relaxed ever since admitting that he didn’t plan to go to college. Studying for the entrance exam just wasn’t for him. He said once he graduates high school he wants to become a firefighter. There have been moments when I worried about his decision to forgo college, but my feelings have changed since then. Ever since he set out on a career path that didn’t entail a college education, he’s regained an air of warmth and kindness I haven’t seen in him since he was a kid.         “I’m going to get some writing done, so hang out with your mom in the meantime,” I tell my daughter, who is washing dishes alongside her mother. She nods in response, and I’m relieved to see that her face looks peaceful and content. Leaving my daughter in my wife’s care, I step out of the house.         At a local café, I sit down and open my laptop. I left the house at 6:30 p.m. Now, it’s time to write. The protagonists of the novel I’m working on are siblings of children with disabilities. These kids come of age seeing their siblings grapple with disabilities while simultaneously navigating the world of people who are not disabled. It’s a story about young people beginning their adolescent years while coming to terms with conditions that are outside of their control.         After I submit this book to the publisher, my next novel will center on the competitive culture surrounding the college entrance exam. For the past two weeks, I’ve been flipping through research material and conducting interviews on the topic. But all the while I’ve been unable to fight off a feeling of heaviness in my heart, like I’ve been staring into a dinosaur’s cold, reptilian eyes.         Whenever I write fiction about young protagonists, the first emotion that hits me is guilt. Although school life in South Korea has improved in certain ways, other aspects have only become more severe. Thinking about the state of our society now always makes me feel sorry for the kids born into these troubled times. Yet, I still want to offer them encouragement. I want to tell them that no matter how dismal the world around them may seem, they have ownership over their lives. Sometimes when I’m writing my novels, the word “wild” comes to mind. I often want to see moments when my protagonists are possessed by a fierce, untamed resoluteness. Because even if a kid can somehow get through their troubled adolescent years, they’ll undoubtedly face more challenges in the future. We know all too well that life doesn’t get any easier as an adult.         I remember the day of last year’s graduation ceremony. I was watching the graduating students’ pre-ceremony performance. As each graduating class ascended the stage to perform a ukulele ensemble, one male student next to me stayed glued to his seat. His mother was next to him, holding his hand and crying. Her son was on the autism spectrum, and he was refusing to go on stage. Seeing this reminded me of my daughter during her own sixth-grade graduation. At the time, I desperately wished that she could somehow live her life without autism, but as time passed it became clear that she was always going to be a bit different from others her age.         I knew what that crying mother was feeling in that moment. As cheerful ukulele melodies and rhythmic clapping resounded throughout the ceremony hall, I approached the mother and her son.        “I teach at this school. My daughter attended the special education class here, and she graduated six years ago. I can imagine how you’re feeling right now.”         The mother put her hand over her mouth and nodded. She seemed to be saying something in response, but I couldn’t make out the words. I told her to hang in there, assuring her that our kids would grow up to be as happy and healthy as any others, and that great things awaited them. When she started to break into sobs, I couldn’t help but do the same.         To me, life is frightening and uncertain. I never expected to become a parent to a child with a disability. I’m certain that was the case for that mother as well. Our children will face so many uncertain events and unpredictable hardships in their lifetimes. I can’t help but think to myself: what kind of fiction would be meaningful to those children?         I finish writing for the day and head home. Upon my arrival, my daughter rushes to the door and pulls me into a hug. She’s evidently been waiting for me to come home. She tells me how glad she is to see me and how happy she is. After changing into her pajamas, she jumps into bed and waits for me to say goodnight before going to sleep. After getting ready for bed, I go into her room. I check which classes she has at the welfare center tomorrow and make sure she doesn’t forget anything at home. We decide on tomorrow’s dinner, search for recipes, and watch cooking tutorials videos together—our daily bedtime ritual.         After everything is settled, my daughter looks up at me with contentment in her eyes.        “Kiss my forehead, please.”        Each night when I press my lips to her smooth forehead, I say the same thing.        “I love you.”        “Love you, too.”         Her sweet response makes me smile. When I close her bedroom door behind me, it’s 11:30 p.m. This is how every one of my days ends. I open my laptop on the dining table in hopes of wrapping up a scene I started at the café, but find I don’t have any motivation left.        “That’s enough now, let’s go to sleep,” my wife calls  from our bedroom.         With a single yellow lamp turned on, the living room looks especially cozy. I try to focus on the manuscript open onscreen, but I just can’t. I briefly think about tomorrow, when I will repeat the same routine. My mind reflects on tomorrow’s classes, tomorrow’s dinner, tomorrow’s novel. Suddenly, I remember something my dad said this morning.        “People are born into this life to live as hard as they can.”         I realize that his words describe the life I’m living now. I’m very fortunate. I’m lucky enough to do work I like and that I’m good at, and I’m surrounded by people I love. I love working—and sometimes the work I do even gives me strength. No neat borders separate my jobs of teaching, parenting, and writing. Like artwork made with paint marbling, each component of my life blends into the others to form a single pattern.         I don’t mind this way of living. I get the feeling that the novels I write tomorrow will be informed by what I experience today. I sometimes wonder how many more stories I’ll write, whether I’ll still be writing past the age of sixty, whether my stories will stand the test of time and for how long—all pointless worries.         The everyday is enough for me. I write about life the way I live it.  Translated by Julie Wi   Moon Kyeong-min won the JoongAng New Writer’s Award for his novella Mr. Bear’s Cave. He was awarded the 2023 Honbul Literature Award for Worlds We Must Protect, the Munhakdongne Young Adult Literature grand prize and the 2022 Kwon Jeong Saeng Literature Award for his novel Flutter, and the grand prize in the Bang Jeong-hwan Foundation’s Dasaesseu Writing Competition for his full-length work Uturi Hanarin.

  by Moon Kyeong-min

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  [Cover Feature] Even So, the Heart Grows

  I used to feel a certain pity whenever I thought about teenagers. Some might see adolescence as the most dazzling, beautiful time of life, but for me, it was the most anxious and lonely. Some people think growing up is easy—that time simply passes and, with it, growth naturally follows. But growing up is no simple task. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easily, and growth is no exception. Perhaps that is why so much young adult literature pays careful attention to the struggles of youth.         The teenagers I met, however, made me realize how misguided and limited my perspective had been. Without meaning to, I had viewed teenagers as a reflection of my own past, assuming that, like my younger self, they too must be going through a tough time. Yet many of the teens I met and spoke with, though still in the midst of adolescence, were brimming with remarkable thoughts. They reflected deeply on their own lives and lived by philosophies of their own. They knew how to devote time to what they loved, and how to follow through with their responsibilities. They could smile through worry, and even after sinking into despair, they would spring back to their feet. They were far more impressive than I ever was at their age.         Knowing that these young people would shape the future was deeply moving and filled me with gratitude. After my first close interaction with teenagers, I have tried to meet them whenever time allows. Their stories are as diverse as they are: some dropped out of school to live according to their own standards, while others endured bullying or family hardships. It is easy to assume that young people who carry pain must have a troubled or shadowy side—but that was not the case at all. Far from being defeated or broken, they were growing stronger by quietly putting down roots for themselves. And every time I met someone like that, I couldn’t help but feel small and humbled in their presence. As just another adult, I felt unworthy of talking about such marvelous young people. Watching these teenagers grow into individuals far more grounded than I had ever been at their age filled me with a sense of gratitude and awe. And as I wrote their stories, everything grew larger—my perspective, my heart, and my universe.         My early work I Will Cross Time for You tells the story of a girl whose life unfolds through a series of miraculous events. Framed within the context of her family, it focuses mainly on the individual and her family environment, rather than addressing society at large. Since then, my writing has gradually expanded in scope. Another of my novels, Good Luck Is Coming to You, tells the story of a teenager who, after enduring abuse, chooses to save herself for the sake of the friends who try to protect her. In fact, Good Luck Is Coming to You is the work that had the greatest impact on me as a writer. The kids I met while working on it left a deep echo within me and offered profound insight. Looking back, the very process of creating the story was, in many ways, the greatest “luck” that came my way.         What struck me most about the teenagers I met while working on the story was their approach to supporting a friend who was experiencing abuse. Rather than viewing this friend as “someone going through something out of the ordinary” or keeping theirdistance, they simply held to the perspective, “No matter what you’re going through, you’re still my friend.” At the same time, they made no effort to hide their desire to protect them.          Looking back, I realize how truly admirable these kids were, and even now, the memory moves me to tears. My conversations with them have left a deep and lasting impact on me. These students seemed to be ordinary teenagers; nothing about them particularly stood out. And yet, to me, they seemed like heroes. Wanting to capture that quality just as I experienced it, I worked hard to create the most “ordinary and unremarkable” protagonist I could for Good Luck Is Coming to You. I wanted to place an average character at the center of a story built around a serious theme like child abuse, to convey that anyone can become a victim, and just as easily, anyone can be a lifeline for someone living with pain.         If my earlier works centered on the protagonist’s personal journey—how the “I” grew and how that growth benefited “I” as an individual—starting with Good Luck Is Coming to You, the narrative scope broadens. The personal growth of the “I” begins to ripple outward, influencing “us.” While writing stories like this one, where children become each other’s salvation, I felt the need to explore something starkly contrasting. After all, some lives unfold in entirely different ways, and to know that and still choose not to write about them felt, in a way, like lying to the young readers of YA fiction.          The Girl You Want to Kill was born out of that conviction. While I was outlining the story, a term kept surfacing in the media: “fake news.” Of course, rumors or hearsay have always existed, but the phrase “fake news” was not a familiar part of public discourse before that. To be honest, at the time I was thrown into uncertainty. Even when reporting on the same event, media outlets would craft their narratives differently depending on their values, then accuse one another of spreading fake news. We’d moved from an era of simply consuming news and media into one where we had to fact-check information ourselves and decide which perspectives to take. In such a confusing time for adults, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like for teenagers.         The chaos of conflicting information split the world in two. Sides were drawn, and it was as if everything had to be either black or white. In a society so divided, teenagers were bound to feel the strain too. In fact, since they were particularly attuned to social media and the constant flow of information, they were affected even more deeply than adults. Social media became an amplifier of their anxieties—in the past, kids might have been compared to the top student in the neighborhood or their mom’s friend’s son. Now, they were measuring themselves against the top 0.1 percent of the world’s most exceptional lives. Some misguided adults seized on this moment to present the lifestyles of the top one percent as if they were the norm. In doing so, they urged kids to believe they needed to reach that level, placing them on an impossibly unfair scale. As teenagers began splitting and taking sides like the adults around them, the world was gradually turning into one defined by hatred.         The Girl You Want to Kill tells the story of a teenager living in a world steeped in hostility. The protagonist, Juyeon, appears from the outside to lead a perfect life, but in truth, she is a lonely girl with nowhere she can truly rest her heart. When her only close friend dies unexpectedly, people grow suspicious of her, their accusing glances and whispered allegations propelling the story toward its climax. In depicting Juyeon as a girl who ultimately can’t even trust herself, I wanted to evoke a deep sense of unease in the reader. I also portrayed the adults around her not as sources of support, but as figures who further destabilize her at a time when she has yet to grow strong enough to stand firmly on her own. This is another expansion of the story’s scope: it begins to show private struggles being shaped not only by friends and school but by society at large. Yet the society depicted here doesn’t intervene in a just or responsible way. Instead, people hide behind anonymity, spinning convincing narratives; they accept stories from uncertain sources as truth; and they pursue their own interests with no regard for the lives of others. In this way, I sought to capture an era dominated in every way by hatred.         Additionally, I deliberately refrained from spoon-feeding readers the answers, instead inviting them to think, question, and even doubt the protagonist—just as the protagonist is doubted by others. I never reveal what the “real truth” is. Through this approach, I hoped to reflect the raw uncertainty of our times without softening or simplifying it. I wanted to show that any one of us could become a perpetrator, and to ask young readers how they might choose to navigate this terrifying era of hatred. The teenagers I know possess astonishing wisdom and intelligence. That’s why I believe that if we simply pose the right questions, they’ll arrive at their own best answers.         To be honest, even as I say all this, I believed The Girl You Want to Kill would end up being a deeply unsettling novel, and thus be shunned by readers. Still, I chose to write it because I felt that even if people turned away from it, there was a world of difference between a story simply sitting on a shelf and one that never existed at all. And yet, I was also afraid it might become a book that vanished into obscurity. What amazed me was that, contrary to my fears, young readers embraced The Girl You Want to Kill. And just as I’d hoped, they began responding with their own answers to the questions I had posed. That gave me incredible confidence. Without that experience, I don’t think I could have written my next novel.         The book that followed, Of Course, I . . . You, was another unflinching work. It revealed the darker shades of love to teenagers who are just beginning to experience their rosy early romances. The phrase “first love” evokes images of innocence and tenderness, but not everyone’s first love is so sweet. We too often romanticize it, highlighting only its softer, more beautiful aspects. Of Course, I . . . You is a story about teenage love that is far from innocent or lighthearted. Instead, it focuses on the toxic dynamics that can emerge when love grows between people who are not yet fully mature. Using the theme of gaslighting, I wanted to illustrate that love cannot and must not be used to control another person, and that any one of us could become either perpetrator or victim. Phrases like “we’re dating, so you belong to me” may seem harmless, but they can conceal real danger. With this book, I wanted to say that truly loving someone means seeing them as they are, in their entirety. And at the same time, it means affirming that you, just as you are, are worthy of being wholly loved. More than anything, I hoped my readers would go on to seek love that is genuine and safe.          My readers and I have grown alongside each other—or rather, they’ve guided my growth. Whenever I took a step, they were already two steps ahead, beckoning me onward. I followed their lead and wrote my stories accordingly. However, after writing The Girl You Want to Kill and Of Course, I . . . You back-to-back, I found that my heart had grown weary. Perhaps, without realizing it, I’d leaned too heavily on my young readers as I wrote.         An anxiety I couldn’t name began to choke me until I found myself unable to write at all. By then, I was mentally exhausted. Nothing excited me anymore—not even the sight of spring flowers in bloom could lift my spirits. Even when I smiled, I felt an emptiness deep inside. But what unsettled me most was the realization that writing wasn’t fun anymore. It took me quite some time to understand that I was experiencing what people call “burnout.”         Writing had always made me feel alive. Pouring all my emotions, no matter what they might be, into a piece and bringing it to completion gave me a distinct sense of fulfillment, like reaching the summit after a long, steep hike. But when writing stopped bringing me joy, I had lost both my favorite hobby and my greatest skill. Part of my heart shattered, and the pieces slowly drifted away. The fear that nothing would ever fill that emptiness again clung to me.         I had to do something about this nameless anxiety and emptiness that had taken hold of me; I needed to understand why it was happening. But foolishly, instead of searching for the cause, I poured all my efforts into simply trying to chase the emptiness away. I traveled, met friends, and spent all day binge-watching TV and movies, all the while wondering what I might get up to next. I deliberately distanced myself from books and writing, but the more I avoided them, the more I felt like an empty shell. I refused to acknowledge this feeling and lied to myself that everything was getting better. That seemingly endless state continued for about a month. Then one day in May, as if I was waking from a dream, it went away. That day, I rediscovered my reason for choosing to write for young readers, and glimpsed the path forward.         The springtime light of May poured down on everything, and the pale green leaves, newly unfurled, rustled and shimmered so brightly I could hardly keep my eyes open. That day, a group of middle school students in uniform passed by in the sunlight. Their laughter, so loud and carefree, lit up everything around them, and in that moment even the breeze felt softer. It’s a scene I will never forget. Watching those students, radiant simply by being, brought back my smile. The heart I thought had cracked and could never hold anything again, no matter what I tried, began to fill as if no part of it had ever broken. That’s when my mind stirred: I wanted to write. Stories came rushing in like waves—stories of those laughing kids, stories of a youth shimmering clear and bright, like the first days of early summer.         The book born of that moment was Taking a Bite out of Summer. In that novel, I wanted those children—tender, pale green leaves just beginning to grow—to remain sheltered. The teens in this story still carry their own pain, but the biggest change this time was the role of the adults. While my earlier works mostly focused on the process of young people coming to their own realizations, in Taking a Bite out of Summer, I wanted to show that beside every child is someone quietly looking out for them. That no one grows up entirely alone. That no one becomes who they are without someone, somewhere, caring for them. Even if that care is perhaps too subtle to recognize, it still finds its way in and helps them grow, if only a little. More than anything, I wanted the book to offer a warm, consoling message to readers.         If someone were to ask me how a teenager becomes an adult, I would say they grow like trees in the summer. Yes, like freshly sprouted leaves, teenagers flutter wildly in the lightest breeze. But still, they grow into tall, sturdy trees. Sometimes they move me, sometimes they surprise me, but they always speak with such strength and spirit. Early summer, pale green leaves, the soft wind that stirs them, the warm sunlight—these are what adolescence is made of.         Everyone who’s growing carries early summer within them. It must be unbearably hot and uncomfortable to bear the weight of the blazing sun, but knowing that early summer, as always, will stay green and shine in full brilliance, I can’t help but find their struggles both heartrending and admirable. Anyone who’s lived through summer knows that it raises all life with fierce determination, and that children, who seem like they’ll stay young forever, inevitably grow.         It was the thought of them that gave me the strength to write again. Because writing a story about a tree you know will surely grow will always be a joyful thing.  Translated by Kim Soyoung   Lee Kkoch-nim won the Munhakdongne Young Adult Literature Award with I Will Cross Time for You. Her works have been translated and published into many languages including Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.   Korean Works Mentioned:Lee Kkoch-nim, I Will Cross Time for You (Munhakdongne, 2018)이꽃님, 『세계를 건너 너에게 갈게』 (문학동네, 2018)Lee Kkoch-nim, Good Luck Is Coming to You (Munhakdongne, 2020)이꽃님, 『행운이 너에게 다가오는 중』 (문학동네, 2020)Lee Kkoch-nim, The Girl You Want to Kill (Woorischool Publishing, 2021)이꽃님, 『죽이고 싶은 아이』 (우리학교, 2021)Lee Kkoch-nim, Of Course, I . . . You (Woorischool Publishing, 2023) 이꽃님, 『당연하게도 나는 너를』 (우리학교, 2023)Lee Kkoch-nim, Taking a Bite out of Summer (Munhakdongne, 2023)이꽃님, 『여름을 한 입 베어 물었더니』 (문학동네, 2023)

  by Lee Kkoch-nim

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  [Essay] When We Say Goodbye: Kim Ae-ran’s “They Said Annyeong”

  Kim Ae-ran debuted in 2002 with her short story “No Knocking in This House.” At the time, she was a junior studying theater at the Korean National University of Arts and a first-time winner of the Daesan Literary Award for College Students, established by the Daesan Foundation. Three years later, her short story “Run, Dad!” was awarded the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, making her the youngest recipient in its history. The Hankook Ilbo said that given her young age, the decision to give her such a prestigious award was both “shocking” and “monumental.”         Such a response was warranted because she was just twenty-five years old and only three years into her professional writing career. But that’s not to forget that Kim had already been singled out by Korean literary circles as one of the best emerging authors of the 2000s. At the time, the memoir genre and writing that emphasized interiority were on the decline. Kim’s fiction, set against the backdrop of the economic anxiety following the 1997 IMF Crisis, was seen as a pioneering work among a newly emerging generation of authors. Her most famous works from this period are contained in her short story collections Run, Dad! and Mouthwatering.         Kim’s insights into life at the time, expressed with immense sensitivity toward the Korean language, are surprising despite her youth. Her intellectually attuned sentences, neither pedantic nor obfuscatory, explore the problem of how to retain one’s existence and dignity in a rapidly neoliberalizing society. Her works revealed the existence of young women’s voices even before the feminism reboot in Korea. Not only do her works disrupt the patriarchal order and affirm the accomplishments of women’s labor from previous generations, but they also uniquely capture the precariat imagination of young women in a consumer society.         Although aware of the dissonance that threatens life in Korea, Kim’s stories also carefully aimed to produce harmony in the lives of its characters through her literary imagination. But in the 2010s, with works like Vapor Trail and Summer Outside, Kim shifted away from discovering the value of life between everyday joys and unexpected tragedies—a shift that may have been influenced by the 2014 sinking of the MV Sewol and the impact of hate—toward darker stories, including eschatological narratives about the climate crisis and allegories about the MV Sewol.         Aside from a steady stream of short story collections, Kim has also written two beloved novels, My Brilliant Life and A Lie Among Truths. Both full-length novels share crucial themes of growth, family, and lies—themes that apply to this KLN issue’s short story, “They Said Annyeong.”         “They Said Annyeong” was published in the anthology Collection of Stories on the Theme of Music alongside works by authors Eun Heekyung, Kim Yeonsu, Yoon Sung-hee, and Hye-young Pyun. The story begins seven years in the past when the first-person narrator of the novel, Eun-mi, is listening with her partner and housemate Heon-su to the cover of the song “Love Hurts” by indie rock artists Kim Deal and Robert Pollard. As she listens, she mishears the lyric “I’m young” for the Korean greeting, “annyeong.” This memory re-emerges in the present when her current English tutor, coincidentally also named Robert, asks her how to say “hello” in Korean.         The story switches back and forth between two narratives, one set in the past with Eun-mi and Heon-su, and one with Amy (Eun-mi’s English name) and Robert. Like the song “Love Hurts,” “They Said Annyeong” is a story about hellos and goodbyes. And like Kim’s love stories “Night There, Song Here” and “Where Do You Want to Go?” it also raises questions about the nature of communication by focusing on language and media.         This aspect appears most clearly during Eun-mi’s English lessons. Through the online tutoring platform called Echoes, Eun-mi meets (and says goodbye to) people of various backgrounds, nationalities, ages, and genders. Robert is one of Eun-mi’s many tutors. During one of their lessons, Robert asks her how she differentiates between the two different meanings of “annyeong”—“hello” and “goodbye.” Eun-mi tells him that she “just know[s].”         Such linguistic differences, while subtle, exert great influence on the characters’ relationships. Because Eun-mi and her tutors come from different linguistic backgrounds, they have trouble completely understanding these nuances. For example, Eun-mi is shocked to realize that she and Rose (another English tutor) have starkly different ideas about what constitutes a typical “dating show.” Instead of trying to clear up these misunderstandings, however, Eun-mi thinks that one must accept the inevitable losses and omissions that occur in translation.         Although Eun-mi’s thoughts are complex and layered, in the end, they become reduced to the simplest sentences in translation. Not only does this make communication more efficient, but it is also a way to protect and defend the ego. When talking about the sexual tension in foreign language classes, Eun-mi discreetly notices how the act of exchanging languages exposes one’s most intimate self. In classes where her personal life often becomes the conversation topic of the lesson, Eun-mi resorts to lying—assuming her mother’s career as her own and pretending to like things that she doesn’t—all for the sake of conversational convenience.         Despite the misunderstandings that start to pile up, Eun-mi’s English lessons become a path toward understanding these strangers who teach her English through the slow accumulation of information. Linguistically, it can be difficult for non-native speakers to differentiate between “nice to meet you” and “goodbye,” but that doesn’t mean that contextual understanding and situational inferences are impossible. Likewise, although Eun-mi is unable to correct a misunderstanding about raunchy dating shows, she feels a deep sense of socioeconomic camaraderie when Rose shares that she nearly lost her home during a major hurricane.         In “They Said Annyeong” the word “situation” often refers to inevitable human and interpersonal vulnerabilities, such as impoverishment, loss, and pain. The reason Eun-mi starts studying English is that she dreams of escaping such situations. Because of her mother’s illness, Eun-mi’s finances and social life are ruined. When she confesses that her 15- and 30-minute English lessons are sometimes her only interactions with people, we begin to sense the depths of her emotional isolation. For Eun-mi, a woman in her forties whose career has been cut short, her only chance to restart her life is to leave her mother tongue and learn a foreign one.         It is under these circumstances that Eun-mi starts to feel close to Robert, her last English tutor in the story. Eun-mi, Heon-su, and Robert—like many of Kim’s characters—are introspective. But in most cases, this introspectiveness appears as reticence—the characters often don’t expound what they really mean or refrain from talking all together. At such times, the limits of language extend beyond mere linguistic barriers. Heon-su’s observation that “Love Hurts” sounds like a farewell song, “the kind sung by someone who doesn’t often express their pain,” also applies to the main characters.         Such reticence becomes all the more significant when Heon-su and Robert finally reveal their inner thoughts. The courage to do so only comes during states of intoxication. Heon-su, for example, drunk dials Eun-mi after many years to talk to her about the lyrics of “Love Hurts.” Robert is only ready to talk about his family after a glass of wine, after he realizes that it is their last class together. Through Robert’s confession, we too become aware that he, Heon-su, and Eun-mi are all in the same situation. Those who have gone through pain and loss are the ones who can understand others in similar situations.         In particular, each of the three characters finds that their hardship and pain overlap and begin with their parents. The traces of their parents—literally the roots of their existence—put their lives in precarious positions. Eun-mi can empathize with Heon-su, who spent many years caring for his parents in the hospital, but only after her own mother falls ill. By then, it is too late, and she will never be with Heon-su again. Robert says that although many stories end with some great revelation or appreciation for life, the life that he’s experienced has only been a series of losses “without purpose.” Similarly, Eun-mi says that life and death are clichéd, hackneyed, and banal. She says that sometimes relations rupture and people just leave; that being able to cope with the recurrence of such things is the exception to the rule.         It has been twenty years since Kim Ae-ran published “Run, Dad!” This is roughly the amount of time it takes for someone to become an adult. In that story, one of Korea’s best coming-of-age novels, Kim created a father who runs around the world in his shorts. But the story is also a happy lie, a fantasy about growing into better people than our parents. The attachment that Eun-mi has for her mother tongue is an attachment to her roots and traces (i.e., her parents). But now it is time to learn a new language. Although it may be cliché, we need to say “Thank you, I’ve learned a lot. Annyeong.” Eun-mi can now say goodbye. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert  Mi Ryeong Cha is a literary critic and professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST). She has published a collection of literary criticism titled A World of Abandoned Possibilities.  Korean Work Mentioned:Kim Ae-ran, Run, Dad! (Changbi, 2005)김애란, 『달려라 아비』 (창비, 2005) Kim Ae-ran, Mouthwatering (Moonji, 2007)김애란, 『침이 고인다』 (문학과 지성사, 2007) Kim Ae-ran, My Brilliant Life (tr. Chi-Young Kim, Forge Books, 2021)김애란, 『두근두근 내 인생』 (창비, 2011) Kim Ae-ran, Vapor Trail (Moonji, 2012)김애란, 『비행운』 (문학과 지성사, 2012) Kim Ae-ran, Summer Outside (Munhakdongne, 2017) 김애란, 『바깥은 여름』 (문학동네, 2017) Kim Ae-ran, A Good Name to Forget (Yolimwon, 2019)김애란, 『잊기 좋은 이름』 (열림원, 2019)  Kim Ae-ran, A Lie Among Truths (Munhakdongne, 2024)김애란, 『이중 하나는 거짓말』 (문학동네, 2024) Kim Ae-ran, et al, Collection of Stories on the Theme of Music (Franz, 2024)김애란 등 『음악소설집』 (프란츠, 2024) Kim Yeonsu, “What Kind of Person is Kim Ae-ran?” Literature and Society (Moonji, 2012)      김연수, 「김애란 씨는 어떤 사람인가요?」, 『문학과사회』 (문학과지성사, 2012)  

  by Mi Ryeong Cha

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  [Cover Feature] A Novel’s Chance and Its Destiny: On Transforming Literature into Different Media

  Shortly after my third novel, Intimate Stranger, was published eight years ago, I was contacted by a few studios interested in acquiring rights for the screen adaptation. A famous producer even approached me and suggested I write the script myself. He’d sign the contract on the condition that I participate in the writing. I straight out refused, as I had no idea how to write a screenplay. He said I could learn quickly, but I doubted it would be that easy.        I didn’t watch a lot of television. I could think of only one or two series I’d watched from beginning to end, and neither of them were recent. My lack of knowledge would make it all the more difficult to identify trends for structuring a screenplay or dramatizing the story effectively. In short, I had no interest in the job.        Even now I’m pleased with my decision not to participate in writing the screenplay. As a writer, I know that a work demands total devotion from its author. One cannot devote oneself to something one doesn’t love.        Ultimately, I sold the screen rights to a female director preparing her second feature film. She planned to write the screenplay herself, and actually, she seemed worried that I’d get too involved in the project. Only after I promised her I wouldn’t, raising my hands in a pacifying gesture, did she share her interpretation of the novel. We spent hours discussing the dramatization and I could tell that she was perfect for the task. Not only did she have deep feelings for the novel, but above all, she was a writer herself. She’d read the book so many times that the cover was in tatters, and Post-it notes with her ideas were pasted throughout.        Yumi Lee, the protagonist of Intimate Stranger, deceives others by assuming false identities. She’s a habitual liar, changing her name, job, and hometown multiple times. The climax of the story—which also works as a commentary on the irony of gender as a socially imposed construct—is the scene in which she changes sex. The director told me that she couldn’t depict all the character’s lies onscreen; in particular, the part where she changes into a man would be impossible to capture. She wanted to make desire central to Yumi’s story, and not gender. Also, she presented the character as a villain. A villain! Wouldn’t that make her evil? I was caught off-balance, as I’d never considered a central character of mine in that light. I was also concerned that they’d portray Yumi as crazed without any context. But in the end, I agreed to all the director’s decisions. Now, as then, I regard an adaptation of a literary work to be distinct from the original. The medium is a form which dictates what can be relayed through it. It is entirely up to the director to determine what can be conveyed on screen. She is the creator of the work.        In hindsight, I probably doubted that my work would really be made into a movie. During my career, I noticed many writers in my circle, including myself, signing copyright contracts with studios, but only very seldom were these projects ever realized. A screen project was like a unit of soldiers on a mission. The risks were high, commensurate with the supplies and resources required. Most of all, the flow of capital involved was beyond anything that one could imagine. Even with a signed contract, very few works made it to the production stage and, having gone through this process many times before, my expectations were understandably low. Years passed without any news, and I assumed that the project had fallen through like the others.        When the director finally got back to me, it was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She said she had something important to tell me, and a studio representative accompanied her to our meeting. They wanted to amend the contract, applying the rights to a drama series instead of a film. They said that theatres were empty due to the pandemic, and funding was being diverted to streaming services. It would take Netflix months to review a manuscript. With the adaptation in hand, they’d decided that Intimate Stranger would do much better as a series than as a film. I agreed to the change without too much fuss. The project went into full gear after that. The actors were cast, production was finalized, and promotional articles came out. Every time the director resolved an issue, she filled me in on how things were progressing. I was the first to be informed about anything to do with the series. I felt that she respected me as the author of the original work and strove to keep a place for me at the table. Later I found out how exceptional this attention was.        Before the end of the year, I received a copy of the script for the show. Titled Anna, it was divided into eight episodes. I read it immediately, and as I expected, it diverged from the novel in many places. In the novel, Yumi’s father dresses her in expensive clothes befitting a Russian Grand Duchess, and so “Anna” becomes a kind of nickname for her. In the drama, however, Anna is the name of the woman that Yumi begins to imitate in earnest.        The novel’s narrator was cut entirely from the series. A depressed novelist—her career finished, her marriage over—she depicted scenes of everyday sadness, which is a common trope in contemporary fiction. However, for this very reason, the effect could not be felt on the screen so there was no need for her. The camera subsumed the narrator’s role, replacing her descriptive musings with camera shots. In the novel, the narrator’s words conveyed much of the storyline, but in the video format, the audience simply followed the camera’s point of view. Such differences were vividly apparent in the screenplay.        Intimate Stranger, the book, follows the life of Yumi Lee. Through her disguises, she infiltrates different social classes and becomes involved with many men—even marrying one—before abruptly vanishing to assume a new identity and find new targets. Instead of following this sequence, the screenplay of Anna focused on one section and expanded on it. It depicts Yumi’s first marriage in exhaustive detail, focusing on her relationship with her husband and what they exchange in the name of desire. In the drama series, however, a plot twist involving the husband at the end is entirely new, so you can actually regard the screenplay as a different work. Only later, when I saw the filmed version, could I recognize the two works as coming from the same source.        The director offered me the chance to watch all eight episodes before the series premiered. In the beginning, the camera shows the military camp town where Yumi was born and raised. I was astonished by how closely it resembled the scene I had imagined. The bleak alleys, shabby tailor shops, the appearance of the supporting actors were all so familiar. This scene, which I had never described in detail to anyone, was brought to life with such precision that I had the sudden, surreal thought that it had been filmed just for me. This sensation reminded me of the kinds of thoughts that cross my mind while I’m writing. I don’t think about the reader then. The process is extremely personal because I don’t pay attention to popular or commercial appeal. I think to myself, I’m writing a book that I want to read. However, when I saw one of the most beautiful actresses in Korea being called by my character’s name, I knew the series wasn’t just for me anymore. Anna concentrates on Yumi to the extent that there are very few scenes without her. The camera dwells on the actress’s beautiful face. Shots of the elaborately made-up visage are juxtaposed with shots of her bare of cosmetics. Through this technique, the camera shows us the inner life of this mysterious character.        Yumi’s desire is expressed through her lies, but underneath is emptiness. She fraudulently presents herself as having high social standing, but her habitual lying has no meaning or purpose. She simply wants to enjoy the momentary gratification her lies grant her—the respect, the satisfaction, and the pleasure of the moment. To attain this, she has no scruples about fabricating lies that are bold to the point of ridiculousness. In short, she is monstrous, hollow inside. Anyone who peeks behind her mask will not desire her. This was my design when I wrote the novel. I wanted to write about a woman with a monstrous inner core who could not be the object of desire as she herself is the desiring subject. She was me; she was all of us. . . we all have this aspect hidden under the mask of the socially imposed female identity.        The most sophisticated aspect of Yumi’s lies is her use of feminine artifice. With expensive brand name products and a tasteful choice in clothes, she crafts an attractive outward appearance. She becomes a charming conversationalist, someone who can mirror another’s mood and satisfy the other’s emotional needs. But this, too, is a mask, not her true self.        The series Anna created a number of splendid masks for Yumi. I was told that the lead actress changed into dozens of suits for the filming. This was also the reason designer shoes and bags appeared more frequently in this series than in others. High heels, in particular, symbolized Yumi’s status seeking. As she gets closer and closer to succeeding, her shoes become sleeker and narrower at the toe. She pants and gasps climbing the stairs to her high-rise apartment in those shoes.        Another way the adaptation differs from the novel is that Yumi poses as a music professor in the book whereas in the drama series she becomes a professor of fine arts. Although both fields are plagued by the same problems of exclusive connections, behind-the-scenes financial transactions, and academic forgery, perhaps these issues are more vividly portrayed in an art school setting. In the scenes where Yumi stands in front of grand paintings and sculptures, she herself appears like an object of art—no different from an installation piece that is both fake and real. The actress’s physical beauty embodies the message that the drama series wants to convey.        After the trailers were released and as soon as the first episode aired, I was bombarded with calls. Close friends congratulated me, but I also got calls from people I’d lost contact with ages ago. I was stunned. What were they congratulating me for? Even then, I couldn’t recognize the power of visual media. I didn’t know that so many people watched dramas, discussed them, and celebrated them so enthusiastically.        During the two months that the drama aired, the novel Intimate Stranger received more interest than a newly published book, and sales profits increased at a staggering rate. I was receiving interview requests for a book that was published seven years ago. It was perhaps my busiest season as an author to date. It wasn’t a negative experience, either; in fact, it was a great pleasure. But the whole time I felt like I was in a daze. When the editors at the publishing company called to tell me about urgent additional printings, they asked, “Where have all these readers been hiding until now?”        Today, the publishing industry is gradually contracting. The digital age has arrived, and the old text-based system of creating, receiving, and sharing messages is being replaced by an audio-visual one. Although a wider variety of genres is being published now, books have less influence than they did in previous generations. As a full-time writer, I’m long past the point of being disappointed that I’m selling fewer copies of my books. It is no exaggeration to say that we are now in an age of visual communication.        The reading population declines every year, but cooperation between the publishing industry and other media continues to grow stronger. Each year film rights for novels are being optioned more actively and urgently, and books are frequently adapted into stage performances or musicals as well. These adaptations are a very desirable form of publicity, the dream of every author, as they attract more readers to their original works. For example, with the worldwide release of Anna, Intimate Stranger had the chance to be translated and published in multiple languages. Whereas the book had been the basis for the drama series, it was the series that paved the way for the book’s larger re-release.        As the drama series was trending, drawing readers back to the book, the question I fielded most frequently was, “How do you, as the author, regard the drama?” People seem to believe that I must have some standard or grounds for critiquing the adaptation. However, I always reply that comparing them is meaningless—they are two different works that exist on their own terms. As they’re two stories originating from the same idea, the adaptation can be viewed as a kind of spin-off. Even if you’re depicting the struggles of the same character, the effect will be entirely different depending on whether you use print or visual media. The story in a novel always poses questions that the readers must fill in for themselves. The adaptation, however, can be viewed as one possible answer to those questions. Any answer is possible and none is definitive. This, too, is why familiar prototypes of stories are remade in every generation: we like to see a fresh take, to acquire a new perspective from a familiar tale. Each time, the story takes on new life. People enjoy seeing the adaptations in diverse media. Ultimately, it is the narrative that they have in common, uniting them. Our desire for stories isn’t that different from that of our ancestors who gathered in front of the fire to hear storytellers long ago.        More than two years have passed since the final episode of Anna aired. The show ended, and with it, my hectic schedule. I returned to my life of peaceful obscurity. Once again, I make a living writing novels for myself and I don’t have many complaints. What has changed is that I’m able to introduce myself more easily. If I say I’m a novelist, many people look uncertain as to how to respond, but if I mention Anna, they brighten up. The power of dramas, the impact of popular media, is amazing. The presence of visual media is felt everywhere in our culture now.        They say that each book has its own destiny, and Intimate Stranger is the perfect example. As an author, I hope that all books fulfill their destiny in kind. This is, however, something distinct from my own goals or efforts. Various opportunities and possibilities that amount to nothing more than chance await books in the literary market today. Meanwhile, authors write in solitude, removed from the tumult, only guessing as to when the words they planted as seeds will mature into trees, not knowing how far their branches will extend. Translated by Kari Schenk  Chung Han-ah debuted in 2007. Her works include the short story collections Laughing for My Sake, Annie, and Liquor and Vanilla, and the novels Little Chicago and Intimate Stranger. She has won the Munhakdongne Writer’s Award, the Kim Yong-ik Novel Prize, the Hahn Moo-sook Literary Award, and the Sim Hoon Literary Award. Intimate Stranger was adapted into the serial drama Anna for Coupang Play.  Korean Work Mentioned:Chung Han-ah, Intimate Stranger (Munhakdongne, 2017) 정한아, 『친밀한 이방인』 (문학동네, 2017)

  by Chung Han-ah

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  [Cover Feature] The Poverty of Imagination Era

  This is the era of splendid images. Literature is in decline and it seems that visual media has entered a golden age. However, it is interesting to note that film companies around the world, including those in Hollywood, are all suffering from a ‘story famine.’ In this magnificent era of story inflation, when people around the globe are gorging themselves on a glut of stories, some may wonder, “What story famine?” There are hundreds of cable channels on TV; global streaming services like Netflix, Disney, and HBO are springing up everywhere; and thousands of movie theaters are still in operation worldwide. On top of that, billions of consumers are ready to open their wallets wide for great TV dramas or films. The problem is that while the demand for more visual content is growing and the number of streaming channels has exploded, it has become harder and harder to find a captivating story that can be told through the visual medium with huge production costs. Whenever I meet film producers, the one thing they all say without fail is, “It’s so hard to find a good story to make into a film these days.” Which is why film studios everywhere are thumbing their noses at their audiences, churning out hundreds of movies a year by endlessly pulling out old blockbusters from their file cabinets to remake, rehashing the same stories in the form of sequels, and pouring astronomical production costs into stories so old and worn that anyone can plainly see how they will play out within the first five minutes. But what’s even funnier is that these movies we find so absurd are actually the best stories that film producers can find, carefully handpicked out of the tens of thousands of screenplays that make their way around the global film market every year.        Robert McKee, renowned for his Story Seminar, declared in his book Story that the art of the story has steadily been on the decline in the twenty-first century.        The power of storytelling is in decay, he argues, and today’s writers are unable to create stories with the same overwhelming force and beauty as writers of the previous generation. They instead scramble to fill the hollow shells of empty stories with flashy action, histrionic, lewd and violent performances, and all sorts of decorative shots packed with camera techniques.        Is McKee’s claim too extreme? Well, even in this era of story inflation, it has become increasingly rare to see films like Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven—films whose stories confront the deep truths of dreamers and are told without any trickery. Filling that void now are these rowdy, two-hour films in which speeding cars smash into each other, machine guns spray bullets, and bombs explode to reduce city buildings to rubble—all for no apparent reason.        Compared to previous generations of writers whose story consumption was limited to household appliances such as radios and black-and-white TVs, we are a generation that grew up consuming an unprecedented number of movies and dramas. We are also a generation that still craves and consumes a wide array of genres, as well as a generation that has been blessed and baptized with the sheer imaginative power of  writers and directors of earlier generations. But even as we devour stories in such huge quantities, we aren’t creating stories with the same overwhelming impact and beauty as writers of the past. This goes for films and novels alike. Moreover, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to any one country—it’s a global trend. Advancements in scientific technology have fueled the development of media technology, which in turn has improved film production environments and led to a dramatic increase in the capital invested in filmmaking. However, the stories created by this generation are only stylish and ornate on the surface, flashy casings that are devoid of substance. That is why we feel a sense of emptiness as we consume all these countless stories. We’re not producing anything that comes close to the imaginative power needed to meet these demands in terms of quality or quantity. We’re living in an era that suggests we ought to have imagination in abundance, yet strangely enough, we’re instead experiencing its dearth. We’re like people on a lake dying of thirst.        What exactly is the problem? There are probably many complicated reasons at play here. But if I were to choose the most apparent cause for this trend, it would be that people of this day and age live in an environment that is quite good in terms of consuming imagination but incredibly bad at nurturing it.        As with everything in the natural world, a system must renew itself in cycles in order to be sustainable. In a natural ecosystem, plants are eaten by herbivores, herbivores are eaten by carnivores, the carcasses of carnivores are eaten by microorganisms, and those microorganisms become nutrients in the soil, allowing plants to grow. In the same way, the students who consume education grow up to become the teachers who produce education. In the case of publishing, the readers who consume books naturally cultivate both the imagination and language proficiency they need to ultimately become the writers, translators, and editors who produce future books. But while it is possible to maintain a healthy cycle that turns book-consumer readers into book-producer writers in the publishing world, there is an ironic mechanism in place in the film industry that makes it hard for the viewers who consume movies to become the directors who produce them. This is because, in contrast to the act of reading, which naturally fosters the imaginative muscle, watching movies is a passive, flaccid way to consume the imaginations of others without fostering an imagination of one’s own.        As we all know, reading books is like making movies in your mind. A reader opens a book and reads the letters within. Letters are an effective tool for expressing the most information in the smallest amount of physical space, but they are very uncompromising. The reader must, without the support of any other visual or auditory aids, read one exacting word or sentence of the text at a time and start the imagination process within their mind—just as a film director creates images and landscapes or casts all the actors for the lead and supporting roles (as well as the extras), adding dialogue and music, and delicately arranging the space of the story in each scene. That is, reading is uncomfortable and arduous work that requires the reader to focus their imagination at every moment. As a person reads, they become both a writer and director. They become the lead actor playing their role. They become their own sound director and add in the dialogue and the music. They become a lighting director and modulate the story’s color and tone. They become a stage director and complete the mise-en-scène. Reading fiction is an art form that cannot be enjoyed if the reader cannot, from beginning to end, call upon their own imagination to internally visualize every last detail from the main character down to the arrangement of the forks and knives on the dining table. Moreover, with fiction, each reader creates a different version of the film in their heads. The cast will differ according to each reader, as will the stage design and the score, the movie’s tone and color. And so the images that readers mentally envision are singular and distinct. Thus, every reader in the world is someone who uses this uncompromising and vague material called language that the writer has left for them to produce, direct, and act in, allowing them to appreciate their own unique version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which is to say that each of these versions is the only one of its kind in the universe. Unlike these film production environments with their astronomical production costs and enormous number of crew and equipment, this unique film born inside the reader’s mind relies entirely on one’s own incredible imagination and therefore doesn’t cost a thing to produce aside from some donuts and coffee. Inevitably, a portion of these readers who read these books and create these countless movies in their heads will go on to become writers.        However, the audience that consumes movies has no need for imagination, brainpower, or a keen sensitivity. This is because the incredible, composite art form that is film shows us all the characters and landscapes we have to imagine outright through overwhelming visuals and sound, leaving us with nothing more to do than sit back in our armchairs and relax. Compared to reading, watching movies is so ridiculously easy that the viewer never flexes their imaginative muscles. Even worse, while each reader imagines their own distinct characters and backdrops, each viewer of a film sees the same images. Oversaturated, identical images can be our best friends when creating clichéd works and our worst enemies when they impede the growth of our individual imaginations. And we are already exposed to tons of identical imagery compared to previous generations. We lack the muscle needed to imagine and reconstruct the world. This is the fundamental problem that makes it difficult for film consumers to become film producers.        According to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, the brain did not evolve to think but was instead made to effectively manage the body’s stores of energy through a process called allostasis. The same way we fear bankruptcy due to unnecessary daily spending, the brain also extremely dislikes when the body expends unnecessary energy. It hinders survival. From this perspective, reading requires a lot of energy and puts tremendous strain on the brain. As mentioned, the sheer number of elements a reader has to imagine for themselves as they read novels is huge. On the other hand, moviegoers are incredibly efficient with their energy. They can simply sit back and watch. They don’t need to exert themselves to generate images; there’s no need to establish the actors and no need to insert the sound. Which is why, according to the dynamic energy budget theory, humans instinctively prefer watching movies to reading books.        So what sort of future will this energy-efficient medium usher in for humanity? In the natural world, there is a highly energy-efficient creature called the sea pineapple. When sea pineapples reach their larval stage, they lead an extremely active life, using their brains and nervous systems to swim around in search of food and a good habitat. However, once they find a suitable environment to settle in, such as on rocks or among seagrass, the sea pineapples use their suckers to embed themselves on a surface and stop moving, living the rest of their lives in that spot, filtering and eating the food that floats by. And then they eat their own brains because, by then, the brain is no longer of any use to them—it’s just an organ that wastes a lot of energy.        All living things are conservative beings. We never do anything that requires us to use more energy unless we absolutely have to. Doing so would be extremely dangerous for our survival. Reading is an activity that cannot function without the power of the reader’s imagination, while movies are an energy-efficient medium that can be enjoyed easily without having to force the brain to imagine a single thing. Does anyone really need to read energy-inefficient books in this era of such captivating visual media? My answer to this question is, “Yes.” It’s like asking all of humankind, “Would you rather live as a well-fed pig? Or a hungry Socrates?”        Currently, the largest industry on the planet is the story industry. This story industry—extensively linked to the publishing, film, drama, game, animation, advertising, broadcasting, fashion, character, and many other industries—is much larger than the semiconductor industry and even larger than the defense and energy industries. It is an industry based on visual media and is set to grow even more in the future. However, as mentioned, in order for a system to be sustainable, it must be cyclical—for visual media to remain in its current golden age, it must be continuously supplied with fresh imaginative power.        I believe that literature is at the center of this vast story industry. And I believe that literature should be much more classically literary in form as opposed to being well suited to screenplay adaptations for movies or TV dramas. If some film director or producer reads a novel and thinks, “Hm, this would make a good movie,” they will fail because they clearly know nothing about novels or movies. That is not the role of fiction. If you’re looking for a textual source that can be used as a movie, you need to find a good screenplay rather than leaf through a novel. The novel doesn’t aim to pinpoint the best, definitive image out there, but to disperse itself and produce an infinite number of images in the minds of that one story’s readers. In contrast, a movie brings together directors, writers, actors, producers, cinematographers, and others to discuss, debate, and coordinate in order to create a unified body of work. In other words, in this enormous story industry, literature is tasked with differentiation, while visual media is tasked with integration. Literature and video neither assume a confrontational form in relation to each other nor are they absorbed into each other to become one and the same thing. Rather, they push and pull at each other, interacting in their own ways.        It is the power of imagination that has placed humankind in a special and unique position relative to other animals in the natural world. Imagination is not delusion, nor is it fantasy. It is thorough, intricate engineering that turns dreams into reality. Humanity has come this far with the power of the imagination, and we will reach the future we dream of on the strength of it. If we were to lose the power to imagine and reconstruct the world, we would begin to miss out on certain truths of life and fall apart from within. It is time, then, to pose a serious question about what we are losing while we are so dazzled by the flashy images of the twenty-first century.        “How will we recover our lost imaginations?” Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris  Kim Un-su won the Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Award in 2003 with his novella Breaking Up with Friday. His first novel Cabinet won the Munhakdongne Writer’s Award in 2006, and his 2010 novel The Plotters was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time. His 2016 novel Hot Blood was made into a feature-length film, and a television series based on The Plotters is currently in production at Universal Studios. Kim’s works have been translated and published in thirty countries. 

  by Kim Un-su

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  [Cover Feature] Becoming Utterly Ordinary

  As soon as news broke that writer Han Kang had won the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, I searched for themes related to Korean literature that could be explored in a film magazine, then put together a special feature on media adaptations of Korean novels. The article, published later that month, covered eight novels, from Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife to Hye-young Pyun’s The Hole, although the total number of works considered for the piece exceeded ten. Several of these adaptations were released in 2024 alone. Troll Factory and Because I Hate Korea, both based on novels of the same name by Chang Kang-myoung, reached theaters in March and October, respectively; the Netflix original My Name Is Loh Kiwan, adapted from Cho Hae-jin’s novel I Met Loh Kiwan, was also released in March.        Yet it would be a stretch to regard film adaptations of novels as an industry trend. Webtoons and web novels have a firm grip on screen adaptations, and their influence is only growing stronger. (The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call, the hit Netflix series that aired over the Lunar New Year holidays, is also based on a web novel.) While covering this topic, I noticed an interesting distinction in what draws filmmakers to adapt literature as opposed to web-based content. While not a universal rule, the former tends to be driven by a desire to delve into the original work’s themes, whereas the latter is often motivated by the appeal of specific characters or scenes. For example, director Min Kyu-dong adapted The Old Woman with the Knife into a film, drawn to the rich cinematic potential he found in “the novel’s exploration of truth and falsehood, as well as its tension between past and present.” In contrast, director Lee Jang-hoon decided to take on a drama adaptation of Study Group, eager to “bring the webtoon’s charismatic protagonist to screen.”        So do adaptations of literature into films and dramas emerge when a visual storyteller encounters a work that reflects their own artistic themes? While production companies often initiate film rights, the most compelling content comes to life when a director channels their creative vision through a literary work that resonates with the story they wish to tell. This was precisely the case with the film and drama adaptations of Love in the Big City, released on October 1, 2024 and October 21, 2024, respectively. Both were based on Sang Young Park’s novel of the same name, with the film directed by Lee Eon-hee and the drama unconventionally helmed by four directors—Son Taegyeom, Hur Jinho, Hong Jiyeong, and Kim Sein—with each handling two episodes apiece in the eight-part series. The film adapts only “Jaehee,” the first of the four chapters of the novel, while the drama brings the entire book to the small screen. Although the two adaptations were developed independently, they happened to premiere in the same month last year, and like the novel, both stood out for their embrace of the ordinary. What defines this “ordinariness” within these works is their focus on people often seen as outsiders, oddballs, or misfits in Korean society. The directors peeled away layers of stigma, misunderstanding, and myth by meticulously capturing the characters’ quotidian lives.        The film version of Love in the Big City follows the friendship between Jaehee (Kim Go Eun) and Heungsoo (Noh Sang-hyun), two French literature majors who are considered the “ultimate outsiders” in their department. Their lives from the age of twenty to thirty-three unfold across familiar milestones—graduation, employment, romance, and marriage. As they navigate these experiences together, the outsider duo gradually comes to be seen as ordinary. What is key here is the “duo” element. While the novel’s original chapter “Jaehee” primarily focused on the queer literature student Young (renamed Heungsoo in the film), the adaptation significantly expands Jaehee’s role, reshaping the narrative into a story about both characters. This shift reinforces the film’s effort to highlight the ordinary characteristics of those on the outskirts of the mainstream. The decision to reframe the narrative with two equally central protagonists aligns with director Lee Eon-hee’s longstanding creative focus on one-on-one relationships. In an interview ahead of the film’s release, Lee revealed she has always been drawn to stories that “observe the dynamics between two people.” She chose to adapt “Jaehee” to “bring forward the charm of a female character who had remained in the background of a male protagonist’s narrative.” Lee’s filmography reflects a consistent interest in marginalized figures. From her debut film . . .ing, which centers on a girl born with a congenital hand deformity, to the mystery drama Missing, which portrays the lives of a single mother and a Chinese nanny, she has constantly turned her lens toward the vulnerable and marginalized. Given this, it is no surprise that Jaehee—an outsider among her peers—came into Lee’s line of sight.        The theme of ordinariness is reinforced in the film in various ways, letting it take root and expand. At its heart is the everyday life of Jaehee and Heungsoo, who, as the novel describes, at some point became “the closest and most comfortable people in the world to each other.” Their friendship, initially guarded, takes a turn during the summer they turn twenty, when Jaehee learns that Heungsoo is gay. Recognizing in each other an undeniable outsider trait and an equally insatiable appetite for nightlife, they become “inseparable overnight.” Their bond further deepens when a suspicious man starts lurking around Jaehee’s studio, prompting them to become roommates. The film brims with moments that capture their day-to-day intimacy—like the times they “fall asleep side by side with dried-up cosmetic masks  glued to their faces,” or “sharing quick meals of cold rice with old kimchi.” Scenes overflow with daily rituals: watching movies in their messy studio, swearing off alcohol only to break that promise in front of a bowl of hangover noodles cooked to perfection. Alongside the good times, the film confronts the more somber moments as well: Jaehee’s crushing disappointment as she questions whether Heungsoo values their friendship as deeply as she does, and the way their arguments, sparked by something as trivial as uncollected trash, quickly spiral out of control. The camera dwells on the spaces they occupy—the living room, the bathroom, their separate bedrooms—capturing the details of their daily life, from razors to cosmetics. None of these objects are remarkable. Their routines, the places they go, are all familiar and their emotions are relatable. Through carefully layered depictions of their everyday life, the protagonists seamlessly blend into “normal.” For Heungsoo, a gay man burdened by society’s judgment of him as abnormal, and Jaehee, labeled as promiscuous, this is the director’s gift—a sense of freedom.        In its latter half, the film makes another move to close the gap between the protagonists and the audience. It expands on a moment from the original story—when “in the first semester of senior year, Jaehee defied her (widely recognized) job market handicap of being a female humanities major and scored a job at a large electronics company”—by adding a layer of realism through an imagined detail: an inserted sequence shows Jaehee, once brimming with personality in both style and spirit, now attending job interviews in the same black suit as everyone else, followed by her struggles to adapt to corporate life. The portrayal of her early days as a working professional is tinged with sorrow. One of its most poignant scenes captures Jaehee on the subway, now an office worker, gazing with quiet resignation at another young woman across from her dressed in the same unremarkable trench coat and flats. The fear and despair creeping over her, the unsettling realization she might be losing herself, are emotions all too familiar to anyone who has already faded into the muted tones of corporate life. A similar current runs through Heungsoo’s time in the military. While the original novel presents this period lightheartedly, centering on Jaehee’s letters, the film is more pensive in mood, focusing on Heungsoo’s expressions, heavy with uncertainty about his future. Additionally, the film delves deeper into Heungsoo’s life before he becomes a novelist, depicting his struggles as a job seeker, making his journey feel more familiar. In summary, by leading both protagonists through the inevitable dulling of life that comes with the transition from youth to adulthood, the director further anchors their identity in the ordinary.        The drama series Love in the Big City stays closely connected to the novel—author Sang Young Park himself penned the script and the directors were committed to capturing the essence of the original work. However, in adapting to the conventions of television drama, it leans toward a coming-of-age narrative with clearer emotional highs and lows. The four directors, by directing two episodes each, create a natural four-part structure. Director Son Taegyeom’s “Miae” (episodes 1-2) explores protagonist Young’s friendship with Miae (Lee Sookyung) and his naive romance with Namgyu (Kwon Hyuk). Director Hur Jinho’s “A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe” (episodes 3-4) delves into Young’s strained yet unbreakable relationship with his mother (Kim Sungryung) as well as his relationship with Youngsoo (Na Hyunwoo), his next lover after Namgyu. Director Hong Jiyeong’s “Love in the Big City” (episodes 5-6) focuses on Young’s central romantic interest, Gyuho (Jin Hoeun), while Director Kim Sein’s “Late Rainy Season Vacation” (episodes 7-8) follows Young as he reflects on his past with Gyuho while building a new relationship with Habibi (Kim Wonjoong). In essence, the drama charts Young’s journey from his early twenties to his early thirties as he navigates relationships and comes into his own.        Notably, Young’s growth isn’t confined to a coming-of-age tale about a sexual minority; rather, it extends to the broader experience of youth in general. The drama pulses with the protagonist’s youthful energy, depicting the pursuit of his dreams, the emotional highs and lows of love, family conflicts and reconciliations, and moments of wavering and doubt—all of which shape him as an ordinary young man. Thoughtfully woven with elements from the novel—what Young eats, sees, and passes by—the series preserves the evocative details: blueberries in the freezer, a furiously spinning ceiling fan, an autumn evening at Olympic Park. This delicate balance was made possible by the directors’ shared vision. Ahead of the drama’s release, lead actor Nam Yoonsu and the four directors discussed the story together and unanimously agreed that Love in the Big City, at its core, is a universal love story, with Young conveyed as an ordinary young Korean man. Though separated by generations, Son Taegyeom, Hur Jinho, Hong Jiyeong, and Kim Sein share a sensibility and talent for capturing contemporary lives with striking realism. Under their direction, the drama sidesteps the trope of “the special life of a queer artist in the big city” and instead becomes “the ordinary life of a young person navigating love and success in an expensive city like Seoul.”        One particularly interesting choice is the drama’s use of death as a thematic undercurrent to heighten its realism, something that the original work only subtly implied. The adaptation strips away romanticized notions of queerness, emphasizing that queer individuals, too, are simply human, bound by mortality like everyone else. This is powerfully reinforced through the drama’s funeral scenes. In the series, Young attends funerals for his first love, Namgyu, and his mother, who had been battling cancer. The novel only briefly mentions the death of Namgyu (referred to as “K3” in the novel) through a text message about his funeral and merely hints at his mother’s passing, whereas the drama brings these losses to the forefront. But the theme manifests itself even more directly through Young’s suicide attempt. After discovering that his second boyfriend, Youngsu, had deliberately approached him as part of his research on homosexuality—described in Youngsu’s own writing as “capitalism’s mental illness” (from his article as a researcher at the Institute of Ethnic and Social Culture)—and facing the sting of blatant rejection, Young is devastated. In despair, he overdoses. The scene, shot in a long take from a distance, lingers on Young as he swallows the pills one by one, gradually ratcheting up the tension (in the novel, he drinks pesticide). Even without pinpointing specific examples, death’s presence looms over the entire drama.        Episodes 3 and 4 revolve around Young caring for his ailing mother, while her funeral at the beginning of episode 5 sets the tone for the latter half of the series. “Kylie”—the name Young gives to the HIV he has contracted—plays a crucial role. The drama subtly threads his inner turmoil throughout, capturing both the enduring fear that death might come at any moment as well as his surrender to the idea that its timing no longer matters. Remarkably, this ever-present shadow of death paradoxically transforms him into someone who clings fiercely to life. Like light visible only against darkness, Young’s determination to love and write, despite death’s looming presence, radiates unmistakable vitality. This culminates in the final episode’s closing scene where he watches fireworks with friends and hope flares brightly within him. Essentially, the queer character in Love in the Big City, through confronting the extremity of death, and feeling, thinking, and growing in profound ways, evolves as an ordinary yet vividly living and breathing individual.        Revisiting these versions of Love in the Big City reminded me of Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, currently in theaters. While the film follows a sculptor preparing for an exhibition, its focus, surprisingly, lies in the everyday challenges she faces at home, such as a broken water heater that leaves her unable to shower for days or certain family issues that interfere with her work. Watching it, I came to understand that artists, too, are ordinary people. The abstractness I had always associated with them dissolved, making them feel more tangible. Artworks at exhibitions and artist residency programs resonated in a new, more relatable way. And this experience led to a realization: there needs to be more visual storytelling that conveys how those perceived as peculiar or strange in our society are, in reality, just like everyone else. When we feel a sense of closeness to someone, when we can envision their lives in intimate detail, discrimination and distortion naturally lose their grip. In this light, the film and drama adaptations of Love in the Big City mark a crucial first step. The directors have shaped the novel into a story about ordinary Korean youth who are outsiders, with a keen sense of realism. As a result, these adaptations serve as an essential bridge between those on the fringes and the broader audience.        Yet another significant achievement of these works is how they crack the media’s distorted representation of queer individuals. For too long, media portrayals, particularly of gay men, have relied on lazy stereotypes: flamboyant fashion, chatty high-pitched voices, and the raised pinky finger while drinking. These one-dimensional depictions have cemented the perception of queer people as distant, almost alien, beings. However, the film and drama adaptations of Love in the Big City have introduced characters free from these exaggerations to affirm that queer people are simply and undeniably human. In other words, these two works, which assert that queer individuals exist everywhere like everyone else, carry symbolic significance in the history of LGBTQ+ media representation, and 2024, the year of their joint release, will be recorded as a pivotal moment. Translated by Kim Soyoung  Lee Yoochae is a journalist for Cine21 film magazine.  Korean Works Mentioned:Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City (tr. Anton Hur, Tilted Axis, 2021)     박상영, 『대도시의 사랑법』 (창비, 2019) Gu Byeong-mo, The Old Woman with the Knife (tr. Chi-Young Kim, Canongate, 2022)구병모, 『파과』 (자음과모음, 2013)Hye-young Pyun, The Hole (tr. Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2017)편혜영, 『홀』 (문학과지성사, 2016) Chang Kang-myoung, Troll Factory (EunHaeng NaMu, 2015), Because I Hate Korea (Minumsa, 2015)장강명, 『댓글부대』 (은행나무, 2015), 『한국이 싫어서』 (민음사, 2015)Cho Hae-jin, I Met Loh Kiwan (tr. Ji-Eun Lee, University of Hawai’i Press, 2019)조해진, 『로기완을 만났다』 (창비, 2011)

  by Lee Yoochae

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  [Cover Feature] At the Boundary between Fiction and Film

  These days, countless movies from the early days of film, are circulating on YouTube, alongside YouTube shorts. I occasionally search and watch them, only to soon find that I am unable to tear myself away from the screen. I’m fascinated by how digital reproduction technology has continued to advance, enabling me to watch these old black-and-white films in vivid color. But above all, watching these films makes me feel at peace. Most of these films, shot between 1895 and the early 1900s, record panoramic views of cities like Paris and London. There is no narrative, no main character. Just people from the past, living their normal, everyday lives, passing through the square frame of the screen. In this world, free of danger or conflict, I find inner peace.        Today, films are often understood as “stories expressed through images,” but that’s because most of the films we come across are “drama films.” Before drama films became mainstream, films sought to capture everyday scenes and activities. The world’s first films were documentaries. In 1895, the Lumière brothers filmed and screened the world’s first film, The Arrival of a Train, which shows a train arriving at La Ciotat Station. Similarly for Korea, while the 1919 kino-drama The Righteous Revenge is known as Korea’s first film, another film was actually screened just before it—the documentary, Panoramic View of the Whole City of Gyeongseong. It’s quite interesting that a kino-drama is considered to be Korea’s first film, ignoring the documentary film that preceded it.        The Lumière brothers didn’t realize the commercial value of films at the time, but the people who did, moved swiftly. One of the most important directors of early film history, Georges Méliès, integrated narrative into films, demonstrating its commercial value and establishing the foundation for the current film industry. Meanwhile, Hollywood explored various editing and shooting techniques to make seamless, sophisticated, and systematically categorized narrative structures that drew the audience’s attention, creating what’s now known as the classic Hollywood narrative style. No one can deny that narrative played a key role in the birth of the film industry, at the same time demonstrating how closely tied narrative is to the commercial viability of film.          Drama films actively brought the myriad stories scattered around the world to the silver screen. These films drew on everything from the Bible to the myths and legends of different cultures. And of course there have also been many film adaptations of books. Many of Stephen King’s novels were adapted into big-screen movies, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series became major blockbuster hits. Such examples of book-to-film treatments are legion.        In my opinion, books that have the potential of becoming adapted for film share a few characteristics. First, the main character needs to be a human. This might sound a bit odd, but there are quite a few books where the main character is not human. Written stories can be narrated through the wind, or even objects, like a hat. Of course, it’s not impossible for films to have a non-human main character, but it’s less likely to be a box office hit without a star-studded cast. Second, it’s better if the book has a specific and clear plot. Books with a lot of internal narrative or wordplay or text-centric works are difficult to produce into films. For instance, novels like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable are challenging to translate into films and even if they were, the particular texture that can only be felt in the text would be lost.        But what’s most important is that the book must be popular and engaging. Major film studios require massive amounts of capital from investors, which means that generating profits is the number one priority. Films that have no chance at profitability are not even considered for development in the first place. Thus, books that have already been favorably received by readers are considered safer bets that help studios navigate the high seas of the film market towards the safe harbor of a box office hit. Even if success isn’t guaranteed, at the very least, it helps to get investors on board in reaching the development stage. Of course, it goes without saying that good novels don’t always become good films.        In recent years, there have been some eye-catching examples of films adapted from Korean novels: Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Snowball, and Concerning My Daughter. These films were notable because they all showcased female characters that had largely been absent in mainstream Korean films. The adaptation of these books by Korean women writers left a significant mark on the landscape of the Korean film industry. Of course, I’m not suggesting that there were no screenplays featuring female leads prior to these films. Surely there must have been many great projects that were shelved during the development stage due to industry trends. However, I believe that the above films were realized because of the enthusiastic reception of young women in their twenties and thirties who make up the main pillar of Korea’s readers.        In addition to book-to-film adaptations, many films are being adapted from webtoons and comic books. On one hand, this reflects the desire to engage with entertaining works through different media, but on the other hand, it reflects heightened anxiety around issues of box office success and capital recovery. This is because it’s difficult to gauge what the public’s reaction will be to original scripts written by a scriptwriter or a director. Given that the scale of production has gotten larger while the film market has contracted, studios can’t help but select works that have already proven to be successful.        Around the time I was a middle-school student, I recall searching “How to become a movie director” on an online Naver forum. This was the answer I found: Read a lot of books. You need to know how to write good stories. I was devastated. Not only was I not a bookworm, but I also didn’t find reading or writing to be particularly interesting. Yet I couldn’t give up on my movie director dreams so easily.        One by one, I started to read the original books that the movies I’d seen were based on. It was then that I realized a wide array of books had been turned into films— from classic, old movies to recent, popular ones. Sometimes the films were better, and sometimes the original books were better, but later I came to think that comparing the two was pointless. The enjoyment I felt reading books was completely different from the enjoyment I felt from watching movies. I suddenly became curious. Why did that person on Naver say to read a lot of books when they were so different from films? Why books and not screenplays? In high school, I started to write story arcs for all of the films I watched. Of course, it was difficult to clearly grasp the story structure for art films or experimental films. However, the genre films screened at the multiplex followed a formulaic storyline, and even if there were slight variations, they didn’t deviate greatly from the overall structure. I was incredibly proud to have come to this realization. I thought that if I could just familiarize myself with these structures, I’d be able to write good stories myself. But soon after, this faith evaporated. I no longer found watching films entertaining. I could predict how a film would progress and no plot twist shocked me. Even without looking at my watch, I could tell where we were in the running time based on the story arc. Was that it? Was that all there was to a movie? I understood then that an entertaining narrative was not the only thing that made up a film. I began to explore the different methods employed to express narrative—the movements of the characters or the camera; the various ways to show a space; the tension between each shot; the pacing of the edits; the colors and lighting, atmosphere and texture, etc. This led to a broader enjoyment of films, which made me very happy. And it also led to a clearer understanding of films taking root within me.        For me, films have always been about the image. Not the narrative, but the way it is expressed. In fact, I dreamed of making films where images were not the vehicle or means for conveying narrative, but were narratives in and of themselves. Even if it was difficult to ascertain their exact meaning, films that pushed forward on the strength of their images felt more “cinematic” to me. Not only do films use audiovisual imagery to stimulate the senses, but this imagery is an art form that can penetrate deep into the unconscious mind, awakening parts of ourselves that we never even knew existed.        I began to question the assumption that “a good story makes a good film.” In college, this was repeated among film students as fact, but I was always a bit suspicious. Did a good story automatically make for a good film? Even though films were more than stories?After a few years, I began to write books for the first time because someone had told me long ago that I had to write and read a lot of good stories to become a film director, and also because countless books had been adapted to film. Of course, I already intellectually understood the difference between the two, but I was excited by the possibility that by directly writing a textual narrative, new perspectives might arise. In essence, I wanted to feel the difference in how visual language and textual language handled narrative. That’s why I began writing stories—and now it’s already been seven years.        After becoming a writer, I’ve gotten mostly two types of questions from people: How did you become a writer after graduating with a film degree? How does writing books differ from making movies? I’ll share just a few of the many insights I’ve gained over the years. Sentences and Shots When I first write a story, I think of each sentence as a film shot. A shot includes visual elements like the actual filming itself, the lighting, props, and the actors’ facial expressions. These elements determine the emotion and ambiance of the scene, and even the function of the shot. The sentence plays the same role in a story. Within a sentence there is a structure, and within that structure there are words. Depending on what structure you choose and where you place certain words, the meaning and nuance of the sentence changes. I compose each sentence the way I would compose a shot. If composing a shot means deploying the visual elements within it, composing a sentence means arranging the words within. How the sentence is composed, and how the sentences are connected, will determine the story’s atmosphere and tone. The Camera’s Perspective and the Character’s First-Person Perspective There are several things to keep in mind when writing a screenplay. These are not absolute rules, but they are generally followed. First, screenplays should be written in present progressive, and only audiovisual cues should be included.  Adjectives and adverbs should be avoided as much as possible, and the character’s state of mind should be communicated through their actions and dialogue, not internal narration. The biggest difference is that it’s impossible to narrate solely from the first person point-of-view in film. For example, a sentence like, “Yesterday, I fell asleep feeling so tired and sick; it felt like my body would crumble into a million pieces” wouldn’t work well.        Because of this, when I first started writing, the word “I” took on special meaning. “I” am speaking. “I” can speak. Of course, point-of-view shots can be used, or voiceovers employed for internal narratives, but for the most part, films are shot from the camera’s “view.” In films, the world is perceived through the camera’s gaze, but in books written in the first person, the world is perceived through the narrator’s perspective. Thus, I came to believe that the first-person perspective was “novelistic,” and barring certain exceptions, it made me want to continue writing stories in the first person. Watching vs. Reading Before I started writing myself, I thought that one “read” books and “watched” movies. But since I became a writer, I’ve started to feel that the shape of the Korean alphabet and the sequence of the sentences are a type of image. If you really think about it, we’re already “reading” when watching films. I was always reading subtitles without thinking twice, as well as the title and the ending credits. It was so obvious that I’d never noticed it before.        This realization brought the films of Jean-Luc Godard to mind. As a director, he had already noticed the interesting things happening in the space between watching and reading, and deployed typography in an intentional manner. This also led me to think of directors like Wim Wenders, Quentin Tarantino, and Hong Sang-soo. Their films, starting with the font of their titles, showcase the unique touch of a writer. Through directors like these, I learned that watching and reading have only been categorized differently, and actually the boundary between them is quite vague.        In writing stories, I’ve explored the difference in these two mediums and very much enjoyed experiencing the tension between them. I’ve come to realize that writing a book requires deep contemplation of text and language. Otherwise, it’s like trying to film a movie without a camera. Translated by Hannah Kim  Seo Ije majored in film and made her literary debut in 2018 after winning the New Writer’s Award from Literature and Society. She has three short story collections, Towards 0%, Low Resolution, and Along With the Light that Passes Through the Window and has co-authored an essay “The Scene I Loved Made its Way to Me.”  She has also won the Young Writer’s Award, Today’s Writer Award and the Kim Man-jung Literary Award.  Korean Work Mentioned:•   Cho Nam-joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (tr. Jamie Chang, Liveright, 2020)    조남주, 『82년생 김지영』 (민음사, 2016)•   Lim Solah, The Best Life (Munhakdongne, 2024)    임솔아, 『최선의 삶』 (문학동네, 2024) •   Kim Hye-jin, Concerning My Daughter (tr. Jamie Chang, Restless Books, 2022)    김혜진, 『딸에 대하여』 (민음사, 2017)

  by Seo Ije

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  [Cover Feature] Don’t Ask Me When the Script Will Be Ready; I Don’t Have an Answer for You

  Some writers seem to have all the luck. Loved by tens of thousands, if not millions, of readers, they sometimes appeal not only to publishers but also to broadcasting networks; they land screen adaptation rights, along with a handsome advance. Exciting news for the writer and the publisher alike. If they show potential, some of these lucky writers are invited to write the script themselves. I happen to be one of them.        A year after signing the scriptwriting contract, however, I sit at my desk, face grim, stomach churning with acid reflux, asking myself the question: am I really lucky to be writing my own script?        To be honest, I thought I’d get it done in no time. I considered my writing popular. Of course, in an era flooded with short-form content, my choice to write books, one of the oldest forms of media, may not have been the most popular choice. Nevertheless, at least in print, my writing worked—my books sold. But the reports of declining print readership continued to haunt me every year, and with it, the question of whether I could sustain a livelihood just by writing books. Even if my books appealed to the masses, if the act of reading itself was becoming unpopular, it felt very necessary to consider alternatives, which included opening a banchan store. “Writer” is a job title, not a lifetime guarantee of employment.        I broadly categorize my fellow writers into “literary writers” and “literary-literary writers.” “Literary writers” write to negotiate the distance between themselves and the world. Even if they write about feeling alienated from the world, they write toward the world. In this effort, they sometimes revise their book titles to something that will help drive up their sales or agree to have their faces appear on the cover of their books. But “literary-literary writers” allow no such negotiation. They live in their own artistic realm. They do not allow their faces to appear anywhere on their books; they don’t consider it a failure if the reader doesn’t get the point of their works. They choose not to publish at all if it means having to change their chosen titles; they loathe clichéd phrases, rebel against capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism, ableism, and many other problematic -isms of the world, indifferent to stories that go viral or draw the attention of the masses. They are the most literary of the literary writers.          I said yes to writing my own script because I’m a literary writer. I too have issues with the world, but perhaps due to my mild temperament, I could never become that radical. Instead, I’m good at compromising and mediating conflicts. So, on the one hand, I remain flexible and open; on the other, I’m a coward. If I were a literary-literary writer, I would not have responded positively to being invited to the world of TV in any capacity. Literary-literary writers don’t even watch that much Korean TV. Many of them are my good friends. In a sense, I turned my back on my admirable, principled best friends, and took broad, confident steps toward a compromise that would bring me closer to the masses. It happened in the summer of 2023.        The truth dawned on me shortly after: I knew nothing about scriptwriting. Writing for TV, at first glance, seems easy. TV shows are meant for everyone, how difficult could it be? But that was exactly the point: I had to write something that could appeal to everyone. It’s easy to dissect and criticize TV shows, but it’s so freaking difficult to write, edit, and complete one. Very few manage to do so at all, let alone successfully. Think again before shouting “I could have written that!” at that scene full of clichés. TV writing has turned out to be a completely different beast from book writing. The Difference in Scale If writing my novel The Age of Filiarchy was like planting three trees in my backyard, adapting it for TV felt like building an entire forest. And I had to start by tearing down a mountain that stood there before. “I have to amplify the conflict by this much? And add this many subplots?!” To my stunned face, the producers and the network director nodded yes as if I were asking the dumbest questions. I was writing a twelve-part series; each episode had to carry its own weight. That meant I had to add conflict and plot twists that didn’t exist in the original novel; I had to create more characters, new love interests, add backstories about the main character’s family, define the heroine’s desires as well as what keeps her from achieving them. I can’t be too specific here since the script is still in progress, but it’s fair to say I have written it as a completely new work. The general essence of the original novel, as well as some well-known lines from it, has stayed, but the rest had to be rewritten from the ground up. Reader vs. ViewerReaders read with caution. They savor their books slowly before deciding if they are good or not. They choose to leave the clamor of the world behind and dive into the pages, and I love them for it. But TV viewers vastly outnumber book readers. It broke my heart to learn how minuscule my book sales figures were in comparison to TV show viewers. Still, no time for heartbreak. Once a writer decides to work for the small screen, there’s no time to feel sorry for oneself. Your audience is now a viewer, not a reader. A viewer does not have time for you. The average human attention span for visual content is less than 15 seconds. People choose to watch even the most celebrated masterpieces in edited summaries. To hold the attention of a dopamine-addicted viewer, you have to write something that keeps them on their toes.        The viewer who is completely different from my reader; the viewer who has no qualms about never reading any book at all; the viewer who comes home tired from work and watches YouTube on their phone; the viewer who turns on Netflix while unpacking their takeout meal; the viewer who may not even know the word “patriarchy”, let alone “filiarchy”; the viewer who’s likely a stranger to me, though they have the potential to become my friend. That’s the viewer I am writing the script for. I watch people on the bus, on the subway, on the street, asking: what do you want to watch? What moves you? How can I reach you? How can I convince you that my story can be yours, too? As a prose writer, I struggled to define my style. As a script writer, I struggle to understand the people I live among. The secret is for me to understand the viewer. The Plot Thickens. . . through VerbsIn my novel, there’s not much of a plot. A self-made woman hires her parents to work for her and reigns as a filiarch. This is the premise of the novel, and things happen around it—quiet, everyday things. When it comes to writing, how it’s written can carry the story, not what happens. The language itself can make the whole book. In dealing with language, I sensed my talent. But in constructing a scene for TV, I felt lost. My ability to investigate the inner lives of characters through language? Useless! I had to lose beautiful adjectives and adverbs. I had to lose the well-constructed narration. Scriptwriting is an art of verbs. I had to make sure everything was written clearly so that the dozens of staff reading it could understand and follow directions. It took me a year to lose all the frills and ribbons of my language. I also wasn’t good at creating comprehensive plots that continued to evolve, keeping the viewer hooked. Most of my plots were short episodes that didn’t have the strength to develop themselves throughout the entire season. I had to learn to do this while acquiring other basic principles of scriptwriting. But it was fine. I like learning. The most valuable principle I learned about plots? It’s not a plot if you’re not curious to see how it develops.Edit, Re-Edit, Then Edit Some MoreIn publishing, manuscripts go through edits. I usually look forward to developing a manuscript with my editor and going through multiple editing rounds with them. However, I quickly discovered that feedback in publishing is the polite, gentle kind. TV, not so much. TV people are direct, practical, and will not hesitate to tell you when the script isn’t working. It takes the work of many sailors to keep the ship afloat. The writer may write the script, but feedback comes from all directions from all those involved. The scope and the frequency of edits in TV shows far surpass those in publishing. I wrote a tremendous amount over the past year and a half—between 10 to 45 pages every week. I had to write more than usual because so much of what I wrote was rejected. And for good reasons, too. . . or so I tell myself (let me take a moment here to wipe away my tears).        Editing also takes place with the producers and the network director. I trust them as my coworkers and teachers. But it’s not easy work. The personnel may vary according to each production company, but the women on my team are all pros at diagnosing issues in a manuscript. They’ve watched way too much TV. They can categorize and summarize most plots within ten seconds. If prompted, they can recite all the clichés ever uttered in the history of television. They’ve been on all kinds of production sites. They’ve dealt with countless writers and yelled at them, too. To these pros, my very first attempts at scriptwriting must have seemed laughable, and for that I feel bad. But after receiving negative comments one after another for the whole year and feeling my stomach churn each time, I finally had to tell them: “Please try to say one nice comment for every ten negative ones. That will really help me keep going.” Perhaps they took pity on me, but they now include a positive comment or two in their feedback. It makes me so happy. While I take note of their comments, the director (who has been working in TV for twenty-one years) slides in, even bringing a tasty pastry the following week as if giving me a special treat. I gobble it down like the hungry child that I am as she silently watches me with a look that says, “Good girl. . .” To sum up, no matter how many books I’ve sold or literary accolades I’ve collected, I’m nothing but a red-faced infant just delivered into a completely new world. Money MattersThe relative freedom and respect I had while writing books were tied to the costs that hinged on the process. Producing a TV show often costs 100 or even 1,000 times more than producing a book. The number of people involved is also many times larger. A TV production unfolds across a much longer span of time, as it involves securing larger capital, major networks, and well-known actors. At its fastest, a show is completed at least two years after the script contract is signed; at other times, it can take up to three, four years, and sometimes even longer. I’m used to publishing two books a year. This extended timeline felt foreign. “When does your show air?” “Has the cast been announced?” “When will it launch?” Each time these questions come my way, I avert my eyes.I simply don’t know. I am working on my script day and night; but it is beyond the writer to know when the show will see the light of day.        While I struggled with this new experience, my literary-literary friends finished their books and sent them my way. I would open the package, hold the book in my hand, turn a few pages, then close it shortly after. There were beautiful words. The literary quality of their writing, the beauty of their language, almost gnawed at me. The books seemed to whisper: Don’t forget, we are your home. Come back, come back to us. I had to shake my head, stack the books in a corner, and turn back toward another pile of how-to-write-for-the-screen books with my own script next to it. I’ve read Robert McKee, Blake Snyder, Ronald Tobias, No Hee-kyung, Kim Eun-sook, Park Hae-young, Lim Sang-choon, Song Jae-jeong, Moon Ji-won, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, Jeong Seo-kyeong, Lee Jong-beom, Seongsu Park, Ki-hwan Oh. . . I took notes religiously from masters in film and TV writing, as well as in webtoon writing. Having done this, I’ve now come to admire all the TV shows in the world. Even if they don’t seem like much, the fact that they’ve been written, produced and aired, leaves me in awe.        I now watch every TV show while kneeling to show my deepest respect.        My dream is to become a writer who has completed a full TV script.        I hope I get a lot of negative feedback when my show airs. I am afraid of writing something that gets none at all. That would mean that no one has watched it.        I’m a writer of books through and through, and I won’t lose that part of myself. But I do want a second life as a scriptwriter. I want to experience the thrill of watching how my sentences construct a scene on screen. When The Age of Filiarchy wraps, I will have learned to do it better. If I’m given a chance to write another one, I’m sure I can do it so much better!        The desire to do better—this stays the same, be it for books or for TV. It wakes me up at 5 a.m. I go up to my study as if possessed by a spirit and continue to write and rewrite. I have been lifting weights so I can keep up with my writing routine better. I lift heavier and heavier weights as the days go by. I wouldn’t be able to go through hundreds of editorial rounds without physical strength and endurance. I don’t drink coffee or alcohol. I don’t smoke. Like my grandma, I go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m.        When I’m up too early, I go hiking on the mountain in my neighborhood. When I’m there, I hug a tree. When I find a handsome tree, I hug it and pray: Please let me finish my script. The tree spirit looks down upon the newbie scriptwriter, stuck between the masterpiece she yearns to write someday and what she is capable of writing at the moment. The writer who stands on the long road of transition into a full-fledged scriptwriter, steadily becoming a better writer in the process.        When the show airs, I will thank the trees.Translated by Dasom Yang  YSRA is a writer, publisher, and scriptwriter. She writes essays, columns, interviews, and song lyrics and is the author of more than thirteen books, including Body and Mind Training, Pure Reverence, and An Awesome Life. She placed first in the YES24 Young Writers Award in 2023. She is currently working on the screen adaptation of her novel The Age of Filiarchy.  Korean Work Mentioned:The Age of Filiarchy (Promunhak, 2022)  『가녀장의 시대』 (이야기장수, 2022)

  by YSRA