Colorful models of love within us

The first novel collection by writer Park Seonwoo, who has garnered everyone’s attention

Only those who seek love think persistently about it

Park’s short stories always deal with relationships with others. The characters get drawn to others, experiencing a range of emotions before becoming intimate one moment and distant the next, which the narrator dwells on and recounts throughout the stories. The novels are particularly delicate in depicting relationships between the loved ones. Various emotions one may feel while in relationships—such as jealousy, helplessness, a sense of defeat, hesitation, reluctance, recklessness, courage, sexual urges, and regrets—are vividly reflected in the stories. The author expresses these relationships with a subtle balance.

In a world of love with infinite possibilities, the characters experience changes as they go through various aspects of relationships. The first-person narrator, who has been changed irreversibly, passes through the next season in a different life and becomes a new person.

“Why do some moments emerge like uninvited guests and leave a stain that can’t be removed, not even if one spent the rest of their life trying? How come they never come back?” In the book’s opening short story, "Fish of the Night,” which begins with these sentences, the first-person narrator is characterized as rather callous, and “can’t dare imagine being someone else,” even reminding himself, I shouldn’t be someone else. But one day, he gets into a conversation with someone who is openly gay and has been squandering his life away after a breakup, living without any plans and giving off a strange and hostile vibe.

Since then, the memories don’t fade away; they eventually become a part of him. In "The Colors of Light and Water Droplets," the aftermath of love is more intensely revealed. The old lover who suddenly lost contact and passed away, transforms into a ghost and comes to “me”. Deep sadness and a sense of longing are reflected in a scene where the two naively communicate. The novel beautifully depicts a lover’s death and parting with the phenomenological imagination of “the fall and the evaporation of water,” following poetic associations. In "Slow Dance," the first-person narrator reflects on her breakup and searches for the words she wanted to say to her lover—what she should have said but couldn’t. The narrator thinks about "son of a bitch" to "Why did you do that?" before erasing them and “feeling lost and unable to think of the right words." Her heart hesitates throughout the monologue, wandering and never reaching anywhere.

"The single image that you’ll cherish for the remainder of your life.

I think could get a vague idea of what that would be like.”

Most characters in the novel have queer identities. These stories closely narrate various aspects of queerness, including the excruciating journey of inner anxiety and division, confrontation and conflict, reconciliation, and integration that the characters face while trying to identify who they are and what kind of orientation they were born with. The novel delicately conveys the inner thoughts of minorities who live in the aftermath of psychological violence for being queer, which is inevitable in society. Above all, it presents colorful models of love through an excellent writing style about queer love, and the subtle range of emotions revealed in queer relationships.

“The Silent Passion," which tells the story of Yeonsu discovering her young brother Yeonhu’s unsent letter, portrays the inner lives of queers through the perspective of a sister instead of the person directly involved. Yeonsu, the focalizer of the story, reflects on the life of her brother whose sexual orientation has been revealed, providing readers with an opportunity to logically understand his life rather than simply empathizing with the feelings of a queer person. In “Tropical Nights of the Fall,” the first-person narrator invites her lesbian lover J over to her house while her parents are away on a trip. The narrator suggests trying something new and proposes a game of hide-and-seek, where they gradually take off their clothes each time they are found. As they play and become nearly naked, they suddenly hear someone entering the door code. Throughout the novel, the narrator has concealed the existence of her lover, J, out of fear of exposing her own identity, even dismissing J’s hurt feelings. “Oh, I see.” “Seems like you can do that. You’re that kind of person.”

Park seonwoo’s novels explore how queer individuals can love their own lives and the lives of the others without falling into the trap of self-deception or self-loathing. Furthermore, they earnestly question how members of a community with countless different identities can embrace one another. In the author’s note, Park wrote, “What I contemplated the most while writing these novels woven into the book was the gender of the protagonists.”

He mentioned that “the flow couldn't be changed artificially, as it determined the tone and direction of the work,” adding that the endings of his novels mostly originated from “anger and resignation against masculinity” and “a cautious affirmation of femininity.” However, he wrote that now that he has finished writing the stories, he doesn’t care about the gender of “me.” Which direction will he take now? Us, In the Same Place is the first collection of novels by Park Seonwoo, a delicately brave writer poised to become a cherished figure in contemporary Korean literature after 2020.