“A testimony to the unwitnessed,” Everything Was Forever (2020) is the second full-length novel of Jung Jidon, who has invited various genres to expand the scope of fiction as a genre. Written by an author who has continuously produced new works based on the facts extracted from the texts he absorbed, Everything Was Forever centers on the life of Wellington Chung, the son of Alice Hyun, a communist falsely accused of being a U.S. spy.

Written records of Wellington Chung exist in scarcity. The son of the Korean independence fighter and communist Alice Hyun, Chung was born in October 1927 and raised in Hawaii.  In 1945, he became a merchant marine and sailed overseas. After a short period of studying at UCLA as a pre-med student in 1947, he relocated to 1948 through France and Germany. He began studying medicine at Charles University in Prague the next year and married a Czech woman Anna Šoltýsová with whom he had a daughter Tabitha in 1958. In October of the same year, Wellington Chung forfeited his U.S. citizenship and obtained Czechoslovak citizenship in 1959. In November 1962, he was appointed Chief of the Central Laboratory at the City Hospital of Cheb, where he poisoned himself to death in the dissecting room in November 1963. Having born a child of the first generation of Korean immigrants in Hawaii, he was a U.S. citizen but an Asian who often faced racist discrimination. He was a communist who once dreamed of moving to North Korea, but North Korea was hostile to him, a U.S. citizen. His mother was accused of being a U.S. spy and executed in North Korea. He worked as a collaborator of the Czech secret police, but the Czech police did not believe he was a communist. Wellington Chung was not accepted in the United States, North Korea, Czechia, or anywhere in the world.

Jung Jidon devotes his pages to Wellington Chung and his peers by blending dry facts with rich fiction and weaving light humor in the grave discursive exchanges between the inevitable and coincidence, or skepticism and faith. The fictional reality unfurled by an individual who had only left a faint mark in history displays both absurd wit and melancholy, all in a surprisingly warm light. How can we describe such a cerebral book that is full of quotations, questions, and ironies? “A letter to those through whom he could think,” or “an avant-garde network curated by Jung Jidon?” The author would counter it in a way that is typical of him, by borrowing the words of Nicolas Rey: “No word can summarize my work, nor have I thought of the possibility of one.”

Jung Jidon debuted as a writer in 2013 by winning the Literature and Society’s New Writers Award. His published works include the short story collections As I Fight, We Shall Survive in the Memories of Others, and People Who Dislike Jokes, the full-length novel Everything Was Forever, the novellas Little Coward: A New Coward Party, The Diary of a Nightwatcher, …Scroll!, and the essay collections The Joy of Literature (co-authored), Cinema and Poetry, For You But Not Yours, and Space (Non)Fiction. In addition to the Literature and Society’s New Writers Award, he has won the 2015 Munhakdongne Young Writers Award, the 2016 Moonji Literary Award, and the 2022 Kim Hyun Literary Prize, among others.