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ISBN
9791155251829
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Author
Kim Hyosun김효선
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Publisher
littlemt 낮은산
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Rights Holder
Danny Hong Agency 대니홍에이전시
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Year Published
2025
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Category
Essay 에세이
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Updated: 2026-09-23
- Posted by Danny Hong Agency on 2026-09-14
- Updated by Danny Hong Agency on 2026-09-23
Description 작품 소개
Part mother-daughter memoir, part feminist social history of postwar South Korea, and part meditation on the body, OH CHUN-SIL'S FOUR SEASONS follows a daughter teaching her retired mother, Oh Chunsil, to swim.
In her sixties, after a lifetime of physical labor, Oh Chunsil enters a public swimming pool for the first time. Fearful of putting her face in the water, unable to float, and stubbornly resistant to instruction, she approaches swimming with the same qualities that have carried her through life: persistence, curiosity, and an unwavering determination to do things in her own way. Her daughter accompanies her through every swallowed mouthful of water, every awkward kick, every small breakthrough and setback.
As Chunsil learns to float, the daughter reconstructs the life written into her mother's body: poverty, limited education, domestic violence, urban displacement, factory labor, postpartum neglect, repeated injury, and the invisible sacrifices demanded of working-class Korean women. Through Chunsil's memories, the memoir quietly traces the social history of postwar South Korea from industrialization and the IMF crisis to the present day.
Running alongside this excavation is the daughter's own reckoning with her body and mind. Diagnosed with adjustment disorder and recovering from alcoholism, she recognizes in herself a different inheritance: perfectionism, relentless striving, and a tendency to push beyond pain in pursuit of achievement. A swimmer obsessed with lap counts, speed, and endurance, she gradually comes to understand that her relationship to her body has also been shaped by suffering.
The swimming pool becomes a threshold between these two women.
Within water's altered physics, gravity loosens. Aging bodies move differently. Women laugh, gossip, stretch, cheat during drills, complain about aching joints, and reinvent themselves. Swimming becomes not simply exercise but ritual: a place where mother and daughter learn to accompany bodies that cannot be perfected and histories that cannot be undone.
At the center of the memoir is Oh Chunsil herself: stubborn, mischievous, distractible, endlessly curious, quick to laughter, forever talking to dogs, picking up litter, and finding reasons to be grateful. Rather than turning her into either a heroic labor activist or a saintly mother, the memoir allows her to remain gloriously herself.
At its heart, OH CHUN-SIL'S FOUR SEASONS asks: How do we learn to love the bodies that have carried us this far? And perhaps more radically: how do we learn to see the people we love as they truly are, rather than as symbols of what we need them to represent?
Author Bio 작가 소개
There are no expectations.