Hwang Jungeun (born 1976) is a Korean writer. She is one of the most promising writers in the Korean literary world, acclaimed as 'the writer who represents the 2010s' and 'the young master.' The most prominent feature of her writing is the elements of fantasy, which create a cheerful tone in her narratives but also coat them with the sadness of reality. That is, the fantasy in her works is a fictional device that builds a joyful as well as sorrowful atmosphere at the same time. She made her debut as a writer in 2005 with the publication of her short story "Mother (마더)." Then her first collection of short stories The Seven Thirty-two Elephant Train (일곱시 삼십이분 코끼리열차) came out in 2008 to make a strong presence to the readers, and with the subsequent publication of her novel One Hundred Shadows (백의 그림자) in 2010, her writing career began in earnest.
1. Life
Hwang was born in 1976, in Seoul. During her freshman year at the French literature department of Incheon National University, she had to leave school due to her health problems and started to learn creative writing over the internet from the novelist Lee Soon-won. She was known as 'the absent-minded girl' in her high school years, because she often drifted into her daydreaming. When it was especially bad, she was too immersed in her thoughts to realize that she was drooling. And she became so shy in a crowded place that she could not make eye contact with people, and so introverted that she was like "a fish out of water" wherever she went. When Lee Soon-won first met her, he was not thinking about 'how to make her a writer,' but about 'how to make her a decent person.'
Since her childhood, she has read a lot and enjoyed it. However, she got all her books confiscated in middle school, which led her to stop reading for about a decade. Then she resumed collecting books when she turned 20 and began to write. Every time someone asks why she writes, she always answers that she writes because she wants to. For her, stories are just something she has to write. But she found her reasons to write in two crucial occasions. One day in 2009, she passed by the Namildang building—the site of the Yongsan Disaster in which a clash between evictees and the police had led to a fire of 30 casualties—and thought that she should offer something to the world as a response to the atrocity she witnessed. So she started writing a novel in the daytime and went to the building at night, which resulted in One Hundred Shadows. The other occasion is the Sewol Ferry Disaster that happened on May 16, 2014. The 2019 collection of series stories dd's Umbrella(디디의 우산) consists of stories which, set in the Sewol Ferry Disaster of 2014 and the Candlelight Protests Against President Park from 2016 to 2017[6], explore the new meaning of revolution in our daily lives.
Hwang says she tries to write in the daytime and spend time with the people she loves at night. In her daily life of exercising and playing with her cat, she writes rather regularly by splitting her work into two parts and doing them in the morning and the afternoon.
2. Writing
Having debuted in the literary world with her unhindered imagination and the motif of free metamorphosis, Hwang Jungeun is noted for her unique works. Her first short story collection The Seven Thirty-two Elephant Train (일곱시 삼십이분 코끼리열차, 2008) features various elements of fantasy, such as the appearance of the dead, people transforming into objects, and talking animals. That being said, what is important is not the elements of fantasy and metamorphosis themselves, but the fact that the protagonists in the world of imagination are those in the low-income bracket or absolute poverty, or those who are completely isolated from society. The implication is that the fantasy in her works are actually related to the issues of reality.
"Kong's Garden" is acclaimed as the masterpiece that marks the novels of the 2010s. It recounts the story of a missing girl in retrospect, but it is more dedicated to the life of the narrator before she met the girl who disappeared. In the process, it continues to pose questions like 'is it right to do such a thing?' or 'did I do something wrong?' and eventually shows that all these deliberations come down to the question of morality. The morality in the story is revealed through the alternation of sympathy and hostility, which is the unique writing style of Hwang that has been repeated since her early works. To be more specific, she has been posing questions that cannot be easily answered, alternating between the severe anxiety and pain caused by life and the vision of a united society, such as one held by sympathy.
One Hundred Shadows (백의 그림자), her first novel, is regarded as a unique romance novel in which reality and an element of fantasy, separation of a person and their shadows, go together in a weird harmony. The protagonists, Eungyo and Mujae, are young workers of an electronics market in the middle of a city that has been running for 40 years. Then one day, the news that the market will be demolished due to the redevelopment plan start to circulate, and the stories of those who are based in the neighborhood unfold one after another. By comparing the reality in which the market has to be torn down with the lives of those who have to find a new home, which develops into the contrast between the ruthless system and the lives of good people, the love story of the young couple is beautifully recounted. Another prominent characteristic of this story, other than the element of fantasy, is the soothing power of language. The two young lovers, Eungyo and Mujae, continue their love, understanding and comforting each other through language, not depending on common expressions like "I love you." Comforting though language—it might be another warm consolation that Hwang is offering to this cold world.
