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[ENGLISH] Two Women Living Together Is a World scrap
by
Madeleine Han
September 7, 2026
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Two Women Living Together
The title of Two Women Living Together is deceptively straightforward. In their joint memoir, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo introduce themselves as longtime “singletons”—unmarried women living in single-person households—who, some years ago, decided to co-purchase a home in Seoul’s Mangwon neighborhood. Their memoir arrives amid headlines that routinely sound the alarm about South Korea’s plummeting birth rate and aging population—trends often attributed to rising living costs and an ever-stratifying labor market. Feminist and queer critics have stressed that patriarchy and heteronormativity are also at play, noting that same-sex marriage and adoption in South Korea remain illegal.
The memoir became a bestseller upon its release in 2019, with over 56,000 copies sold to date. In forty-nine mini-essays, Kim and Hwang ponder the meanings of the life they have built as housemates, co-homeowners, and platonic life companions, addressing topics from splitting household duties (Kim does the dishes, Hwang does the cooking) to overarching questions of aging, caregiving, and entering each other’s extended families in midlife. The writing is warm and conversational, peppered with humor and affectionate interludes featuring the authors’ four cats, Haku, Goro, Tigger, and Young-bae. Gene Png’s English translation captures the resultant sense of camaraderie between the authors and readers with apparent ease. The memoir has also inspired a popular weekly podcast in Korea, Two Women Talking Together (여둘톡), where the authors discuss issues of work, relationships, and self-purpose.
Kim and Hwang rarely narrate the significance of their partnership as an explicit response to systemic effects. The two met on Twitter, now X, while working in adjacent industries: Kim as a manager at a major marketing agency and Hwang as an editor at W Korea. Both had grown weary of living alone. The authors depict their decision to cohabit as an incidental effect of a friendship rooted in similar upbringings—growing up in Busan, moving to Seoul for university—as well as kindred tastes in music, drinks, and humor. But societal pressures to conform surfaced in day-to-day encounters. In one essay, Hwang recalls attending a dinner with a male guest who characterized marriageable women as “real gems” to be “excavated” by men. Hwang writes, “He demonstrated no regard whatsoever for these women’s humanity, treating them like exploitable goods with neither agency nor interests.”
Most of the time, the authors’ abode provides refuge from such unwanted interpellations. However, at other moments, their home is the source of relational friction caused by disagreements about when to fold and put away the laundry or how to spend the holidays. These everyday frictions will ring familiar to anybody who has shared a home. Sometimes the issues Kim and Hwang face have deep roots. In one series of essays, the authors reflect on the challenges of taking out a loan to finance their apartment, a common path to homeownership in Seoul’s fierce housing market. Whereas debt in Hwang’s family was an “unwelcomed burden—something to be ashamed of and to get rid of quickly,” Kim looks back aghast at her “audacity to keep bugging Sunwoo about buying a house” together. Only in retrospect did Kim learn that, without Hwang’s name on the loan, her status as a freelancer would have likely disqualified her. Yet with enough patience and trust, the authors are able to turn their divergence over debt into a chance to explore their underlying attitudes toward work, finances, and responsibility. Discord over laundry routines turns out to be more about ingrained attachment styles. Curiosity about each other creeps in, presenting a chance to resolve conflict differently.
In the space of friendship, the authors become each other’s mirror, both in conflict and in joy. “Stuck in an endless cycle of disappointment and forgiveness,” Kim writes, “we will never stop pinning our hopes on each other.” Two Women Living Together represents the possibility of reprieve from everyday scripts about who we ought to be—a marriageable woman, a trustworthy loan applicant, a respectable career holder—and from narratives that promise conformity as the antidote to abandonment. How Kim and Hwang show up for each other illuminates how care in relationships is not about effacing difference between people but about recognizing and upholding difference as a core component of intimacy. In a world where “two women living together” is a politicizable act, we can begin to enact wider possibilities for what partnership, care, and love look like, beginning with our own living rooms.
Writer 필자 소개
Madeleine Han
Madeleine Han is a writer and researcher based between the US and Korea. A PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University, they are working on a dissertation about the spatial and memorial politics of ceasefire.
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