Cover Features

The Birth of a Life-Challenged Author

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   George Orwell said there are four motives for writing: political purpose, sheer egoism, historical impulse, and aesthetic enthusiasm. I had four motives as well: no friends, no money, no energy, and no dreams for the future. The only thing I knew for sure as a young university student was that I didn’t have these four things. I spent my days going from class to my part-time job, and back. On the first day of summer break, I lay in bed looking up at the dorm-room ceiling and muttered to myself, “One thing. I need just one single thing I can call my own.”  I turned on my netbook and stared at a blank Hancom Office document. More nothing. I was so tired of having nothing. I decided to fill up the page. Maybe I could at least do that. It was just letters, after all. The page was its own world—if I pressed a key, a letter appeared on the screen. Was there a more honest world than this? To fill up the page, I tried to imagine the most talkative speaker in the world. Who would have that much to say? Someone who’d never spoken before, someone whose voice would go unheard even if spoken. Then I thought of the pigeons that gathered in the courtyard in front of the dorms. My first narrator would be a pigeon. A pigeon was bound to have plenty to gripe about. After all, the world acts so petty toward pigeons. One minute they’re pest birds that represent poor, dirty city life, and the next they’re held up as a symbol of peace and the Holy Spirit. Everyone, including me, skirts around them in the street like they’re filthy, then steps into the grocery store to buy cleaning products like Pigeon fabric softener or Dove soap. Suddenly this behavior felt so rude, but also funny. Caught in this contradiction between hatred and holiness, what would a pigeon say if it had a voice? I decided to hand the mic to a pigeon working in the circus as a magician’s assistant. The pigeon preened its feathers and checked the lights in preparation for the performance of a lifetime, recounting the generational story of its family through the world wars, industrialization, and the Olympics, spanning a century of modern history. When I finished the story, I was in a daze. Sitting quietly in my practically empty room, I had created something. It didn’t look like I was doing anything at all, but I had become an author. In what must’ve been a stroke of beginner’s luck, my first short story made it to the final round of a spring literary contest. Then it was rejected. After that, I had to drink from the bitter cup of defeat several more times with several more stories. Of course, it was encouraging to occasionally make it to the final round. I read and reread the judges’ comments so many times I lost count. I could leave it at that and look cool, but I have to admit that sometimes, I let those comments hold me back. The flaws they pointed out made me self-conscious about my limitations as a writer. “Am I rushing this character offstage again?”“Is this story going anywhere? Every story needs a strong beginning and ending.”  Slowly, the standards of “good writing” were starting to form in my mind. When I got frustrated, I watched stand-up comedy. I felt liberated whenever I saw a set that went all out on heavy topics like religion, death, and sexuality. I was captivated by how well the genre juggled right and wrong, success and failure, beauty and ugliness. Soon I was memorizing the silly, vulgar jokes. When I saw an exceptional stand-up comedian, they reminded me of a character in a classic work of literature. It felt like watching Holden Caulfield step out of Catcher in the Rye, snatch the mic, and start chattering away. I enjoyed being swept away in the cascade of grievances and self-contempt. Moreover, many of the comedians I liked also had roots in literature. Norm Macdonald read widely from Russian literature, Anthony Jeselnik wanted to be a novelist, and Ari Shaffir majored in English literature. When I found out the highest honor in English-language comedy was the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, I was happy because it felt like an acknowledgment that literature was the source of comedy’s spirit of satire and wit. Reaching the rather audacious conclusion that there wasn’t much separating the stand-up comedy scene from the literary scene, I decided to try stand-up. As it turned out, I had as much to say as a pigeon. I had so much to say—as a vegetarian, as a daughter, as an “ugly” woman, and simply as a human being in Korean society. Plus, to start out as a stand-up comedian, there are no job interviews or any other institutional hoops. Anyone can sign up to experiment in the joke laboratory of the open mic. All I had to do was get on stage, watch my jokes fail miserably, and slowly gather up the few that were passable. At night I tested out my jokes, and during the day I wrote stories. For a long time, I spent every day holed up alone in my room, but fortunately that life suited my personality well. After a few years I’d gathered some jokes and completed a novel.  Around 10 p.m. on January 31, 2024, Park Hye-jin, a well-known critic and editor at the publisher Minumsa, followed me on Instagram. I’d been waiting for a response from Minumsa ever since I submitted my novel to them for consideration. I stayed up all night trying not to read too much into that follow. Getting my hopes up was an all-too-familiar hell. “It’s probably just a follow. Sometimes people do that. I do it too, following and liking things for no reason. You don’t mean anything by it.”“No. There’s no way she just followed you for no reason. That would be . . . too much,” my partner of ten years whined. I snorted out a laugh. Normally my partner would be the one trying to calm me down. The next day, the first of February, I received an email a little after lunchtime. It was from Park Hye-jin. She said she was excited to work with me on my novel!I read the acceptance email again, then caught my breath, read it one more time, and left for a stand-up gig. That night, the other comedians in the waiting room all looked lovely. Even the cough drops and scattered pens on the dressing-room table made my heart ache. To top things off, my set was a success. My LPM (laughs per minute) rate was one of my best. For the first time in my life, someone left me a 50,000-won tip, along with a sticky note that read, “Soyoon Won, thank you! See you again next time.” As I stood there smitten with my note, K oppa looked at me and said, “They must know a thing or two about comedy.”I’d like to take this space to thank that audience member. When the show finished, I went out for drinks with the other comedians. The soju went down smooth, and the kimchi jeon was nice and crispy. I thought I might get carried away if things kept up like this. I turned to P oppa and made him promise to get me home. “I’m having a really good day. I can’t tell you why yet, but something amazing happened. But I don’t wanna get too drunk and have this end up my ‘lucky day,’ * so make sure I don’t die before the night’s over.” * Translator’s note: A reference to colonial-era author Hyeon Jin-geon’s short story “A Lucky Day,” in which the protagonist finally has a good day at work, so that he can afford to buy his ailing wife a bowl of nourishing soup, only to find her already dead when he gets home. The protagonist also stops by the bar and gets drunk on his way back. He must’ve been pretty confused. If it was such a good day, I should’ve been offering to buy them all drinks, but here I was demanding he catch me a taxi. Safely on my way home, I pulled out my phone and read the Minumsa editor’s email a few more times. Then I reviewed my recording of my set from earlier. My phone is full of recordings of my performances. Of course, the recordings are a mishmash of laughter and silence, people coughing, and shot glasses shattering on the floor. The same kind of things that fill my fiction.  The theme for this KLN essay was “the birth of an author.” While I was writing it, comedian Jeon Yu-seong passed away. He was the comedian who coined the term “gagman,” the word for comedian in Korean, along with his own comedy troupe, the first university “gag department,” and the long-running TV comedy show Gag Concert. I never met or even so much as exchanged a few words with him. To be honest, I never felt much camaraderie with him, either. I considered him an institutional elder comedian. But my fellow stand-up comic K oppa spent several years in his troupe. It was K oppa who informed me of his death.  “I think your book was the last one he read in the hospital,” he told me. “When he got done reading, he looked up and said, ‘This kid’s got a way with words.’”P oppa added, “Your book’s such a snoozefest, I bet it put him to sleep. He thought he’d just take a little nap. Then BAM! Dead of boredom.” After that, I had to attend the funeral.On the way there in K oppa’s car, nothing but sad songs were playing on the radio. I didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of comedians—in other words, I didn’t want to get made fun of—so I quickly searched songs by PSY, but somehow every single one was sad.“What’s up with these songs? This is supposed to be PSY,” I said.The other comedians in the car nodded and said PSY had a lot of sad songs. When I finally found something with a beat, the mood in the car actually sank, and everyone looked sadder. I wondered what sort of jokes Jeon Yu-seong told during his life, so I searched.“We call someone who can’t keep a beat ‘rhythmically challenged.’ Someone who’s tone-deaf is ‘tonally challenged.’ Someone who’s always getting lost is ‘directionally challenged.’ I can’t figure out how to live. I don’t even know how I ended up here. I guess I’m ‘life challenged!’”* * Jeon Yu-seong, Like It’s My First Day on Earth (Huckleberry Books, 2023). It didn’t even sound like a joke. It just made me wonder what end awaited the life-challenged. When I stood before Jeon Yu-seong’s portrait at the funeral hall, I looked down and noticed his baseball cap resting among the bed of chrysanthemums. Printed unmistakably on the cap was the word “comedy.” Seeing that cap made the distance I felt between us seem totally immaterial. As I went to eat, I could hear the boisterous clamor coming from the dining room. I’d never seen such a noisy funeral hall. I let out a laugh. I’d also never seen funeral guests with such wild hairstyles. I laughed all through the meal. At the other tables, I recognized so many familiar faces from the entertainment world. There was no way to know who’d gone through the proper process and who was an unconventional hire. Yet here they were, all gathered in one place. And so many magicians, too. Apparently Jeon Yu-seong loved magic. “Let’s get the magicians to bring him back to life right now. Then we can have them send him back again after an hour or so,” P oppa said. “P hyung, that joke’s already been made about a hundred times since yesterday,” K oppa told him. P oppa smiled sheepishly. I turned to K oppa. “I wish I could’ve met him to say thank you for reading my book,” I said, knowing it was silly. “Or maybe not. Was that not his style?” “I’m sure he would’ve liked that,” K oppa said. Caught off guard by his certainty, I said, “Oh, come on. I’m nobody.” K oppa doubled down, “He’d have absolutely loved it.” To be honest, whether in comedy or literature, I’ve always felt a certain sense of pride in not having properly debuted or joined a prestigious troupe. I suppose I relished the idea of myself as some sort of maverick of K-literature and K-comedy. But now that pride feels silly. I can recognize the long and storied tradition that came before me. In the end, we all just have something we want to say. And we’re mesmerized by whatever form expresses it best. Caught up in that fascination, we go on saying what we have to say, even without the proper qualifications or conviction, writing life-challenged jokes and life-challenged fiction.

by Soyoon Won

Cover Features

Becoming a Poet

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   Long ago, when I was only an essence, like mist floating through the air, I slowly took form in my mother’s womb, until one winter I was born in the shape of a tiny person. Being born is similar to becoming a poet in at least one way—you can’t choose your own birthday. Sometimes you meet poets who became poets by chance, much as birth itself is a matter of chance. I’ve heard many stories from poets who never had any big hopes or profound intentions of becoming one. Maybe a friend secretly submits your writings to a contest, and you win a prize. Suddenly, you’re a writer. There are plenty of stories like this. If you ask these poets how they ended up as poets, they invariably respond, “Who knows?” I barely knew how to become a poet, but I knew I’d do anything to make it happen. To explain how I came to that decision, we’ll have to go back to my childhood. In elementary school, I was actually more interested in drawing than writing. I drew in my notebooks until the pages were tattered, with my classmates watching over my shoulder. My notebooks filled up with their faces as they clamored around me, asking me to draw them too. Back then, we had a separate computer class. The desktop computer sat like an immovable slab of rock alongside a monitor with rounded corners. During class, we learned to turn the computer on and off, save a file, and create a new Hancom Office document. I made my first email account in that class, too. I tried to draw in MS Paint, but the mouse didn’t move the way I wanted. Pen and paper were still more comfortable. So I opened up Notepad instead and started jotting down something that was not quite a story, and not quite a diary entry, either. It contained too much fiction to be a diary, too much of my real life to be fiction. The .txt file slowly filled with stories about me. In the late 2000s, when I was in middle school, the academic pressure in my neighborhood was so intense that I got swept up in it as well. One day, while I was studying for the entrance exam to a prestigious foreign language high school, one of my classmates asked me if I’d heard about the creative writing program at a certain arts high school and suggested we take the exam together. Swept away once again, I found myself sitting for the exam. (Back then, as now, I was a person easily swept away.) On the day of the exam, my friend failed to show up. I took the test alone and was lucky enough to pass. It was during the high school creative writing program that I saw a real living poet for the first time and started learning to write poetry. Before that, I’d only read poems in textbooks, and all of those poets were long since dead and gone. I also competed in countless impromptu poetry contests, known as “baegiljang,” because awards in such contests would make it easier to get into university. Unfortunately, throughout my three years in high school, I rarely won anything. Poetry was too hard. The collections I read were thinner than my little finger, and when you flipped through the pages, there was so much empty space that it seemed like a waste of paper. The margins were wider than the text. I filled the blank space with notes as I read. One hundred books of poetry were sitting on my bookshelf by the time I decided I wanted to be a poet. It was my second year of high school. I was eighteen years old. I changed the password of my first laptop, which I got when I started high school, from my birth date to “deungdan+@.” Every day, I opened my laptop and thought about how to secure my debut. My desire to become a poet slowly crystallized like clear, solid ice. By the late 2010s, I had graduated from the creative writing program of an arts university and was working part-time while attending privately run poetry workshops. There were two ways to learn poetry from an active poet in Korea—creative writing lectures held at a university, or courses run privately by publishing houses or bookstores. These private lessons were usually relatively small, lasting from four to eight weeks with around ten to twenty students, and functioned like a typical workshop in which students bring in poems they’ve written to read and discuss. The university classes were so large that most students could only workshop three to five poems per semester, so many students signed up for private courses as well. Whether in the university classroom or in the private workshops, the aspiring poets were every bit as intense as anyone studying for a high-stakes test, but we all tried not to let it show. That sort of intensity didn’t seem to suit a poet, I suppose. With my feigned expression of nonchalance, I kept on dreaming about the moment I would become a poet. As of October 2025, there are a few basic ways to start a career as a poet in Korea. They are as follows: Spring Literary Contests (Sinchun Munye)Held annually by major newspapers including The Chosun Ilbo, The Dong-A Ilbo, Hankook Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Seoul Shinmun, and Segye Ilbo. Contest entries are accepted each October, and the winners are published on January 1 of the following year. In the poetry section, poets submit three to five poems each, with every newspaper receiving thou­sands of entries. (A total of 5,404 poems were entered into The Dong-A Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 2025.) Emerging Writer Awards (Sininsang) by Literary MagazinesAwards bestowed by established literary journals upon new and emerging writers. Submission periods and length requirements differ by journal, and win­ners of the poetry section typically publish their first collection in the selected poetry series of the publishing house affiliated with the journal. The major magazines include Literature and Society, The Quarterly Changbi, Munhakdongne The Quarterly, and Hyundae Munhak. The Daesan Literary Awards for College StudentsPresented by the Daesan Foundation and only open to university students. In the past, the reception of this award was not recognized as constituting an official debut, but this has begun to change recently with the successful careers of winners like Kim Yeon-deok. Independent Literary MagazinesLiterary journals that are not affiliated with a major organization or publisher and are published independently by an individual or small group. The independent literary magazine Begae, for instance, accepts submissions regardless of debut status and publishes poetry collections in its own selected poetry series. Publication of a Poetry CollectionPublishers such as Achimdal, Samin, Paran, and Geodneun Saram accept submissions and publish collections of poetry regardless of debut status. There is no limit on the number of poets selected, and curators or editors personally arrange and select the manuscripts. Kim Suyeong Literary Award (Minumsa Publishing)Open to poets regardless of debut status. Poetry collections by the winners are published in the Minumsa selected poetry series. Mailing ServicesSubscription services in which the author sends writings directly to readers, in the manner of YSRA’s Daily YSRA. This makes it possible to achieve a writing career outside of traditional institutions of print publishing.  Of the options listed above, the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards from established literary magazines constitute the traditional literary debut system. The other alternatives have appeared largely over the past five to six years, broadening and diversifying the available routes to debut. In Korea, to become a poet typically means to debut—that is, to “deungdan.” The literal meaning of the word “deungdan” is “to go up onto a pile of dirt.”* In other words, to go up onto the “mundan” (literary stage or scene), for all to see. This has traditionally meant being selected as the winner of a spring literary contest held by a major newspaper or an emerging writer award granted by an established literary magazine. The single person who breaks through the thousand-to-one odds receives the title of poet. * Translator’s note: This phrasing is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The “pile of dirt” referred to here is better described as a ceremonial earthen mound or altar, and the word is more commonly understood today as “stage” or “scene,” as in “the literary scene.” To be selected in this way is to be called up as a poet. At that moment, a poet is born. The day a poet debuts is their poetic birthday. Like me before my “birth,” the poems I saved as files on my computer existed only in faint, mercurial form, to be born only once they were granted a body as print on paper. I anxiously awaited the day my poems would appear in the pages of a newspaper or magazine and eventually take material form as a book that I could actually touch with my own hands. I had already made it past the preliminary round of a spring literary contest when I was in university, so at first it felt as if my debut was within reach. Just as I began to tire of waiting, I heard about a new publisher called Achimdal Books. Word was getting around among aspiring poets that Achimdal would accept submissions regardless of debut status. The debut system was slowly showing signs of change. The shift began around 2016 with the emergence of a selected poetry series by the publisher Samin. The online purchase page for the first collection in the series, Eugene Mok’s The Book of Love, featured the following statement on the publisher’s intentions: “Many poets have long since made the persuasive argument that it’s impossible to judge a poet’s potential from a few short poems.” They were criticizing the spring literary contest’s method of judging based on three to five poems. The statement went on, “Our goal is to fill this series with collections by talented poets, who will be evaluated on submissions of fifty to sixty poems at once, enough to fill a collection.” This example is often cited as an important early effort at diversifying the debut system. Another background to the debut system’s diversification was the 2016 Sexual Violence in the Literary Scene movement, which predated and overlapped with the #MeToo movement in Korea. It was then that incidents of sexual abuse by teachers in arts high schools or private workshops against their young students entered the public discourse over social media. There were many victims and perpetrators. The argument that the problem was not merely individual but systemic gained traction, and for aspiring female poets like myself, it was painful to see that literature, which should be something beautiful and free, was wrapped up in violence. The root of the problem lay in the debut system. The limited options for starting a literary career reinforced the hierarchy between poet (teacher) and poet aspirant (student). Young, aspiring poets desperate to debut were easily exposed to gaslighting by their poet-teachers. The call grew louder for changes to the debut process and for a healthier literary ecosystem. The literary scene was like a forest populated by various plants. If diversity were respected, the chains holding back aspiring poets would loosen naturally. In 2018, Achimdal Books posted their Featured Poets series as a project on tumblbug. The crowdfunding platform was the best method available to a young publishing company without the capital of major publishers. Achimdal said their goal was to discover new poets regardless of their debut status, and they tried to avoid the hierarchical implications of referring to editors as “judges,” opting instead for the term “curator” to express the horizontal relationship between reviewers and submitters. While the earlier effort by Samin had emphasized a strict standard for publishing a poetry collection, Achimdal was placing more focus on diversifying paths to debut. I submitted a set of around thirty poems to Achimdal, and they soon sent me a publication offer. However, I made the decision to hold off on publishing and keep trying for the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards. I was still afraid of trying something new. The curator, poet Kim Un, kindly respected my hesitation. Turning away from the open door to publication, I fell back into my position as an aspiring poet. In the fall of 2018, Achimdal released the first nine collections of its Featured Poets series at once, and gingko nuts squished under my shoes as I walked down the street. The pungent smell filled the air, but it still didn’t really feel like fall to me yet. Another curator at Achimdal, poet Kim So Yeon, said something that stuck with me. “What if you just declare yourself a poet right now, from this day forward?” Those might not have been her exact words, but that was her point. The idea that I could just call myself a poet gave me courage. It was also the reason curator Kim So Yeon had joined Achimdal’s project in the first place. Of course, the publication of my first collection was only possible with the help of the publishing house, the curators, and so many others, so I couldn’t really say I’d become a poet all on my own. And it was no different in the sense that I became a part of the system. Nevertheless, publishing my poetry as a collection was a new path. In the existing debut system, I’d have been judged on three to ten poems, then published in magazines and journals for three to four years before putting out my first collection. It would be similar to a singer putting out single albums with a couple of songs each until they have enough to perform a solo concert. Debuting with a full collection, on the other hand, was like putting on a solo concert for my debut. I was worried I’d feel like I was standing alone on stage in front of a stadium of empty seats. That’s how reckless an endeavor it seemed to me at the time. Though my fears remained, I decided to go forward with the publication. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had a lingering attachment to the debut I’d dreamed of for so long. What I feared most of all was that I might still not be a poet even after I’d published my first book in this way. But amid the courageous efforts of so many writers, poets, and publishers in the literary community to dream up a new approach for a healthier literary ecosystem, I could finally feel that winter had arrived. On January 31, 2019, I released my first poetry collection and put myself out into the world as a poet. When I did my first reading for the collection, someone asked me, “When do you most feel that you’ve become a poet?”“Whenever other people call me a poet, it feels like I’m becoming one bit by bit,” I said. I could really feel that I’d made it because of all the readers and fellow writers who read my collection and shared their thoughts with me. I am always grateful to them. It’s thanks to them that I’m now working on my third collection—to become a poet again, just as winter comes around once more. I do my best never to forget the gift of being read, and to read the poetry of my fellow poets as much as I can. I hold my breath and focus on the voice of another poet. It’s like tilting your head to hear the birds chirping in the forest. This is how we help each other be born as poets.

by Jo Hae Ju

Cover Features

Endings and Beginnings

During her final years, my grandmother lived with my aunt in the city of Naju in South Jeolla province. My grandmother had always dreamed of spending her old age close to her son and his family, but his circumstances prevented that from happening. He had divorced his wife and was in no position to look after anyone. His children, that is, my grandmother’s two grandsons, ended up taking jobs in Seoul and settling in Gyeonggi province. According to my aunt, my grandmother often said the only person she could trust was her son: that was the degree to which she treated my aunt with indifference. But in the end, my grandmother accepted with a strange calmness the fact that she had no one else to rely on but my aunt. And my aunt would say with the same calmness that it brought her happiness to spread out her mother’s quilt in the master bedroom where hung a photo (seemingly restored through digital technology) of my uncle, who had passed away twenty years earlier. In this way, the cohabitation be­tween my grandmother, who had reached her mid-eighties, and my aunt, who had entered her sixties, continued for ten years, only ending with my grandmother’s death. Death will find a way to make an end. An end that ends all, and makes a new beginning impossible. It seems that care is needed primarily at the beginning and end of our lives. At the beginning, we usually receive care gladly. But at the end, it may be difficult to do so. This may happen because, at the end of our lives, our bodies are often afflicted by many diseases caused by our protracted lifespan. We live longer now than nature intended, and we pay for our longevity dearly with both physical and psychological signs of aging. My grandmother, as far as I knew, always worked diligently and never slacked off. Maybe that’s why she never got rich. Is this cause and effect, I ask. The poor who live diligently. People who are too poor to afford to be lazy. Today’s news reported on the laborious process of minimum wage negotiations, and showed an anonymous interview with a caregiver. She said that she had been doing this work for thirteen years, and in that time had never made more than minimum wage. This year the negotiation is between labor groups who demand the minimum wage be raised by 900 won per hour and industry leaders who want a 120-won increase. The care worker takes care of seven or eight elderly people every day. She prepares their meals and checks in on them. “Did you do anything today?” she asks. “Oh yeah, I watched some television,” they reply. My grandmother liked watching television too. She liked singing contests and weekend soap operas. Surprisingly, one of the shows she liked was American professional wres­tling. Maybe because it was popular when she was young. My grandmother was easily impressed by the world of profes­sional wrestling. She would marvel at the scenes where the wrestlers thudded to the ground or crashed into each other and would cry, “Oh dear, that looks painful.” I would reply, feigning special insight, “Grandma, it’s all fake, it’s an act!” My grandmother just kept her eyes on the TV, as if she hadn’t heard me. And then she would mumble, “They’re so lucky to be healthy. So lucky to be healthy,” about those muscular athletes. Before my grandmother got sick, she would still make breakfast in the mornings for my aunt. The following year, despite thinking she was in good health for her age, my grandmother had to be admitted into a nursing home—where her favorite wrestling shows were definitely not shown on TV. My aunt wanted to take care of her until the end, but it was just too much for her. She couldn’t be home during working hours and my grandmother needed care at that time. Wearing a surgical mask, Grandma was admitted into a nursing home where she could receive care. Her formerly hardworking body, now small and thin, could barely move without professional care. I was also wearing a mask as I watched my grandmother be taken to the hospital. We couldn’t see each other’s faces completely. I didn’t remove my mask because I didn’t realize that would be the last time I saw her. It was the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. She passed away before it was over. Nearby stood my aunt, who could very well soon need care herself, her tears frozen on her face. Her face, the image of her mother’s.  There is something that I never told my grandmother. Did she know the words “Down syndrome”? She never learned to read. It’s possible her great-granddaughter’s disability might not have been part of the knowledge she acquired through her deeply profound life. Or maybe she did understand everything. My aunt would say, “How long has she got left? There is no need to tell her.” There are quite a few moments when those words pierce my heart. Probably more so for my aunt. My grandmother had seen my daughter until she was about six years old. Occasionally, she would call and ask if my daughter was speaking yet. At that time, she wasn’t yet able to speak properly. Down syndrome is accompanied by developmental disabilities, the most typical being problems with speech and language. It was the following year that my daughter was able to say the word “grandmother” properly. She should have called my grandmother “great-grandmother,” but considering her level of language development, it’s unlikely she would have been able to pronounce it correctly. It is difficult to describe a child’s development through numbers and graphs. Every day feels the same, but as those days add up you can see her change. But then one day, she goes back­wards. You question, is this child growing up? But that ques­tion seems pointless as you see her body change. When she was just born, in the neonatal intensive care unit, I wondered how this baby, smaller than my forearm, would grow up. But now the child reaches my waist and wraps me in a hug every morning. It is in that moment, when I bend down to return her embrace, that I start living. I am grateful that every day is the same, and feel that the accumulation of this grati­tude achieves something. I have been raising a developmentally disabled child with Down syndrome for ten years now. The method and intensity of her care differs from that given to my non-disabled second child. It took me several times longer to potty train my eldest compared to my second child. Only quite recently I had worried that I might have to change her diapers into her adolescence. But there came a day when she went to the toilet on her own. It’s not just her personal hygiene that I need to be worried about. Communicating with our daughter is my wife’s job. My wife can quickly understand what she wants to say or what she is feeling by looking into her eyes. It’s like a conversation between souls. But my wife doesn’t want that conversation between souls. She wants our daughter to pronounce the words herself, even if they come out slurred. It would be nice if we didn’t have to speak with words to communicate smoothly, if we could converse through ultrasound or telepathy, but that is impossible. My wife can have that conversation between souls with our daughter simply because of the accumulated experience of caring for her over a long period of time. The fact that I’m not able to converse with her to that degree may be because I have taken a step back from her care. Nevertheless, there is a limit to which souls can converse. A few days ago our daughter had a high fever and was irritable. My wife said that it was menstrual pain. Turns out it was an ear infection. My wife sighed at her child who couldn’t say the words, “My ears hurt.” She felt regret at being a mother who couldn’t work that out. Lately, our second child, who is one year younger, has been helping more. My wife and I worry that our younger child might feel burdened by the thought that she has to care for her older sister for the rest of her life. This isn’t a special feeling. All parents hope that their children are happy and life runs smoothly for them. Some people hope their child does well in school, others that they succeed socially or economically. Our wish is just one amongst the many. But in order to achieve it, we can’t just send our daughter to a private academy, get her tutoring, or have her solve problems in a textbook. We can only do it ourselves. Thankfully, since our youngest has grown up with her older sister, she has naturally accepted the concept of disability. I believe that when someone has a disabled person in their life, has watched their care, and recognizes that existence, they will become a better person for it. I hope that more people can have this opportunity. I hope that many people will engage with wheelchair users on their commute to work and be considerate to people on the autism spectrum in public places. Our youngest has been taking care of her older sister in her own way, quite differently to how my wife and I think things should be done. Her method is simple. She makes her sister angry! Sometimes she tells her that she is cute, pinching her cheek and patting her backside. Other times, when she doesn’t like that her sister has burst into her room, she chases her out and locks the door. Our older child, after experiencing this several times, gets annoyed, then cries and, in the end, she speaks. Recently she has said the following: “I hate you!”, “Ah, really!”, “Stop it!” Thanks to our youngest, our eldest child is improving her language skills. Our two children are taking care of each other in the way only sisters can.  Japanese scholar Kimihiro Masamura’s book Having a Child with Down Syndrome tells of the sadness and joy he experi­enced over the twenty years he spent raising his second child who was born with Down syndrome. In the book, the author’s wife says, “From the time our child started school until now, spring has been a painful season for us.” In the 1970s, when the author’s child was attending school, Japan’s policies on educa­tional rights and the care of disabled children were somewhat lacking. Even if the system has improved, at least in terms of recognition, spring is not an easy season for the guardians of children with disabilities. As the school year changes to the next, the environment changes, and for disabled young people change can feel like a heavy punishment. A few years ago at a public hearing in Seoul, parents of disabled children pled on their knees for the establishment of a special school. Their photographs went viral. All they wanted was for their children to be allowed to go to school, but many people at the hearing wanted a hospital constructed at the same site. A lot of time has passed since then. Those children, whose mothers were on their knees, will be adults now. Did they graduate? What sort of members of society have they become? Our daughter attends a special school. Luckily there is one close to our home. Every year at my child’s school, as the spring approaches, a not-so-funny comedy is acted out. It becomes an urgent matter of concern to the parents whether or not their child will be able to stay at the same school when they move up from elementary to middle school. It isn’t all that different from the fervor around the entrance exams for science or foreign language high schools. Only the competition is backwards. In order to continue attending the special school, you have to prove that the child is so severely disabled they require a special school, that they often engage in impulsive behavior, and that they need the intensive care provided in the special school’s facilities. Normally, you would zealously educate your child to overcome these things, but for the school entrance requirements our children must be a little more lacking. That’s how they can go to a special school. And not have to move to an inclusive program at a regular school. I know that, in theory, the ideal situation would be for her to attend a regular school and receive an inclusive education with her non-disabled peers. However, I can also calculate how dif­ficult it would be to achieve that reality. In a world where the goal of education is to get into a good college, disabled students can easily be perceived as an interfering presence in the college entrance exam preparation classes, even as obstacles. We are in a situation where there is a general failure to improve the awareness around inclusive education and its environment, while the expansion of special schools is being increasingly delayed. In the meantime, the care of disabled people is left to the individual. I don’t intend to give up the job. But I do want to stop having to prove my child is lacking. It is so hard to hide the pain of that process. This isn’t care at all. I don’t know what the future holds for my child. Just as I couldn’t have known that she would come to me, I can’t know where she and I will go in the end. Perhaps she is the one taking care of me now. If I am becoming a better person, it is because of her care. I do not know who will care for me at my “end of the end,” just as I do not know who will care for my daughter there­after. I think that’s fortunate. I will continue to take care of my daughter without ever knowing the future. In just the same way my daughter cares for me. 

by Seo Hyoin

Cover Features

Caregiving, Family, and the Days of Hope and Disappointment

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, published in Korea in 2017 to critical and popular acclaim and adapted into a film in 2024 by the young woman filmmaker Lee Mi-rang, is narrated from the perspective of a woman in her sixties who works as a carer at a nursing home. The unnamed narrator is assigned by her agency to “Jen” (full name Yi Jehee), a highly-educated woman who has never been married. Jen studied overseas when she was young and spent her life looking after the weak and marginalized, writing books about overseas Korean adoptees, opening an education center for immigrant children, and sponsoring a young boy in the Philippines. But the life of self-sacrificing devotion Jen once led is a world apart from her present situation. With no family or assets to support her, and slowly losing her memory, Jen is only granted a single bed in a nursing home. And even that is contingent on support—financial or otherwise—from charitable organizations. The moment her illness worsens and the support ends, even that bed will be taken from her. All that awaits her now is a transfer to a care facility for people with Alzheimer’s, a place where she will be bound hand and foot, a place that “pumps patients full of sedatives and gives them nothing to do besides expend all their energy waiting for death.” This is the point that angers the narrator, a professional carer. Is it just for society to treat a woman like Jen, who devoted her years to caring for others, this way? Is it truly right to sacrifice human dignity in the name of bureaucratic effi­ciency? The narrator sees herself in the elderly woman’s shoes as she witnesses the world treating Jen like “garbage,” and realizes that this treatment is not just “the way of the world,” but her “business.” This realization underpins the narrator’s determined struggle to bring the dying Jen into her own home, caring for her with extreme devotion. By nature, human beings are dependent on others, reliant on others’ care from birth to death. Providing unconditional care to vulnerable people who are completely reliant on others, then, is an ethical duty that all humans must undertake. This does not, of course, mean that those carrying out this ethical imperative will be free from hesitation, guilt, fear, or regret. The truth is, the “work” it takes to care for someone and the “grueling” task of picking up after someone else are an inextricable part of the labor of care; ugly realities that cannot—must not—be wrapped up into purely beautiful and noble packages. While refusing to turn a blind eye to that grueling work, Concerning my Daughter captures the fleeting instant in when the positions are reversed—when the reality of care is flipped upside-down and the carer becomes the cared-for. In the case of this book, the reversal overlaps with the moment when the title of the book is fully thrust into the spotlight. The narrator has thus far attempted to pressure her lesbian daughter to conform to social norms, unable to understand her. But as she comes to share the work of caring for Jen with her daughter, the narrator comes to accept her child for who she is. At Jen’s funeral at the end of the book, as the daughter (accompanied by her partner) volunteers to be the chief mourner, the narrator manages to tell the couple, “Thank you for being here.” It is a sort of olive branch; a ceasefire left as a final gift from Jen to her carer. After the funeral, the narrator and her daughter will return to their old dynamic, continuing to argue and hurt each other. But so long as they hold on to their gift from Jen, who ironically had required grueling and unconditional care, the energy to “get through the next bit of life ahead of [them]” will remain and keep them moving forward. Life goes on, and as the novel’s final line says, “all [they] can do is believe that [they] will make it through the long stretch of tomorrows,” supported by Jen’s gift.  By depicting a carer gladly bringing her patient into her own home—with no blood relation or promise of an inheritance in the picture—and fostering an alternative, female-centered family community with her lesbian daughter and her partner, Concerning My Daughter explores alternative possibilities for the ethics of care in Korean literature. These gendered ethics of care go beyond the heteronormative boundaries of blood relations, shaking the foundations of the traditional institution of the family. But can such new communities truly serve as an alternative? To answer this question, we can turn to Jadu by Lee Juhye. Narrated by a fictional translator of Adrienne Rich’s When We Dead Awaken (reflecting Lee’s status as the actual translator of that book), the novel offers glimpses of the fictional under­standings and misunderstandings concerning Rich’s concept of the “lesbian continuum.” In the prologue, Rich and the feminist poet Elizabeth Bishop drive from New York to Boston and discuss the recent deaths in their lives (Rich has lost her husband, while Bishop lost a same-sex lover, both to suicide). As they discuss the circumstances that led to those deaths, the two women form a connection over the fact that they have both been misunderstood by the public and gossiped about. This anecdote immediately informs readers of the inten­tion behind Jadu. The narrator’s father-in-law was once a charming old gentleman. But after his bile duct cancer relapses, he is hospitalized, becoming delirious in his illness, and soon Lee reveals the realities of patriarchy through the progression of the cancer. Prior to the narrator’s marriage and the medical crisis, the father-in-law had been a sweet poet of a man who called the narrator “more welcome than the flowers in springtime.” Following her marriage, he had promised to treat her “not as a daughter-in-law, but a daugh­ter,” buying her shiny hairpins studded with fake gemstones and flower-print scarves from street stands, insisting on putting them on her with his own two hands. The delirium, however, changes him completely, and he begins to call his daughter-in-law a “thief” who has stolen his radiant sun. He openly expresses his hatred for her, lamenting, “What has she done for us since she married into this family? Since she mar­ried a professor? Did she bring a big dowry? Have a baby? She’s the reason my line is going to end!” He is also highly suspicious of his carer, to the point of grabbing her by the hair and verbally abusing her.  Though suddenly faced with the brunt of the hypocrisies of patriarchy and branded a thief while attempting to care for the sick man, the narrator is not supported by her husband. The husband remains willfully blind to his father’s true nature. And it seems only right, in some ways, that she is more outraged by her husband’s cowardice than by her father-in-law’s direct displays of hate. The only person who takes her side and understands her is the carer, Hwang Yeongok. The narrator reciprocates her empathy by saving her from violence, shoving the patriarch in the chest when he suddenly grabs Yeongok by the hair and calls her a thief. The father-in-law’s patriarchal family is connected by blood and constitutes an exclusive society of its own from start to finish. But the two unrelated women, joined by their exclusion from that community, form a new community of their own. This is the moment when the lesbian continuum Rich describes comes into being, where “although nothing was said, it felt as though we had shared everything.” However, Lee does not gloss over the limitations of such moments of connection. Overemphasizing the value of gender-based solidarity in the face of imbalanced expecta­tions of care in heteronormative family institutions runs the risk of erasing the real differences between the individuals in this alternative community. The reality is that one of these women is well-educated and belongs to the middle class, while the agency-dispatched carer has been hired for a paltry 80,000 won a day. At the end of the book, the narrator purchases a pretty postcard in Hokkaido, and writes down “an address discovered by looking up the name of the agency from a once-remembered, lilac-hued business card,” con­fessing that “although it was very unlikely the postcard would make it to Yeongok, the remoteness of the possibility was the very reason” she was sending it. This confession is a clear reminder that the bond the narrator and Yeongok share is almost fantastical. Although this is an act “as childlike as tossing a message in a bottle into the Pacific,” Jadu empha­sizes that the narrator’s intentions are not laughable in the least. This reading is supported by the translator’s afterword, written in the form of a letter “to all the Hwang Yeongoks out there.” In Jadu, the act of writing is one way of resolving to never give up on those fleeting connections, to always look forward to a new form of community that acknowledges and overcomes the real differences between people.  Another author who may have something to say about such hopes is Hwang Jungeun. It is only natural, then, for this essay to end with a discussion of “Things to Come”—the last section of her novel Years and Years. Following “Gravedig,” “Words to Say,” and “Nameless,” which all follow the Han family, “Things to Come” centers on playwright Han Sejin, the family’s second daughter and virtually a self-portrait of the author, as she participates in a book festival in New York City. Sejin is very much unlike her elder sister Yeongjin, the archetypal “K-jangnyeo”: the eldest daughter in a standard Korean family who sacrifices her wants for the sake of the family by internalizing the idea that “you can’t always do everything you want.” Sejin has chosen to form a new connection with her same-sex partner Ha Miyeong in direct opposition to the heteronormative Korean family—and on a business trip to America, she comes to notice the things she had not recognized “back in Seoul.” At a talk titled “Reading Peace, Writing Resistance,” Sejin has a lengthy conversation with American writers, but at the end of the talk, a member of the audience asks a question that silences her. The questioner, petite with straight black hair and most likely a Korean adoptee, says, “I’ve been sitting here, listening for an hour and a half, but no one brought up Korean adoptees or the export of Korean adoptees. For an hour and a half, not once did anyone mention it. I need to know. Why?” A similar moment of silencing occurs during a conversation with Jamie, who tells Sejin about how her father Norman—who grew up around a Korean-American community that called his mother a “yanggalbo,” that is, a “Yankee whore”—“couldn’t forgive the people who said those things, so he decided he wouldn’t forgive the language they used either,” and slowly became a man of very few words. The reason for Sejin’s silence is simple: such issues had never even occurred to her “back in Seoul.” Perhaps our problems with family, care, and gender can only be seen clearly when we step back from internalized injustices to examine them in the context of society as a whole. Sejin’s breaking away from her blood family to form an alternative female community with Ha Miyeong does not magically solve these inherent problems; Miyeong, in spite of daily phone calls with Sejin about happy nothings, eventually complains of trouble breathing, finds a hospital on her own, packs her things, and checks herself in. What is it that chokes the air out of these pioneers of the future, forcing them to hospitalize themselves? Rather than try to clumsily answer that question and offer blanket solutions, “Things to Come” cautiously suggests an alternative: “dashing any hope of romance and reconciliation, disappointing those who had been hoping for those things.” That is to say, the future will always generate hope, but our expectations will never be fully met. But life goes on in spite of our disappointment, and busily. In the same way, the sense that our desperate hopes for a tran­scendent new alternative are about to fail is not necessarily a bad thing. As Hwang writes, “While she weeps, while she is disappointed, while she loses hope, while she rages. In other words, while she loves,” she—that is, we—must once more bring the future toward us. That is probably the underlying answer prescribed by Hwang, that our hopes will continue to come toward us for “years and years.” Does that not mean that it is time for both a change in our mindsets, and a mild disappointment of the radical hopes we have concerning care? Who knows? When Ha Miyeong is finally discharged from the hospital, “While she weeps, while she is disappointed, while she loses hope, while she rages. In other words, while she loves,” she may yet be welcomed by a day filled with hopes for such a love.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: · Kim Hyejin, Concerning My Daughter (tr. Jamie Chang, Picador, 2022)   김혜진, 『딸에 대하여』 (민음사, 2017) · Lee Juhye, Jadu (Changbi, 2020)  이주혜, 『자두』 (창비, 2020) · Hwang Jungeun, “Things to Come,” Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024)  황정은, 「다가오는 것들」, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020)

by Shin Soojeong

Cover Features

[Review] Where Are All Those Pronouns Going?

When we think of Oh Eun, the poet and his poetry, the first thing that comes to mind is wordplay—a childlike delight in playing with language. Of the many forms wordplay can take, Oh Eun’s poetic technique and voice are most defined by homonymy and the maximization of its effect. An example is the way he freewheels through the many words that share the pronunciation “seol”—New Year’s Day, tongue (頍), speech (飹), snow (馯)—all in a single poem, displaying a sophisticated sensitivity to language, an effervescent tone, and a distinct aesthetic sense. This is the poetry of Oh Eun we’re all familiar with, a realm of his own where no one else can approach him. (Incidentally, Korean homophones rarely carry over nicely into other languages. This will be the greatest challenge facing any translator of Oh Eun’s poetry.)                But while his poetry reads very much like a child’s innocent play, this doesn’t mean it can be passed over with a cursory glance. Whether intentionally or otherwise, it imparts a sense of weighty thematic concerns lying beneath the surface. The desire and lack levied upon individuals under the capitalist system, the social class conferred upon a person at birth and the inequalities arising from it—at the base of his poetry is a series of topics far removed from light wordplay. A tone of sadness, stemming from not only human limitations but the limitation of all beings in this world, prevents us from passing over it lightheartedly. Especially in his most recent work, we find this tone of sadness lying densely at the deepest level of his poetry.         His most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, once again effortlessly blends this characteristic levity of voice, depth of thought, and undertone of sadness, but a new feature is apparent as well—the intensive use of pronouns. The word “pronoun” appears in the title of the collection, and the table of contents is a lineup of identically-titled poems named after the pronouns “There,” “That,” “Those,” “Them,” “He,” “You,” and so on, while even more pronouns overflow from the main text. Before we dig in to this rich feast of pronouns, let’s take a moment to savor the concept of the pronoun itself.         According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, a pronoun is “a word used in place of a person or thing’s name. Or, the term for the part of speech referring to such words.” Put simply, it is a word that replaces a noun. That is, a word that presupposes a noun. We could go as far as to say it is a word that can exert no power without a noun. Without the noun for a thing—for instance, a chair—a pronoun like this or that ends up referring to nothing or to anything at all. Our ability to use a given pronoun with confidence presupposes that there is already a noun ascribed to its referent. Occasionally, there are times when we struggle to remember the noun—when we can clearly picture the thing but can’t remember its name—but this is another case in which a pronoun is useful. The pronoun steps in to take the place of the noun, however insufficiently, until we can recall the name of the thing. Or when we’ve encountered a thing for the first time, and we don’t yet know its name or still haven’t come up with a name for it, then a pronoun comes in handy. In this sense, a pronoun is a faithful complement to a noun.         On the other hand, sometimes pronouns are used in a way that flips their presumed role as a replacement or auxiliary on its head. In other words, there are moments when we witness an inversion of the hierarchical perception that the referent comes first, followed by the noun, followed by the pronoun. Such scenes play out occasionally in philosophy and literature, and to an extreme in Oh Eun’s poetry. The abundant pronouns in The Pronoun for Nothingness are evidence of this.         To break the hierarchical order of referent-noun-pronoun, Oh Eun’s poetry goes on the offensive against nouns, as in, “The starlight appeared and the star was gone / The mountain bird sang and the mountain went away / The seawater swelled and the sea dried up // Like a word forgetting its meaning / The moment it’s pronounced” (“That”). Here, “star,” “mountain,” and “sea” all function as names for things and play the role of denoting their meanings as well as referring to them, but the moment the word is uttered, what disappears is the star, the mountain, and the sea—that is, the thing itself. As soon as we realize that the noun is unrelated to the real object it presupposes, the pronoun which takes its place also loses its relation to the thing itself and the noun which names it, and the frame of the hierarchy is broken. The noun and pronoun become equal in being nothing more than words. There is no serious distinction between them, as they can both be separated from the thing itself at any time.         Since a word is only a word, it cannot maintain unique coordinates. It takes on a different meaning with each use, in each new context and situation. How unstable, how uncertain is the meaning of “person” in the lines, “Lucky to be a person, and / Even luckier not to have been” (“They”)? Staring down the fact that each person in this poem is every bit as unstable and uncertain as the pronoun they which collectively replaces them, Oh Eun’s poetry does not restrain its offensive to nouns only, nor even to language as a whole, which nouns might be expected to represent. The referent of language, the thing itself, is just as hard to pin down. When someone signs off on a new place because it has three windows, only to discover on moving day that the three windows have become two (“He”), is this simply a misperception? Or did the thing itself change? Either way, the outside world is no longer so easy to trust. You can never be sure when things will change, when perceptions will change, when language will change.         When “They only looked away for a second / And this ceased to be this / This gave up on being this / They go back into the bathroom / They search the utility closet up and down / But this never shows back up” (“This”), the unstable mutability of the world/perception/language represented by this applies just as much to us—both the thing itself and the concept—as well as to me—both thing and concept. When we use the word us, we may grow close enough to share secrets, but this we is only a temporary result, unable to go beyond the we “outside the parentheses” (“We”). Whether the real we sits outside the signifier we or the signifier we sits outside the real we, in every moment that we are referred to as we, we grow more distant from us. A we  wrenched further apart with each invocation.1 And this situation cannot simply be avoided by me.         For instance, in the lines, “Alone / In the bathroom // All by myself, and still / It was an effort for me to smile” (“Me”), myself is wrenched apart from me, whether the signifier or the thing itself, imparting some sense of why I can only ever be other to myself. The somber but not unfamiliar realization that it takes effort to move myself, just as it would to move another, produces a keen sense of the futility of the desire to name, describe, or capture the thing itself. And when you are “born a proper noun but [. . .] often called a pronoun,” and live out your life hopping from adjective to numeral, verb, determiner, adverb, and so on, this is why the last thing you have to say is something like a self-pitying sigh: “Oh, this wasn’t the sentence!” (“You”). We wander through so many sentences only to find the wrong one. As long as we live, we will continue to choose the wrong sentence, and the final sentence we choose to sum up our lives is bound to be wrong too.         This predicament resulting from the unbridgeable gap between language and thing, sign and object, signifier and signified, leaves a bitter aftertaste. But Oh Eun’s poetry does not stop at bitterness. Bitterness is only one of the many flavors his poetry can offer. And there is one more that must be discussed—sadness.         For instance, let’s take a look at the first poem, “There.” The fact that “cheerfulness” appears twice in such a short poem might lead us to imagine the speaker’s cheerful face, but the speaker’s attitude as he greets his father’s ashes “as cheerfully as possible” isn’t so simple. At the most basic level, the there where the speaker’s father resides must be the charnel house that holds his ashes, but ultimately this there is a place that cannot be reached by the living. Only in death does it become a part of one’s lived (?) experience. It is a place that can’t be approached by the language of life, but which we yearn to speak to, if only in life’s language. The speaker doesn’t want to say anything particularly special. Just a cheerful phrase like, “I’ve been doing well.” Or a word of grief, sadness, or longing that he’s been holding back with cheerfulness. The thought that he’ll be headed there one day too. The promise to live with “precipitously overflowing cheerfulness” if only for the sake of his father, who departed first for “that far off day.” Reading over poems steeped in this feeling, we realize why this poetry collection overflowing with pronouns had to be titled The Pronoun for Nothingness. And it is the poet’s foreword that reminds us of the foundation of loss and absence that sustains  the collection: “In the place of loss, there was is.”            As long as we live, “Nothingness will forever knock on former somethingness” (“Those”). This “former somethingness” not only refers to a past presence, but also strongly suggests that all presence is momentary. No one can escape the fate of staying for only a moment before moving on. And once we recognize that this moment of presence is premised on absence, all the pronouns in these poems suddenly read as if they refer back to absence. We realize that, as we go through life naming, memorizing, and forgetting the names for things, the pronouns that accompany us can ultimately only refer to nothing—nonrelation, namelessness. And we accept the bitter but unmistakable fact that, even in our way of referring to the that, there, and then which can only be called nothingness, human knowledge can’t help but rely on a pronoun. There’s no other way; all we can do is call it what it is. There, at the final destination of life, is that. Sometime, you will be there, as will I.  Translated by Seth Chandler   Kim Un is the author of the poetry collections including One Sentence, Your Unknowable Heart, and To the Blank Page, and the essay collection Everyone Holds a Sentence in the Heart, the poetics collection Poetry Does Not Speak of Parting, the literary criticism collection Beyond the Writing of Violence and Allure, and the reader’s memoir, Reading Old Books. He has received the Midang Literary Award, Park In-Hwan Literary Award, Kim Hyeon Prize, and Daesan Literary Award. He is currently a professor at the School of Creative Writing, Seoul Institute of the Arts.   Korean WORK Mentioned:• Oh Eun, The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)   1     Translator’s Note: This is a play on the Korean words “uri” (辦葬 – we, us) and “yuri” (嶸葬 – isolated, separated, divided) which are near homophones/homographs, further suggesting the inherent divisions within any us. I’ve attempted to translate this through the visual similarity of “we” and “wrenched,” but the effect is difficult to reproduce.

by Kim Un

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[Cover Feature] A New Ethic of Anti-Growth Narratives about Young Korean Women in the 2010s

The 2018 film Park Hwa-young, directed by Lee Hwan, sparked intense discussion for its unprecedentedly raw depiction of the lives of runaway teenagers. In the movie, the eponymous Park Hwa-young (played by Kim Ga-hee) insists her “family” of runaway youths address her as “Mother.” Her small, rundown apartment, where she has been living since running away from home at the age of seventeen, becomes a hideout for all the neighborhood’s delinquents. Hwa-young actively embraces her role as mother, cooking instant ramen for them and doing their laundry. She does all this with money from her own mother (Hwang Young-hee), which she extorts through physical threats and verbal abuse. The irony is that Hwa-young’s obsession with being addressed in this way is only a vain attempt to fill the void left by her own abandonment. In truth, there is nothing motherly about Hwa-young’s position in the group. She is more a doormat than a family matriarch. Even her closest friend, Mijeong (Kang Min-ah), exploits Hwa-young’s emotional vulnerability for her own personal gain. To keep favor with her abusive boyfriend Young-jae (Lee Jae Kyun), Mi-jeong uses Hwa-young both as a maid and a scapegoat. And despite being the victim of Young-jae’s violence, which he uses to maintain dominance in the group, Mi-jeong clings to him to maintain her own position in the hierarchy, only leaning on Hwa-young when it suits her. The acts of kindness she does show Hwa-young are trivial—going on a trip to Wolmido together or doing her makeup. The relationship is little more than a transaction of convenience, ready to be abandoned at a moment’s notice. The children only turn to Hwa-young when they need to, using her as a means to an end; no one truly respects her. Her repeated question, “What would you guys do without me?” is understood by the audience as mere bravado; the reality is that no one genuinely needs her.         Hwa-young becomes aggressive when interacting with her mother, teachers, and welfare supervisor. She brandishes a knife at passersby and defies the police when they try to corral her. She acts like a trapped animal, baring her teeth to keep those who are trying to control her at bay. But somewhat paradoxically, such wild behavior has no sway in the group. In a reversal of “kiss up, kick down,” Hwa-young confronts adults with violence and uses whatever means necessary to protect her territory out in public, but among friends, she becomes (quite literally) their punching bag and maid. Hwa-young’s depiction as a fake mother to children who lack domestic stability symbolizes both the absence of patriarchal family ideology and the desperate struggle to fill that void. The movie is an unflinching depiction of the catastrophe that happens when such voids are filled by unnatural and insufficient means.         Toward the end of the movie, Mi-jeong is sexually assaulted by a man she meets for transactional sex, and when Hwa-young intervenes she is raped in Mi-jeong’s place. Despite suffering such extreme abuse, Hwa-young never abandons her position as scapegoat—even though Yeong-jae and Mi-jeong beat the man to death, it is Hwa-young who takes the fall for the murder and is sent to prison. Her tragic sacrifice illustrates how familial roles can be violently twisted when performed outside the traditional social safety net.         Even after everything she goes through, Hwa-young’s life shows little change. She still allows delinquents to sleep in her cramped apartment and eat her ramen. If there is one difference, it is that her motherly persona is now somewhat deflated. Meanwhile, Mi-jeong has started with a fresh slate and become an aspiring actress whose main worries are weight loss and her busy shooting schedule. She offers no apology to Hwa-young (who now has a criminal record because of her) and ignores Hwa-young’s offer of a cigarette, as if the two had never smoked together. Mi-jeong not only calls her by name, but when Hwa-young refers to her old title as “Mother,” Mi-jeong denies their past by saying, “My mother is doing well. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Faced with Mi-jeong’s betrayal, Hwa-young lets out a hollow laugh. Her only choice now is to return to her chaotic life cooking for runaways without ever earning their respect. Just as Mi-jeong suggests when she tells Hwa-young, “You haven’t changed a bit. You’re just as I remember you,” the last two images of Hwa-young—confused silence and self-mocking laughter—portray someone who has returned to the beginning, without success or growth: an image of anti-growth.         Park Hwa-young leaves us with an unsettling glimpse into a world in which parental care is not sacred or even meaningful, but is simply wasted. It refuses to offer a hopeful resolution of familial restoration or reconciliation; it is a quiet observation of the ruthless survival strategies of adolescents whose relationships are solely based on self-interest and exploitation. For these children, family is already a broken illusion, and any attempt to replace it only perpetuates a cycle of violence and abuse. In this way, Park Hwa-young is a microcosm for the gloomy reality faced by those Korean teenagers of the twenty-first century who are running around in circles, with no growth or future. Indeed, the movie does not end like a traditional coming-of-age story; instead, it achieves its bleak aesthetic through exposing a world marked by stagnation and aimless wandering.         Unlike Park Hwa-young, the heroine of Kim Bora’s House of Hummingbird (2019), Eunhee (Park Ji-hu), seems like a typical middle schooler. She has two parents who run a rice cake shop in Daechi-dong, an older brother named Daehoon (Son Sang-yeon) who dreams of getting into Seoul National University, and an older sister, Suhee (Park Soo-yeon), whose only interest is her love life. However, Eunhee’s life is filled with alienation and isolation. Her parents shower her studious brother with affection while ignoring or even condoning his frequent abuse of Eunhee. Even her sister shows little interest in her. Eunhee looks for comfort in her relationships with her best friend Jisuk (Paek Seo-yoon) and boyfriend Jiwan (Jung Yoon-seo), but these, too, end in painful experiences of betrayal and loss. Of course, there are rays of hope in Eunhee’s life. When the new Hanmun teacher Youngji (Kim Sae-byuk) arrives at her school, Eunhee feels respected by an adult for the first time. She also meets an underclassman named Yuri (Seol Hye-in) who expresses admiration and affection for her. But after just one semester, Youngji dies suddenly in the Seongsu Bridge collapse, while Yuri starts to ignore Eunhee. This leaves Eunhee wandering aimlessly again.         House of Hummingbird creates a unique aesthetic by blurring the causal relationships between events, obscuring each scene’s individual meaning and creating loose juxtapositions. The director portrays Eunhee’s life not through clear turning points and climaxes, but through an accumulation of subtle emotions and incidents, thereby dismantling the cause-and-effect logic of traditional coming-of-age narratives. Every event in Eunhee’s life seems significant, but none has a singular, fixed meaning; instead, fragments of episodes and emotions appear and disappear at random, quietly emphasizing that growth is nonlinear and chaotic. Scenes in which Eunhee’s father suddenly breaks into tears upon hearing that she will need major surgery, or when her brother becomes emotional at the dinner table as he realizes the whole family is safe after the bridge collapse, have undeniable emotional power but resist interpretation because of the audience’s memory of previous scenes of domestic abuse, inflicted by the father on the mother and the brother on Eunhee. Rather than responding to her father and brother’s tears by drawing closer to them, Eunhee appears confused and distanced. Paradoxically, it is not at home but the quotidian peripheries—at the Hanmun academy next to school, in a neighborhood where people have been evicted from their homes, in the corner of the schoolyard with friends, outside the entrance to the apartment complex where she says goodbye to her first love—that are elevated as key emotional coordinates, becoming the core sites of her growth narrative.         In House of Hummingbird, the scenes of the Seongsu Bridge collapsing and of neighborhoods disappearing due to redevelopment projects function as points of connection between collective trauma in Korean society and individual experience. The image of Eunhee and her sister standing by the river and gazing out at the site of the collapsed bridge is a poignant visual reminder that individual lives are inseparable from social and historical events. Eunhee’s personal coming-of-age narrative acquires universality through this connection to collective memory. Indeed, the film asks a philosophical question: how do we remember the past while living in the present, at the intersection of personal growth and history? The film is not just set in 1994 for cheap nostalgia; that year is symbolic of the convergence of collective trauma and personal loss for Korean people, and events like the Seongsu Bridge collapse show how unimaginable disasters can suddenly shatter ordinary people’s lives. At the same time, their presence in this film demands from viewers the ability to transcend the boundaries of time and feel past events as if they were happening now.         In Eunhee’s life, events are accidental and unpredictable, and they result not in clear growth or achievement but the development of empathy and ethical sensitivity. When Eunhee shows empathy for others’ pain during a conversation with her mother, the film suggests that growth does not necessarily come from success and accomplishments, but through human connection and empathy. In departing from the conventional coming-of-age narrative of male adolescents overcoming hardships to achieve success, House of Hummingbird presents the possibility of a new form of subjectivity. That is, the movie uses episodic interplay and polyphonic detail to reflect the fractures of contemporary society through the life of a girl, exploring the intersection between personal development and collective history.         Park Hwa-young and House of Hummingbird both incorporate coincidence to create decisive turning points in the plot, disrupting the causal logic that underpins the popular growth myth. For example, Hwa-young’s sexual abuse and incarceration result from Mijeong’s plans going awry, while House of Hummingbird is upended by Youngji’s sudden death on Seongsu Bridge. Both protagonists’ trajectories deviate from traditional formulas, subverting male-centered coming-of-age narratives. Indeed, it is through the eyes of young girls that patriarchal authority is dismantled and the ethics of relationships are restructured. In contrast to contemporary anti-growth narratives about teenage boys, which tend toward despair and cynicism, House of Hummingbird uses a gendered perspective to redefine what it means to grow up, allowing Eunhee to be reborn as a new subject who uses the experience of pain to cultivate empathy and solidarity. A key example of this comes after Youngji’s death, when Eunhee tries for the first time to understand the emotions behind her mother’s comment, “It feels strange without Uncle.” This scene illustrates the other side of growing up—the development of sensitivity to others’ pain and cultivation of an ethical consciousness—suggesting that growth doesn’t need to be tied solely to accomplishment. However, the protagonist of Park Hwa-young ultimately strays from the path of growth, and the film’s critical message becomes this derailment itself, demonstrating how without institutional support and protection children will mimic adults and end up destroying one another. However, the smile on Hwa-young’s face at the end of this tragic anti-coming-of-age tale doesn’t serve the cruel purpose of giving us false hope, but serves as a question mark interrogating how one person chooses to love. It suggests that self-sacrifice might, in fact, be a matter of active choice.         Both of these young women are searching for a way to live with the wounds left by patriarchy and capitalism, but we never get a clear solution. These anti-coming-of-age films about young women dismantle the grammar of traditional coming-of-agestories, searching for the possibility of a new subjectivity for life in a fractured era. Park Hwa-young, a radically apocalyptic take on the void left by the collapse of the family and community, shows both the danger and the possibilities of distorted substitute families created by youths in the absence of traditional family structures. In contrast, House of Hummingbird, as a lyrical poem suggesting new ethical growth through ripples in the fabric of everyday life, searches for the possibility of emotional maturation that embraces loss and pain. The narratives of these girls who do not grow up show not simply stagnation, but rather stories that progress differently from traditional coming-of-age formulas. In that way, you might call them attempts to make us imagine a new type of ethic for solidarity and responsibility in the wake of the collapse of the myth of growth.         In the late 2010s, a distinctive anti-coming-of-age narrative centered on young women emerged. These narratives brought an absence and failure of growth to the forefront. Whereas conventional coming-of-age stories depicted a protagonist’s journey of self-discovery and social integration—often reaffirming patriarchal authority and capitalist ideals of success in the process—the young women in these films either reject that system from the outset or fail to assimilate into it. In doing so, they subvert the traditional growth formula, raising fundamental questions about conventional systems. By choosing stagnation and deviation over progress, these characters hint at other possibilities for development and successfully expose the falsehoods of patriarchal values. Park Hwa-young and House of Hummingbird reject the norms of growth narratives shaped by patriarchal expectations and move toward anti-growth, offering a deep reflection about a reality in which the “way of the world” demonstrated by the traditional bildungsroman is no longer valid. Both films give detailed depictions of how, when the ideals of growth demanded by patriarchy and capitalism are no longer realistically viable, young women can both represent that impossibility and the search for different possibilities, forcing audiences to rethink the meaning of growth and maturation. These female characters do not grow up, but their anti-growth is not mere regression or failure. Instead, it can be seen as an unconscious refusal of the dominant order and search for alternative forms of subjectivity. In that sense, by not following familiar arcs of growth and achievement, their stories suggest that “it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” as Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Or, as in Lu Xun’s “My Old Home,” that “originally there was no path on the ground—yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears.” Translated by Sean Lin Halbert   Cho Hyungrae Cho is the author of the collection of critical essays, Misery in a Godless World. He writes extensively on fiction and film. He is a member of the editorial board on the quarterly Munhakdeul and serves as assistant professor in the Division of Korean Language, Literature, and Creative Writing at Dongguk University.

by Cho Hyungrae