Essays

The Waltz of Expectation and Disappointment

In a city located down south, high-rise apartments were shooting up one after another. I remembered seeing news reports of unsold apartment units piling up, but from the city center to the outskirts, construction was at its peak. I’d be giving lectures for two days in a row, so I’d booked a hotel that towered over a sea of low-rise buildings in the surrounding old downtown area. In this neighborhood, which had thrived during the Japanese occupation and modernization, memories of modernity lingered in low, solid-looking stone buildings, but the signs of decline were palpable. “For Rent” signs were taped to the windows of empty storefronts strewn with “Blowout Sale” flyers. The black marble-finished first floor of my lodging housed the hotel’s front desk, a chain coffee shop, and a sundubu restaurant. When I looked at the online map to make a reservation, none of this had stood out to me. Next door was a university hospital; a famous department store and the Catholic cathedral were just a short walk away.  My room was on the seventeenth floor. It was dark when I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I assumed there were thick curtains drawn across the windows, but there were only blackout roller blinds. No curtains. Only when I raised the blinds did the view become visible. Since the hotel stood tall among the low, modern-era buildings, I had an unobstructed view. The hotel itself wasn’t badly situated and it had a respectable star rating, yet there were signs of neglect. The lowered roller blinds were one such detail, as were the crumpled, unpressed bed sheets. The slippers wrapped in crinkly plastic were sticking halfway out of the bag as if someone had tried to tear it open and shoved the slippers back in, and when I turned on the TV, all I could see was the hotel’s promotional screen. Despite my best attempts I couldn’t figure out how to change the channel. The bathroom was fully visible from the bedroom through a glass wall with nothing to block the view. Staying alone meant there was no need to hide, but sitting in that wide-open bathroom somehow made me feel uneasy. It’s said that Soseki Natsume covered up all the windows in his house because he felt like someone might be watching him. I wasn’t quite at that point, but I understood him. The room was filled with a distinctive stench, seemingly seeping through the pipes, that was common to old buildings. I pushed opened the tilt window for ventilation, but as I was on one of the higher floors, it only opened about an inch. I could understand that much, but when I tried to close it, it stubbornly resisted and wouldn’t shut. In the end, a staff member had to come up to deal with the TV and the window. After finishing my talk and returning to the hotel, I found the tilt window that the staff member had closed for me had swung open again. I tried closing it again, but it wouldn’t budge, so I pulled it shut as best as I could and lowered the roller blinds. Fortunately, the roller blinds were made of blackout material, so I wouldn’t be bothered by light. After turning off the lights, I fell asleep but was woken up roughly every hour. Motorcycles delivering late-night food raced noisily along the ten-lane street; the sirens of ambulances entering and leaving the university hospital seeped through the poorly closed window and pierced my ears. In the city, it seemed like countless people were collapsing, getting hurt, and dying all night long. That night I had a dream. I was somewhere with my father. Looking at his face, I thought it was strange how smooth and unlined his skin was. He was not like my father at all. He looked more like a marble bust, rather than a real person. We didn’t talk, but I felt as if I had somehow disappointed him and he was punishing me with his silence. Another blaring ambulance siren jolted me awake. It was just a dream. That’s right, my father passed away ten years ago. That day, someone who came to the auditorium dressing room had asked me, “Have you ever visited our city before? Do you have any personal connections to it?” I said, “Well, if you call it a connection, my father attended a vocational high school here. It was famous for baseball, and he was proud of that.” That conversation probably led to the dream.  In medieval Christianity, people debated what form the body would take at the final resurrection. Would it appear as it did at the moment of death, or would it return to the most ideal form it had when it was still alive? If everyone rose looking as they did when they died, heaven would hardly be pleasant—it might not feel like heaven at all. But if everyone rose as their ideal selves, with faces looking perfect like photoshopped passport photos, that would also feel unnatural. Yet that night, my father appeared in my dream with precisely that ideal skin and face, and I felt unsettled rather than glad to see him that way. My father was born in Japan, like my uncle, in 1939.  My grandfather and grandmother first went to Manchuria, then crossed over to Japan, where they ran a restaurant somewhere near Kobe serving Koreans who had been forcibly taken there under Japan’s labor program. It’s estimated that around 1.4 million people returned to the Korean Peninsula from Japan immediately after liberation, and my grandfather was one of them. The entire population equivalent to that of present-day Daejeon returned almost empty-handed (the Japanese government allowed each repatriated person to take home no more than 1,000 yen). My grandparents returned to their hometown with their two sons and settled down. Farming couldn’t have been easy for those returning after running businesses in a foreign land. The household had little to spare, but children kept being born until there were seven siblings. Only the eldest son was sent to an agricultural high school; my father stopped studying after elementary school and helped on the farm. After watching from a hill as his friends returned home from school with their bookbags, my father ran away and went alone to the city. How did this runaway boy manage to enroll in a vocational high school? My young father worked at a kitchen that fed women soldiers and slept in a small room beside the stove. After the evening’s cooking was done, he attended night courses at the vocational school. After my father passed away, my aunt told me that women soldiers had once visited my father’s hometown. They seemed fond of my young father, as they had helped him to continue his studies.  In a hotel room in an unfamiliar town, I lay there staring blankly, thinking about my father and our mutual expectations and disappointments. When did my father first disappoint me? Even having this thought felt unnatural and heavy, as though I was defying gravity. I’d grown up constantly afraid of disappointing my parents, and never considered the possibility of them disappointing me.  I was a child who asked a lot of questions; adults didn’t like children like that. In hindsight, I think they were angry because they didn’t have all the answers. That was before I knew that not every grown-up has the answers. One day, long after I became a novelist, a friend asked one of my former teachers—someone I wasn’t particularly close to in high school—if he remembered Young-ha Kim. The teacher immediately retorted, “Wasn’t he that cheeky kid who asked too many questions?” But I hadn’t even asked one-tenth of what I wanted to.  My first disappointment in my father, too, had something to do with a question. As he crouched down to put on combat boots for work, I asked him, “Why do army boots have so many holes?”  Combat boots have long shafts and many eyelets. You have to thread the long laces through every hole and tie them tightly. To my younger self, it seemed incredibly uncomfortable and a waste of time. Of course, I now understand why combat boots are designed that way. They are, literally, functional footwear for combat. They have to support the soldier’s ankles in any situation, prevent water or dirt from entering the boot, and provide insulation to prevent frostbite. Even as a child, I didn’t expect my father to explain all this to me while he was rushing off to work. But I would have been content if he had explained even one of those many functions. Something like, “You need a long shaft so your ankle doesn’t break easily.” Instead, my father snapped, “Because they’re combat boots!” In one of Ephraim Kishon's short stories, a son asks his father, “How do we know the Earth revolves around the Sun?” The father thinks he can easily explain this seemingly obvious scientific fact, but soon realizes that it isn’t as simple as it sounds. As the explanation keeps getting tangled and repeatedly challenged, he grows increasingly angry. In fact, he didn’t understand the Earth’s revolution well enough to explain it simply.  Maybe my father, too, had never really thought about why combat boots have long shafts and so many eyelets. Or maybe that morning he was simply in no mood to answer. When I was in sixth grade, my father was still stationed on the western front line. In the late 1970s, the front was perpetually tense, making overnight passes or leave rare (it was right after what became known as the Panmunjom Axe Murder Incident, where North Korean guards attacked and killed American soldiers with axes, and tunnels dug by North Korea beneath the armistice line were being discovered). My father made only occasional visits home to Seoul, staying just a day or two before returning to his unit. When he came, he would take my brother and me to the bathhouse first. Dressed in civilian clothes, he looked a bit worn and awkward. But because we didn’t live together and rarely saw him, our bathhouse outings were something my brother and I eagerly anticipated. Around that time, my father, who was starting to get a paunch, would have us brothers soak in the hot bath until our skin had softened, then call us out one at a time to scrub dead skin off our backs. While he grabbed hold of one of us, the other played, going back and forth between the hot and cold baths. My brother and I competed for the privilege of scrubbing our father’s back. The incident happened as we were leaving the bathhouse for home. Someone had stolen the shoes our father had left on the shoe rack. At that time, clothes could be secured in lockers, but shoes had to be placed on the shoe rack at the entrance. Naturally, anyone could sneak out wearing someone else’s shoes. My father was furious.  He demanded the return of his shoes or proper compensation, but the bathhouse owner refused to take responsibility. Unable to go home, my brother and I had no choice but to watch the fight between them. While my father’s anger was understandable, even to my young eyes, the odds were stacked against him. Above the shoe rack, a sign in red letters clearly stated: “Please leave valuables at the counter. We are not responsible for lost items.” Above all, I felt ashamed and hated that the bathhouse’s naked patrons had gathered with rapt attention to watch the outcome of the fight. “Dad, let’s go home, please.” My younger brother looked like he was about to cry.  Still, our father refused to back down and argued fiercely with the owner. Before long, night fell and the crowd of onlookers dwindled. In the end, he didn’t win. The only thing he received from the owner was the last pair left in the shoe rack—old, dirty shoes that the thief had probably taken off and left behind. All the way home, wearing the thief’s shoes with the heels crushed down, he didn’t say a single word. He was forty then, fifteen years younger than I am now, and I fully understand my young father’s actions. It was a classic example of the side effects that come with a life spent as a career soldier. Something like that could never have happened on base. The lining of his boots bore his name written in felt-tip marker, and even if they didn’t, who would dare steal the battalion commander’s shoes? Out in civilian life, the only way he knew how to live was with military discipline. Yet he ruined an enjoyable bathing outing. The happiness stolen from my brother and me then was worth more than a pair of shoes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t forgive my father’s behavior (of course I can, I might have done the same). At some point, every parent disappoints their kids, even if it begins with something as small as a pair of stolen shoes. Some, like me, will remember for decades that minor episode—remember it while understanding it, and understand it while still feeling regret. But that doesn’t mean we hate or dismiss our parents. That one day we will disappoint someone is as self-evident as every object in the universe being pulled by gravity, and accepting that doesn’t mean the world will fall apart. One good thing about getting older is that I’ve learned to separate the good and the bad in what my parents (or anyone else) have done for me.  Living alongside another human being inevitably brings both expectation and disappointment, circling each other like dancers in a waltz. When expectation steps forward, disappointment steps back, and when disappointment turns right, expectation turns with it. When expectation’s movements grow large, disappointment’s movements grow large as well; when expectation takes small steps, disappointment’s steps stay small too. It might be safer to expect less to avoid great disappointment, but what kind of dance would that be to watch? After many years had passed, I asked my father about the bathhouse incident. He only said that he didn’t remember. Expectations, disappointments—it was just a dance I had danced alone. My father, weakened in his final years by stroke and cancer, suddenly told my brother and me one day that even if he died, there was no need to hold something like ancestral rites for him, and that we should just scatter his ashes in the mountains or by a river. Having completed a full career in the military, he had the right to be buried at the National Cemetery, but he didn’t want that either. After all, even the National Cemetery has a time limit, and then he’d have to be moved somewhere else. And who would be in charge of that? He wouldn’t have any descendants anyway . . . He spoke coolly, but suppressed disappointment and anger hung heavy in the air. “Our family never held ancestral rites before,” I retorted sharply. “Why bring them up now? We won’t be holding them.” The rites were performed by my older uncle in the countryside, and my father, unable to leave his post, had rarely attended, so other family members certainly hadn’t either. My mother had despised the idea of even going near ancestral rites her entire life.  This ritual, introduced from China by Joseon scholars and adapted by the local culture, didn’t disappear as the country modernized, and instead it spread widely, even to families that had never performed ancestral rites before. The Park Chung-hee regime, which revered military efficiency and treated modernization like a religion, disliked the custom of ancestral rites honoring spirits. It issued guidelines for household rites in an effort to simplify ancestral memorial rites and ritual ceremonies, but it failed. Ancestral rites are a play enacted solemnly by the living, with remembrance as their theme. We open doors and windows to signal a welcome to the spirits, and we write our ancestors’ names on ritual hanji tablets and burn them. I used to wonder why we had to write their names only to burn them, since the spirits would find their way home on their own. But there was a reason. In the spirit world, there are so many spirits whose names no one calls. Unless you write the name precisely on the ritual tablet and burn it, every kind of spirit—all sorts of stray spirits—will show up. Just as weeds signify plants without names, stray spirits are those whose names have been forgotten. Spirits who aren’t stray wanderers have someone to call out their name. The ritual begins by calling the name in a way they can understand, and inviting them in. As he sensed the end of his life approaching, my father seemed to begin worrying about who would remember him after his death. While I fully understood that this was likely the only form of remembrance he could rely on, I had no desire to accept his passive-aggressive guilt-tripping that suddenly insisted, “I don’t need a memorial service or a grave.” It was then that the waltz of expectation and disappointment that my father and I had danced finally came to an end. My father’s will that wasn’t a will was only half-realized. His remains were interred at the Daejeon National Cemetery against his wishes (in truth, due to my mother’s strong insistence), and the nation erected a headstone engraved with his name. We do not hold ancestral rites. Instead, I remember my father in my own way. I write. About the things my dead father has left me. Of course, he would not have liked that.

by Kim Young-ha

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

Translator's Desk

Translating in Four Hands

KLN Hello, Mr. Bisiou. We’re very pleased to meet you. We know you’ve translated Han Kang, Miye Lee, Kim Hye-jin, You-jeong Jeong, and other Korean writers into French. Could you tell us about your work as a translator? PB In France, for many years now, Korean literature has been translated by pairs. One person is a native in the Korean language; the other is a native in French. The Korean native works on a translation draft; the French native then reviews and polishes the translation. The resulting translation is a work of four hands.  My partner is Ms. Choi Kyungran, who has co-translated more than forty books with various collaborators. For the past fifteen years, I’ve had the honor of being her translation partner KLN How did you two meet?  PB It was a coincidence. She was already a translator; I was a publisher. We happened to be neighbors in Paris. I walked past her windows every day to get to my place, as we shared the same courtyard. We got to know each other thanks to our landlord, and one day she asked me if I would be interested in translating Korean novels with her, as the person she had been working with until then had left Paris. I think that must have been in 2012. It was the beginning of a wonderful experience. KLN Could you tell us about how you work with Choi Kyungran?  PB Sure. My partner begins the process by producing a preliminary translation in French. Then I sit down at my desk. On my computer, two documents are open. On the left, my colleague’s translation, and on the right, a blank page.  Day by day, I rewrite the book in its entirety, to give it a truly literary form. Once that is done, Ms. Choi and I go back and forth many times, having long discussions to refine my choices. She constantly makes sure that I never betray the original text.  My challenge, my duty is to produce a French text that is as literary as possible, while remaining most respectful and faithful to the original. Translation is for me a matter of concentration and intuition. Above all, it is a passion.   KLN Your co-translations with Choi Kyungran have received many prizes. In particular, Impossibles Adieux (in English, We Do Not Part) received the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Prix Émile Guimet, two very distinguished prizes awarded in France. Impossibles Adieux was also shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger. Could you tell us about your experience translating Han Kang?  PB As I already mentioned, I was a publisher before I became a translator. My publishing house, Le Serpent à Plumes, published four of Han Kang’s novels. We started with La Végétarienne (The Vegetarian), then Celui qui revient (Human Acts), Leçons de grec (Greek Lessons), and finally Blanc (The White Book). This gave us the opportunity to invite Han Kang to France on several occasions. It was so great to meet her.  Our first meeting took place in 2016. Korea was the guest of honor at the Paris Book Fair. We were a small independent publishing house at the time, with limited means, but we did our best to welcome her warmly. I remember we took her to the theater. She was always endlessly patient. And during the book signing sessions at the book fair, the public was completely charmed by her. Seeing all those wonderful encounters, we knew we were incredibly lucky to be working with such a person. It was both deeply rewarding and moving. Each time she returned, the same magic happened again.  However, the book sales were not very good. My publishing house, Le Serpent à Plumes, was bought by a group that was later acquired by an even bigger one. In 2019, those people told me they no longer wanted to publish books “that don’t sell,” and they shut down my house. I lost everything. That’s life!   KLN We’re so sorry to hear that!  PB The truth is that we had no success during those early years. It was incredibly difficult to promote an unknown Korean author (I published La Végétarienne before her success in the UK). When Han Kang came over, I had the hardest time finding even one journalist to interview her. I sold 700 copies of my hardcover edition of La Végétarienne in 2015. Ten years later, her publisher sold more than 80,000 copies of Impossibles Adieux (We Do Not Part). Everything has to start somewhere— even fame.  KLN One last question: what advice would you give to ensure that Korean authors continue to be translated worldwide, into more and more languages?  PB I think it would be great to see more translation duos from all over the world. Four hands are more fun than two!

by Pierre Bisiou

Book Shelf

Placing the Past Within the Present

I was seven years old when the first state-organized family reunions between North and South Korea took place. By then, five years had passed since I had been forcibly taken from my birthplace, Busan, and sold for adoption to a foreign country. I remember thinking how cruel it was that families could be kept apart by others, not realizing that my own life had been and would continue to be affected by similar gatekeeping.  I was twenty-three when South Korea introduced a lottery system to select the lucky few permitted to travel to North Korea to reunite with loved ones. Six years had passed since I had made my first, but failed, attempt to find my Korean parents. I remember the anxiety I felt watching the news coverage of the reunions, knowing that by the next time the lottery was held, even more people would find their time had run out. For adopted people in search of their origins, knowing that finding family members is a race against time is a constant source of stress. Yet for many of us, it can take half a lifetime or more to find the strength to initiate the often draining process of family search. I was forty-one when the last state-organized reunions took place. By then, six years had passed since I had reunited with the mother I’d lost on the day I was born. Holding my hands in hers, she told me she had spent her whole life wondering whether or not I’d survived after I was taken from her. Not knowing what happened to the family you were separated from freezes you in time. On the outside, life moves on, and your body ages, but some part of you remains in the place where you last saw your loved ones. That part doesn’t grow older. It simply waits, yearning for a time that can now exist only in memory.  Few works capture this suspended grief as hauntingly and beautifully as Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel The Waiting (tr. Janet Hong, Drawn & Quarterly, 2021). Narrated by the semi-autobiographical character Jina, the story follows Jina’s mother Gwija, who was separated from her husband and firstborn while fleeing their home in the north during the Korean War. Her life becomes defined by waiting, by the hope of being chosen in the reunion lottery. We are taught that war is bound by dates—that the Korean War began in 1950 and ended in 1953. Adoption, too, is often framed as a single event rather than something that reverberates through a person’s entire life. On one level, this is simply how we narrate history—through timelines, markers, and endpoints. But on another level, this can become a way to simplify and erase lived experiences that demand account­ability and action long after the main event has ended.  Gendry-Kim dissolves the illusion that the trauma of family separations is confined to the past. Her work shows how war continues—quietly, persistently—in the daily lives of those left behind. She conveys this through visual contrasts: the terror and confusion of war, communi­cated with thick, expressive brushstrokes in heavily packed pages, with slow-moving panels featuring present-day Gwija as she prepares food, battles the remote control for the television, and struggles with her aching and aging body to answer the phone. At times, the timelines are blurred together and flash­backs bleed into the present. When Gwija’s friend Jeongsun is chosen by the lottery and meets her younger sister, the final page depicting their reunion shows Jeongsun’s elderly figure. Floating before her, almost as if she’s carrying them in her hands, are the two sisters as smiling children. Earlier, Jeongsun had said, “I thought I’d be meeting my little sister. But it was a granny who showed up.” In this moment, Gendry-Kim places the past within the present, clearly showing that the past isn’t something we can just put behind us. It continues to live within us and shape our identities and relationships. The Waiting is far from a story about passivity. While “waiting” may imply inaction, a state of not doing much, Gendry-Kim treats it as a form of resistance. By participating in the reunion lottery, by repeatedly asking for updates, and by sharing her story with her daughter, Gwija embodies strength, persistence, and hope. Memory becomes an act of defiance, a refusal to let lost family members fade into the faceless ghosts Gendry-Kim poignantly portrays them as on one of the spreads in the book. The struggle of separated families for reunion mirrors the struggle of countless adopted people who must fight against adoption agencies, government institutions, and private interests just to access basic information about their origins. For those who haven’t experienced the violence of permanent family separation, it can be difficult to understand why some of us continue to hope for reunion, given how impossible it seems. But with The Waiting, Gendry-Kim not only brings attention to an overlooked aspect of war, she also shows that these human experiences have value, that they deserve to be documented and recorded. While the media tends to focus on the rare, emotionally charged reunions, it often rejects the far greater number of people who never find their families. These stories are typically deemed unworthy of attention since they lack “entertainment value.” In offering a deeply moving, highly engaging portrait of someone who remains waiting, Gendry-Kim proves that the stories of those who are not yet reunited are just as important. For me personally, The Waiting has given me a deeper under­standing of how my family separation fits into Korean history and has inspired me to keep going in my own work as a comic book artist.

by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom / 정울림

Translator's Desk

The Lazy Translator

Emerging literary translators often come up and tell me how much they want to be like me. They mean well, and more power to them, but I do find myself thinking: Are you sure about that?     At the beginning of Chuseok in 2023, my husband and I landed in Taipei for a vacation, whereupon I promptly fell asleep for twenty hours straight. Because I was exhausted. Right before we left for Taiwan, I had managed to hand in my translations for both A Magical Girl Retires and I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, do a TV interview for a book I had written in Korean about my life as a translator, and attend a regular literary workshop session. I remember lying in the dark in Seoul just before we left, trying to get my work-addled brain to sleep and thinking, I cannot keep living like this, I will die.  I knew then I had to change the way I worked in 2024, because somehow, I had nine full-length manuscripts due that calendar year, with at least one book translation due every month from December 2023 through June. I also had teach­ing, traveling, and prize-judging commitments, was somehow publishing a novel I had written, and was going on tour in the US and UK, as well as Australia and Singapore. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m a workaholic or that I love to work. I’m actually very lazy. That’s why, early in my career, I took the trouble to calculate the minimum amount of work I would have to do to live modestly in the city of my choice. For the sake of illustration, let’s update those numbers for 2025. The median household income in Seoul was around 57 million won in 2024. An LTI Korea translation grant is around 12 million won for a full-length novel of average length, which means a literary translator has to complete about five books a year to survive in Seoul. If one has an earning partner, their earnings can be deducted from the 57 million goal, drastically lowering the full-timer threshold (if not eliminating it altogether). But since my husband was in grad school when I began my career, as the breadwinner I took it upon myself to earn the median Seoul household income myself until he graduated with his PhD.    Every time I considered a project or a gig, I did the math to see if it would be financially worth doing. Ever wonder why even though so many translators publish in literary magazines, I rarely do? That’s because I figured out that putting together a magazine submission took almost the same effort as putting together a book proposal, and selling a book brings in way more money than publishing in a magazine. The point is, I’ve always worked with very concrete numbers, mostly because, again, I’m congenitally lazy and don’t like to work anymore than I have to. This system fell apart in 2022 when I was double-longlisted for the International Booker Prize and work started pouring in. This doesn’t happen for every translator who loses a Booker, but in my case, everything I had on submission suddenly got sold—including my own novel—and the tide of work rose rapidly. My first-ever author, Jeon Sam-hye, has a saying: Row when the tide is high. Who knew when I would have the time, energy, and opportunity to work at this level again? So I threw myself upon the oars and rowed. I pitched like our house was on fire, taught and lectured at the best translation and literary programs in the English-speaking world, and took so many publishers’ meetings that I made a game of guessing which book the meeting was for while I waited in the Zoom room. But this level of work was unsustainable. I had to recalibrate, if only to survive the gauntlet that would be 2024. It helped im­mensely that my literary agent, who had initially only handled the sales and contract negotiations for my own writing, also began handling my translation contracts. I hired a tax accoun­tant (I can no longer imagine functioning without one). I began keeping a bullet journal in addition to the diary I’d kept since childhood, so I could organize my thoughts instead of falling into a feedback loop of panic, anxiety, and exhaustion.  The tide of opportunities continued to rise—it’s still high to this day—but I got better at identifying which requests would be a waste of time and which were more meaningful. I made a concerted effort to work smarter, not harder, said yes to fewer things, and tried to be more mindful of how I reacted to setbacks. Best of all, I discovered an internal rhythm of language that I found I could tap into at will, a rhythm that I could ride to create the language I needed for that day, be it for translation or for writing. I learned to respect and listen to that rhythm. I’m riding it right now as I write this.     So for those translators who say they want to be like me —boys, be unambitious. Be lazy. Do the math, make less noise, and listen carefully. And work smart. Not hard.

by Anton Hur