Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Korea
The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.
Healing fiction is currently hugely popular in South Korea, and has been since the 2022 release of Welcome to the Hyunam Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum. A raft of English translations are aiming to capitalize on the trend for all things hallyu to make Korean healing fiction an internationally known literary genre. This is a genre that aims to soothe readers exhausted by the pressures of a hypercompetitive and hierarchical society.
BTS are one of the biggest pop culture phenomena to emerge in the 21st century, a fragmented era where one struggles to name similarly hegemonic icons. Perhaps only the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Harry Potter have had a similar reach and staying power. BTS have transcended their original (and already sufficiently lucrative) market of South Korean idol pop, collaborated with western radio mainstays such as Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, and become megastars—only recently fragmenting into solo careers as the members face South Korea’s compulsory military service. For the band’s legion of fans, who refer to themselves as ARMY (this is singular too, a fan can refer to oneself as an ARMY), they need no introduction.
Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in his 2014 autobiography Pot Shards, “we fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice, and the result is hostility fueled by demagoguery, and damage done to all concerned.”
It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the nation’s founding in 1948 that we might as well, in the manner of medieval cartographers, inscribe maps of the Korean Peninsula between the Yalu River and the Demilitarized Zone with illustrations of dragons and lions as an admission that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains terra incognita for outsiders. Happily, for those unable to read Korean, Columbia University Press has published an English translation of a memoir by a prominent defector who fills in some of the map.
A 2016 Associated Press article entitled “S Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of ‘vagrants’” told the English-speaking world about one of the biggest human rights abuses in modern South Korean history. In the 1980s, in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics, President Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship intensified a crackdown on “undesirables”, rounding them up and “rehabilitating” them. At one of the largest rehabilitation centers, known as the Brothers Home, the rehabilitation in fact consisted of slave labour and institutionalized physical and psychological abuse. Sexual violence was especially prevalent.
Even academic books need to be aware of the prevailing zeitgeist. Richard D McBride begins his history of first-millennium Korea with a pop-culture reference to K-Drama.
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
2014, Seoul, South Korea. The Sewol sinks. Russia takes Crimea. A novel flu threatens to turn the world upside down. Nunmaker, expatriate American, is fired without cause from one of three jobs. His wife, Ha, leaves him, but he doesn’t realize it until movers come for her piano.
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