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오늘의 아이돌

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

O-neul’s Dragon Debut

Kim Hyejung

Gimm-Young Publishers, Inc.

탁월하게 서글픈 자의식

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Exquisitely Melancholic Self-Consciousness

Bak Chamsae

Maumsanchaek

우리의 낙원에서 만나자

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Meet at Our Paradise

Ha Tae-wan

THEBOOKMAN

단 한 번의 삶

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Only One Life

Kim Young-ha

bokbokseoga

2025 제16회 젊은작가상 수상작품집

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

The 16th Anthology of Young Writers’ Award-Winning Works 2025

Baek Ohn-yu

Munhakdongne Publishing Corp.

이제야 보이네

This English title may be a working title if the official translation has not yet been published.

공식 번역본이 출간되지 않은 경우, 이 영문 제목은 가제일 수 있습니다.

Now I Can See

Kim Chang-wan

Dasan Books Co., Ltd.

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Korean Literature Now

Vol. 69 Fall 2025 이미지

Magazine Vol. 69 Fall 2025 The Literature Translation Institute of Korea started publishing Korean Literature Now in the fall of 2016. It replaced a quarterly magazine called _list, which ran from fall 2008 to spring 2016. I was an avid reader of both publications. Having returned to Seoul after living many years abroad, I was hungry for information about Korean literature. These magazines informed me about what was happening in the Korean literary sphere: what was being published, who was translating whom, and what critics were talking about. I used the magazines to make decisions at bookstores. Some covers were so gorgeous I could not let them go. I hoarded copies, intending to frame them. In time, I started contributing translations and occasionally joined the editorial board. So when I was asked a few months ago to take on the position of editor-in-chief of Korean Literature Now, needless to say, I was more than happy to accept. I am grateful to LTI Korea for fully supporting new ideas and initiatives for the magazine. We have been lucky to work with a new design and publishing team. We have expanded our editorial board and instituted a new advisory board. In addition, we have introduced several new sections: Bookshelf, From the Translator’s Desk, Featured Review, Bookcart, and LTI Korea Now. In this issue, we proudly share contributions from US-based film director Gina Kim, prizewinning translator and advisory board member Anton Hur, and Professor Susan Bernofsky from Columbia University. The cover feature showcases carers and caregiving in contemporary Korea. Critic Shin Soojeong discusses three works of fiction that engage with the ethics of care, and poet Seo Hyoin shares his experience of caring for a daughter with Down syndrome. Our featured writer is Hwang Jungeun, whose novels are widely available in English: One Hundred Shadows, dd’s Umbrella, and Years and Years, to name a few. If you haven’t already read her books, I hope you will discover one of Korea’s most challenging novelists working today. In Bookmark, we introduce recent works by novelists Seo Jangwon and Haena Sung, as well as poets Park Joon and Moon Boyoung. In LTI Korea Now, Sarah K. H. Yoo reports on the dialogue that recently took place between Kim Hyesoon and Jeffrey Yang at the July 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum. I hope the essays, reviews, and translations featured in this issue will enlarge our readers’ sense of how Korean literature is engaging with the contemporary world. As Gina Kim reminds us, especially after COVID-19 all of us live with an awareness of our fragility and interconnection, as well as a shared sense of standing dangerously “at the edge of collapse.” We live our daily lives with an acute sense of the dangers of environmental disaster and the terrible costs of political violence. We worry about the breakdown of traditional social structures, the precarity of labor, and the limits of care. If, like the protagonists of Hwang Jungeun’s “A Day, Without Trouble,” we find ourselves trapped in a dark tunnel, facing a car that has broken down, will we risk our lives to help others? With this striking image of our interconnected fate, Hwang suggests that our ability to care for others will always be dependent on others also caring for us. Your comments and responses matter to us. Contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr for suggestions and inquiries. I would like to remind you that the contents of our magazine, both past and present, are freely available online at kln.or.kr. Please share this magazine with friends and help us reach a larger audience. I look forward to meeting you again in the winter. Eun Kyung Min Editor-in-Chief

reviews [Featured Review] Best Friends Forever South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang—revered for her rich portrayals of the inner lives of characters who find themselves living against the grain of an unforgiving society—first catapulted to English-language fame after winning the 2016 Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, her first novel to appear in English (though her fifth in Korean). Translator Deborah Smith—who also founded the influential UK press Tilted Axis, which specializes in work translated from Asian languages—learned Korean expressly for the purpose of translating from a language that, at the time, was vastly underrepresented in the English-language publishing marketplace. That trend has since reversed, in part due to Smith’s efforts and Han Kang’s pathbreaking global stardom. English-language houses now look to Korean literature—much as the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) opened the market for books translated from Swedish. After The Vegetarian, a relatively hermetic and poetic work among Han Kang’s oeuvre, her next novel to appear in English, Human Acts (2017 in English, 2014 in Korean), also translated by Deborah Smith, dramatically shifted the English-language public’s understanding of her literary sensibilities. The novel revealed a deep connection between the very personal-psychological horror of bloodshed in The Vegetarian and twentieth-century Korean history—specifically, the pro-democracy Gwangju Uprising of 1980, in the course of which a large number of peaceful protesters, including young students, were shot by the military. Han Kang’s latest novel to appear in English, We Do Not Part (published in Korean in 2021) is a chilling ghost story and moving tale of friendship. It presents the interconnected lives of two friends—Kyungha, a writer, and Inseon, a photographer-filmmaker. The novel opens with Kyungha’s dream of a snowy hillside covered in truncated black trees that is simultaneously a cemetery; a tidal wave sweeps in, threatening to wash away all the dead. Inseon, who’s established a carpentry workshop on the island of Jeju, where she moved to care for her dying mother, agrees to build this cemetery and film it. But when she’s injured working on the project, she summons Kyungha to the hospital where she is undergoing a gruesome treatment—having her reattached fingertips stabbed with needles every three minutes to keep the nerves alive. She entrusts her friend with an urgent errand: to travel quickly to Jeju before Inseon’s pet bird starves to death in his cage. The journey from Seoul to Jeju requires a flight, two overland buses, and a half-hour trek through the woods. Kyungha sets out in the middle of a snowstorm serious enough to shut down all the villages she travels through, serious enough that she risks her life by making this journey—and indeed, she slips down an icy embankment and hits her head. Once inside Inseon’s island home, all the stories that have been swirling through Kyungha’s mind coalesce into conversations that might also be embodied memories. Soon it is unclear whether Inseon is alive or dead, a memory or a hallucination; the bird and his long-dead companion are suddenly both flying about; but what is definitely real are the many stories each of these women remembers and tells—testimonies to horrendous violence inflicted upon Inseon’s mother’s childhood family and, later, her father, as well as the stories of Vietnamese women recorded in a documentary Inseon previously shot about victims of the US war in Vietnam, in which Korean soldiers served alongside their US allies. And Kyungha reports that her recurrent dream of the flooded hillside cemetery began shortly after the 2014 publication (the same year as Human Acts) of her book about “the massacre in G—.” The novel’s richly embodied fictional universe is beautifully communicated in the translation by e. yaewon (who previously co-translated Greek Lessons with Deborah Smith) and Paige Aniyah Morris. In their deft hands, the prose combines the sort of quiet lyricism familiar to Han Kang’s English-language readers from Smith’s translations with a new insistence on the cultural rootedness of the work. English-language readers will acquire a seamlessly integrated vocabulary of Korean words like juk, halmoni, and Jeju-mal. The e. yaewon/Morris translation also feels more rhetorically straightforward overall than that of The Vegetarian, in which the prose is sometimes characterized by a syntactical foregrounding of logic in a mode grounded in Anglo-Saxon traditions, as in “However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and there was no reason for the two of us not to get married.” A complex thought expressed in the e. yaewon/Morris translation of We Do Not Part, by contrast, might look like this: “Her demeanor—the fact that she did not ask anything else—was as calm and unwavering as ever, to the point where I almost felt sure that what I imagined she was thinking now might be true.” This is complexity expressed without the overt rhetorical gestures of logical organization, giving an impression of forthrightness and making the prose appear less specifically tied to an English-language narrative tradition. Like Smith’s translations, this new offering by e. yaewon/Morris stands out for its sharp rendering of the physicality of Han Kang’s prose, taking advantage of English’s rich store of verbs and verbal nouns to lend the descriptions a striking vividness. We Do Not Part—in my view, Han Kang’s finest novel to date—is memorable for the richness and nuance of the relationship Han Kang sketches between the two main characters, and also for the way she ties together various strands of historical memory with the novel’s present tense, creating a shimmering fabric of overlapping chronologies. The house and woodworking workshop in Jeju become a magical space of memory between life and death in which it is impossible to tell for certain at any given moment how many of the figures in the scene—whether women or birds—are alive and which are dead. It is as if the reader has journeyed along with Kyungha from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead, where the voices of witnesses from the past carry as much weight and hold as much reality as the young women recording and preserving them. In this place where trees, birds, and humans come together for shared moments of comfort, connection, and nourishing bowls of juk, we learn that bearing witness may be the most essential form of love.

reviews Where Are We Headed? What Is Reality to a Writer? Disasters like the Yongsan tragedy in 2009 and the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014 have had a significant impact on Korean authors and their writing. These events brought renewed attention to the absurdities and contradictions of Korean society, prompting many Korean writers to develop deep communal sensibilities, renew their responsibilities as fellow citizens, and fundamentally question the relationship between reality and fiction. One writer who has become especially responsive and sensitive to the realities of Korean society is Hwang Jungeun. Hwang began her career with The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train, a collection of fantastical short stories in which fathers become hats, ghosts cross into the world of the living, and bank clerks metamorphize into roly-poly dolls. But now her works adhere to a realist gaze that takes ordinary life and its underpinnings as its focus. She traces this change to the Sewol ferry disaster, stating in a number of interviews that in its aftermath she’d forgotten how to write. Take for example “The Laughing Man,” a story in The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train that repeatedly revisits the events leading up to the death of a loved one. Despite the main character’s attempts to escape their loss, they end the story still hopelessly stuck in place. The section “d” from her next novel, dd’s Umbrella, rewrites “The Laughing Man” from the perspective of someone living after the incident. In this work, however, the main character succeeds in ending their long period of reclusion and finally steps out into the world, beyond the walls of their home. There, they begin to reconnect with the world by listening to other people’s life stories. This narrative shift is the result of Hwang’s long and painful contemplation after the Sewol ferry disaster over how to represent horrific tragedy in the real world. “There is Nothing that Needs to be Said” from dd’s Umbrella reflects on the community signified by the word “we,” ultimately dismantling it by questioning the very premises upon which that “we” was built. Furthermore, the story takes a step back from familiar communities and relationships in order to carefully interrogate the conditions and patterns of power that constitute them. Although the novel doesn’t directly deal with the candlelight protests of 2016 and 2017, they are undeniably the political context of the novel. On the other hand, it is well known (at least in Korea) that what it means to be a woman and to write women’s narratives changed in the mid-2010s as Korea went through a feminist reboot. Around this time, Hwang wrote her own women’s narrative in the novel Years and Years, which retells Korean history through a multi-generational story following three women. The novel does not, however, simply position each generation as oppressed victims, nor does it allow them to remain as overly sentimental mother-daughter tropes. Instead, it rejects and interrogates the clichés of traditional mother-daughter narratives. The novel also depicts how the family structure has functioned in Korean society, and how women’s positions and emotions were formed within that structure. Where Are We Headed? In December of 2024, Korean society was once again thrown into a period of political upheaval. As Koreans contemplate the value of democracy, which is currently under threat not just in Korea but also around the globe, they desire a world different from the past. Hwang’s short story “A Day, Without Trouble,” translated for this issue of KLN, was first published concurrently with the events and concerns that followed December 2024. Although no specific events are explicitly mentioned in the text, the story clearly portrays the collapse of a world paradigm. The only problem is, the characters in the story are having trouble perceiving it. The surface narrative of “A Day, Without Trouble” follows the estrangement and reconciliation of two women, Inbeom and Yeongin—probably sisters, although it is not clear. Beneath this narrative, however, is a vast painting of global society and Korea’s entanglement in everything that’s wrong with the world. Massacres masquerading as necessary wars, wealth and labor inequality, revisionist forces, hate speech, climate change, national tragedies—the story presents as a panorama of episodes. Even social media makes an appearance, connecting all these events and issues in real time. The episodes are presented at first without any relation to one another, like one giant, fragmented mosaic. But through a chance email blunder, the story suggests that perhaps these episodes aren’t as unrelated as they appear. However, it doesn’t take much to realize that this interconnectedness is precisely the nature of our world today. The story shows through its narrative structure that the world does not operate through isolated spheres. It continuously reminds us that the things that appear separate—here/there, past/future, I/we—are in fact connected by a chain of influence. For example, the story suggests how an incident of animal abuse by a group of college students might be fundamentally related to scenes of violence throughout the world. It also hints at how a line of cars speeding obliviously toward the scene of a traffic accident might be related to Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil.” Put another way, this story isn’t just about the entangle-ments and interconnectedness of the world. Rather, it shows us that those entanglements were created, and continue to be created, by us. Take for example this line from the aforementioned “The Laughing Man”: “He will just do what he always does. In other words, the same pattern. People who retreat at the moment of truth, will always retreat . . . People who hold their bags close to their chests will always behave that way. Perhaps that’s what this is . . . It’s a pattern we’re continuously weaving, on and on and on and on.” Hwang is always writing about how the world has fallen unknowingly into a rut. She’s telling us that we are driving blind and over the speed limit. In relation to this, I want to take a careful look at one specific scene from “A Day, Without Trouble.” In this scene, the characters are driving through a tunnel when they come upon a car crash. As the women approach the wreckage, the driver inexplicably steps on the gas, putting them all in danger. Although they escape unharmed, the novel never explains why the driver tried to drive off. He may not even know himself. Force of habit, perhaps? But what is an accelerator but something that accelerates—that makes things go faster? For people who embody the words “faster, faster,” stepping on the accelerator in a moment of crisis might be their first instinct. Charging ahead is their default. They’re carried by their inertia. In the story, the other cars do not slow down while passing the accident either. Everyone is in danger, but no one senses it; they simply keep their feet on the gas. In the same way, the ideals of growth, development, and acceleration have taken us and the world hostage. But have they changed our sensibilities, too? To Pause, or Perhaps to Disrupt Delving even deeper, one might argue that the narrative of “A Day, Without Trouble” is almost apocalyptic. There’s certainly a sense that once we reach the end of this ever-accelerating world of invisible connections, what we will find is ruin and catastrophe. In this sense, the following quote from Inbeom is particularly poignant. Regarding the state of the world, in which sensitivity to violence is seen as boring, she says, “And you don’t know how much that’s killing me.” No one understands Inbeom’s desperation, not even her own eonni. The true horror of this story lies in the fact that we know intuitively what lies at the end of time—a world in which sensitivity like Inbeom’s is dismissed as uninteresting. The novel ends with Yeongin angrily honking at the speeding cars. The world already seems to be moving apathetically toward its end, and yet she and Inbeom look like they’re trying to delay the end of the world, if not stop it all together. Reading this scene, I am reminded of a quote from Walter Benjamin that a revolution is an attempt by the passengers on a train to pull the emergency break. Benjamin was one of the first people to see that Europe’s wars and the rise of fascism were the natural end-point of “progress.” To him, progress was not a revolution; in fact, he was wary of slogans that called for newness, development, growth, and progress. To him, revolution is what people on a runaway train do when they become aware of the speed and direction of progress—that is, they pull the emergency brake. Perhaps this is how we should interpret the word “revolution” when it appears so abruptly in Hwang Jungeun’s work. Perhaps, even, you could say that Hwang is still in the process of writing a eulogy for dd, the character who uttered that word, “revolution.” The blurrier the objects outside the window become and the more our bodies shake with the runaway train, the more imperative the need to stop the train—there is no other way to survive. And the only way to stop the train from within the train is to pull the emergency brake. Is that not what Yeongin is doing in “A Day, Without Trouble,” blaring her horn to tell everyone to stop? Is it not a signal to the world that we must wake up and realize where we’re headed? There is a reason why the title of this short story is “A Day, Without Trouble,” with a comma. While commas signal to the reader to take a breath, they can also (when placed in the wrong location) create a rupture in an otherwise smoothly flowing sentence. In this case, the comma also serves as a question: Is this allegedly unproblematic day really that unproblematic? Most importantly, contained within that comma is a desperate cry to momentarily stop a wave of cars blindly racing towards ruin. In this turbulent year of 2025, the call of Hwang’s horn resonates deeply. KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:· Hwang Jungeun, The Seven Thirty-Two Elephant Train (Munhakdongne, 2008) 황정은, 『일곱시 삼십이분 코끼리열차』 (문학동네, 2008)· Hwang Jungeun, “Laughing Man,” Being Nobody (Munhakdongne, 2016) 황정은, 「웃는 남자」, 『아무도 아닌』 (문학동네, 2016)· Hwang Jungeun, “d” and “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said,” dd’s Umbrella (tr. e. yaewon, Tilted Axis, 2024) 황정은, 「d」, 「아무것도 말할 필요가 없다」, 『디디의 우산』 (창비, 2019)· Hwang Jungeun, Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024) 황정은, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020)· Hwang Jungeun, “A Day, Without Trouble,” The Quarterly Changbi vol. 207 (Changbi, 2025) 황정은, 「문제없는, 하루」, 『창작과 비평 207호』 (창비, 2025)

fiction Expectation Seojin lay on the massage table as aroma oil was rubbed softly across her neck and shoulders. I sat next to her on the foot massage chair and carefully watched her expression. “Does it hurt?” “It’s uncomfortable,” she grumbled. “I lost my breath lying down right away, and now my head’s spinning.” The masseuse asked her to turn on her side and rushed to tuck a body pillow between her legs. Seojin let out a breath of relief. She was going on twenty-five weeks pregnant but still so stick-thin it was hard to tell. Perhaps because she had been a dancer for a while, she seemed to be one of those people whose bump doesn’t show even when they’re due in a few weeks. When I was pregnant with her, weight stuck all over my body and my belly was at least twice the size of the bellies of other expecting moms. It was hard for me to even stand or sit properly. Good thing she hadn’t inherited that flaw of mine. “I have a Brazilian scheduled for next week,” Seojin said. “The nurse usually shaves you before birth, but people say it’s not the most pleasant experience. Once you get one wax, though, apparently you can’t help but go every couple of weeks. It’s so comfortable when you’re on your period!” “Umma,” she went on. “I swear my pubic hair’s gotten thicker since getting pregnant.” “Shh!” I said, shocked. “The baby will hear everything. Do you know how careful I was with food when I had you? You have to watch your words, too.” Seojin just laughed, as if I were overreacting. The masseuse working on my feet pressed harder. I tapped her on the shoulder. She jolted in surprise and asked if I was feeling uncomfortable. “You can stop with me now,” I told her. “Go help with my daughter. Just be gentle with her, she’s very fragile right now.” Two of the spa employees began to carefully massage and rub Seojin’s body. She let out a small groan at their every touch. “Not there—below her chest. No, not that strong. Just soft circles. Good.” I instructed them and watched Seojin’s response. She looked satisfied, my baby. We came out of the spa on the eighth floor of the department store and went to browse the imported children’s clothes two stories up. At Baby Dior, Seojin shrieked and filled her shopping basket with all kinds of newborn clothes and sneakers small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. “Hey, you could get these after we get back from Guam,” I told her, worried. “What, are you saying you don’t want to get them for me?” Seojin grabbed everything without even glancing at the tags, including items she wouldn’t need for a while. After checking the newborn clothes, she perused dresses for toddlers, then asked me to buy one without hesitation. “Kids grow fast. Right, Umma?” My daughter, who used my money without an ounce of shame or apology. But I didn’t think that was excessive, or even greedy. She was simply enjoying what was given to her. Naturally, readily. When I had told her the baby should be an American citizen and I would look at hospitals in Guam, she’d willingly accepted that, too. Though she did add a little note at the end. “Guam’s fine, but are you sure we can’t go to New York? It’s been so long since I’ve seen Central Park and shopped around.” “Passport control is complicated there. And they’ve cracked down on birth tourism before.” Visas had become harder to come by after the 9/11 attack, and it was now difficult to travel to a big city like New York to give birth. Never mind that thirty years ago anyone with money could do it. The fact that I hadn’t been able to go then was my life’s biggest regret. My father-in-law had been strictly against it. He’d accused me of wanting to make a Yankee out of a precious member of the esteemed Chungju Ji family and refused to pay a single cent for the trip. I’d given up then, but I should have done whatever it took to get on that plane to New York. We ended up having to go through all kinds of unnecessary stress for Seojin’s study abroad in middle school as well as her college admissions, all because of her grandfather’s ridiculous insistence that her birthplace be the same as her ancestors’. But in three months, Seojin would follow a carefully set plan to have her baby in Guam. All she had to do was sit back and enjoy the smooth journey I’d prepared for her. Naturally, readily. At the cashier, I watched the growing mound of baby clothes Seojin had so carefully picked out. There was everything from newborn onesies to toddler swimsuits. But I knew Seojin easily changed her mind and followed all the latest trends. She would buy new ones when the baby was born. It was such a waste to throw out these brand-new pieces that wouldn’t get to see the light of day, but I didn’t say anything and just paid for it all. “Thanks, Umma.” Seojin linked her arm through mine as if she’d been waiting for this moment. She grinned, showering me with all kinds of flattery. It was that cute side of hers that made me turn a blind eye to her flaws, that made me give and give even as I tried to stop. “You’re going to stay for dinner?” I asked her. Seojin nodded to say of course. We made our way to the supermarket on the basement floor, and I was wondering whether to make a seafood or meat dish when Seojin got a video call. She checked the caller before excitedly picking up. “Jiji!” It was him. “How’s our little Boki? And Dubok’s growing well too?” I tensed up. That familiar voice. The one who called Seojin “Boki” because he wanted to, then called my grandchild by the ghastly nickname “Dubok.” Seojin told him she’d come to the department store with me and showed my face on the screen. “How have you been, Abeonim?” I put on a smile to greet my father-in-law. His expression quickly hardened. “Ah . . . Good, good, of course,” he managed to say despite his surprise. The man was so thick—didn’t he know you’re supposed to give back what you receive? Without asking me how I was, he told me curtly to put Boki back on. Their call continued while I pushed the shopping cart through the aisles. “Do you want short rib or rib eye beef?” I asked Seojin, but all I got back was a dismissive shrug. She was immersed in the call. I shot her a look and signaled for her to hang up. “Hey, I’ll call you later, Jiji.” She finally hung up. I wasn’t interested in that man’s problems, but Seojin cluelessly began to lay out the details of the summer cold he’d caught recently. He was sick for a couple of days, she said. After his wife passed away three years ago, my father-in-law called Seojin on a regular basis. He asked when she’d visit next, and said stupid things like “My whole body hurts” and “What if I die soon?” I had hired a housekeeper to help him with chores and act as a conversation buddy, hoping that it would stop him from bothering my daughter, but he still seemed to call her once every three days or so. “The cold’s gotten better,” Seojin said, “but he still has a bad cough. He’s worried it’s tuberculosis.” “Who gets TB nowadays? He’s just a hypochondriac. Look at him, freaking out over a few coughs.” “No, Jiji said he coughed up blood. His voice doesn’t sound good either . . .” I couldn’t help but laugh. The man who climbed up to the springs every morning to drink from them? Coughing up blood? You had to be kidding me. Seojin went on and on about poor Jiji until I stopped her. “You didn’t tell him, did you?” “About what?” “You going to Guam.” “Of course not. You want him to keel over?” I told her to make sure no word would get to him, no matter what. He was so old-fashioned that he was bound to make a fuss and try to stop her. “Umma, have I ever not listened to you?” Seojin replied. “I won’t tell him,” she insisted, but I couldn’t trust her. Not when she was so close to her grandfather. Not when sometimes . . . it felt like she liked him more than me. Seojin told me she wanted mideodeok stew with bean sprouts for dinner, and we headed toward the seafood section. But then she got another call. She hesitated before answering, then whispered a couple of things over the phone and hung up. Her brown eyes glanced this way and that—a tic that came out when she was nervous or anxious about something. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “It’s just . . . Jiji seems to be coughing a lot. He asked me to get some meds for him.” “Why didn’t he ask his housekeeper?” I shot back. “Of course he has to ask his pregnant granddaughter to run an errand for him.” But Seojin’s reply was naive, just like her. “Why don’t you come with me, Umma? It’s been a while since you’ve seen him, too. We can eat dinner together and show him Dubok’s ultrasound . . .” “I’m fine. Just go yourself.” A wave of hurt came over me. My face must have gone sour, because Seojin grabbed my arm and made a puppy face. “I can’t just ignore a sick person, hm?” she begged. “It’ll be just for today, I promise.” Her cloying sweet talk didn’t make me feel better. She watched me closely before checking the time and saying she had to be on her way. She ran toward the parking lot, leaving me to finish shopping alone. I paused while reaching for the mideodeok in the seafood section. My father-in-law also loved mideodeok stew. People said that it was a miracle if you could chew soft vegetables after seventy, but that tough geezer didn’t even have dentures and still managed to eat the hard sea squirt. “I’m going to live to see our Dubok go to college,” he would say, showing off his strong teeth. “That’s Jiji’s one wish.” A wish that sounded more like a curse. So getting tuberculosis? Him? I didn’t even have it in me to laugh. Now he was using his own health as a weapon to bring Seojin closer. Twenty-seven years had passed since she was born. It was about time he stopped meddling in my—no, my child’s—life. So why did he continue clinging on between us? * I always hated that name: Jiji. When Seojin was six months old, I taught her all kinds of words in the hopes that she’d learn to speak faster. Single-syllable words like “road” or “win,” palatal sounds like “yes” or “shoe” to strengthen her tongue and the muscles in her mouth. But the one I spent the most time on was “Umma.” I wanted to be the first person that my baby would call. I hoped she would mumble anything that could vaguely sound like that—Mama, Amma—but all she did was roll her eyes left to right with no sign of moving her mouth. Only six months later did she begin to babble, and even then her first word wasn’t to me. “Jiji.” In front of her bright face was my father-in-law. I learned much later that Jiji meant “grandfather” in Japanese. That it was also an abbreviation of “Harabeoji Ji.” And that my father-in-law had been training Seojin when I would leave to run errands or take a quick nap. So instead, I started to use the word with its original meaning whenever I saw anything bad or dirty. “No, that’s trash, Seojin. It’s jiji.” I’d hoped that Seojin would stop using my father-in-law’s weird nickname, but in spite of my wishes, she began to view it as something positive. At the sight of her grandfather, she would shout “Jiji!” and run into his arms. She only ate her food if he spoon-fed it to her, and even when she tripped and fell or faced any problem, it was he who she turned to first, not me. “Here, my darling. Our little Boki. Come here, tell Jiji everything.” My father-in-law said it was true, your grandchildren were cuter than your own kids, and he never let Seojin out of his sight. At her dol birthday party and her first day of preschool, even her school play—he insisted on placing her right next to himself. It was the same with the day of the lottery to decide which private elementary school she would go to. He insisted on tagging along and claimed he had to pick the raffle ticket. “I have the golden touch. You have to let me do it.” The school I wanted was Lila Elementary, because Seojin had a talent for dance and Lila had a special dance program. Please, let it be Lila . . . I begged in my head as I watched my father-in-law pick from the raffle box. “Kyonggi Elementary.” It wasn’t the result I’d hoped for. And of course, though he was the one who’d fumbled my child’s future, I was the only one who could save her. Luckily, a parent next to me wanted Kyonggi, and we’d decided to trade tickets in secret when my father-in-law took it out of my hand. “Some mom over there asked to trade for Chung-Ang University Elementary,” he said. “That’s the only school for our family. Your husband graduated from there, and they’re the most passionate when it comes to education.” No matter that I was the person who would support Seojin through her entire schooling—he whisked away my spot and ruined my plans. He was relentless, that man. When I was pregnant with Seojin, my father-in-law was busier preparing for the baby than I was. As soon as he heard that I was expecting, he reserved a private room at a famous hospital in Mukjeong-dong and even went down to Gyeongju to acquire ten bottles of a special herbal tonic from a renowned doctor of traditional Korean medicine. One day, he made me a cassette tape of the best classical pieces for babies in the womb. “This is ‘Minuet in G Minor.’ One of my favorites of Handel’s.” Whether it was because of my unpredictable hormones or the warmth of a father figure that I’d never felt before, something melted inside me and a few tears escaped my eyes. My father-in-law handed me a handkerchief and patted my shoulder. “It’s okay, don’t cry. All your worries will get passed on to the child. You have to keep calm during an important time like this.” He stayed with me until I stopped crying, walking me through a few deep breaths and offering his advice. What a thoughtful man, I thought. What a kind father-in-law. Unlike my own father, who had barely spared a thought about me my entire life outside of the occasional attempts to buy my favor, this man took precious care of my feelings. I would soon learn, though, that his gentle guidance wasn’t out of love for me. It was out of his insistent affection for my child. Three weeks before I was supposed to give birth, a leak appeared in our kitchen ceiling. Water dripped down into our food, but my father-in-law swore by some superstition that if we fixed the ceiling while I was pregnant, the baby would be born with a defect and prevented any work in the kitchen. The whole family had to eat in the living room while the dirty water collected in several pails we had to empty. And that was just the beginning. If you eat duck, he said, the baby’s fingers will come out stuck together, but pork can cause a rash, and eggs will lead to boils. He rattled off these terrifying taboos and refused to let me have any of the things I craved. Instead, I drank so much fish broth to make the baby smart that my breath turned fishy, and I got so sick of it that I still couldn’t bear it twenty-seven years later. He was also behind the decision to register Seojin’s birth in January, a month after her real birthday. “You’ll see when you raise her. She’ll fall behind in school if she’s the youngest in her grade. This is all for Bok’s own good.” I also wanted only the best for my child. For her to eat the best food, for her to grow up without knowing any hardship or pain. I’d even quit my job for her. I had goals for my career, but I had a bigger ambition to be there to watch my child grow up. I wanted to make sure I could give her all the love I hadn’t gotten myself. For the nine months Seojin was in my belly, I planned her future out step-by-step. As for her name, I pondered over it for months. My own parents had named me in a rush the day I was born. They’d barely thought it through, and the meaning of the hanja characters they’d chosen had been such a mess that I’d had to change my name as an adult. But my child’s start in this life would be different. I wanted to give her a name with a good meaning, one that went well with her last name and would still be easy to pronounce. And more than anything, one that would hold all my hopes and dreams for her life. I studied the hanja character dictionary for days before carefully settling on a name: Seo, “to unfold.” And Jin, “to go forward.” I secretly hoped my child would be more like me than my wishy-washy husband, who couldn’t make his mind up about anything. That she would be strong-minded and live out her life however she wanted. So I could only be taken aback when my father-in-law said he’d gotten a lucky name from a professional numerologist. The baby’s saju was full of fire, he said, so they needed a name to neutralize it. Like “Bok,” for “luck.” And since “Kyung” was the character assigned to her generation of the Ji family, Kyungbok would be perfect. Even my mother-in-law and my husband were surprised by this episode, but knowing my father-in-law’s stubbornness, they kept quiet. The only person left to fight back was me. “Abeonim, Kyungbok is no name for a girl. Plus, the whole practice of name numerology comes from Japanese colonization anyway. Who actually believes that nonsense nowadays?” “. . . Nonsense?” My father-in-law’s eyes grew wide as his neck and ears went red. Unable to control his anger, he began to huff. “I paid good money to get the best name for my grandchild, and all I get is . . . Nonsense?” I could have sucked it up and kept my mouth shut all this time because I didn’t want to stir up trouble, but I couldn’t allow him to sabotage my child’s future as well. My baby’s name was written as “Undecided” on the official birth certificate for a month until it was later confirmed as Seojin. My father-in-law must have been mad that he hadn’t gotten his way because he took every chance he had to remind me that the characters I’d chosen had too many strokes and were unlucky to use in a child’s name. “They said it’s a name destined for a bad relationship with one’s parents. Especially one’s mom.” * Seojin’s apartment was a five-minute drive away from ours.I had found the place for her when she was looking for somewhere to move after the divorce. Since we lived so close together, we visited each other often. Our current routine was to eat Seojin’s favorite mango bingsu at a hotel lounge and go shopping, then come back to eat dinner. I spent more time with her than I did with my husband, and I even asked her if she wanted to move back in with us. I mean, before she got married, she’d never once stayed in a dorm, much less lived entirely on her own. That was my daughter—a child who asked for help even just to fry an egg, who believed you could put clothes in the wash inside out and they’d automatically flip themselves. But Seojin rejected my proposal at once. “I’m not a child, Umma. I need to be independent now.” Independent. It felt strange to hear. Seojin had worked for a bit as a ballet instructor, but she’d always received a monthly allowance from her dad. So financial independence was out the door, and emotional independence . . . Well. But I wasn’t so cold as to tell my recently divorced child to hurry and find a way to support herself. I’d always thought that demanding your child be independent as soon as they became an adult wasn’t really good parenting. Maybe some children required that kind of harsh separation, but not our Seojin. She couldn’t do anything without me, and she thrived on a stage that I arranged and directed. That’s why I went over every other week to clean her place and cook her food, why I looked up pregnancy barre classes and classical music clubs for moms-to-be for her to join. Seojin never protested. She just said: “Umma, can you make the jangjorim with beef instead of pork next time?” “You don’t have to clean—we have a lady who comes once a week, remember? Just get some rest.” “The classical music club is so boring. I only want to take the ballet class.” Still, she accepted my care. After she got pregnant, Seojin spent more time at our place than hers. We ate dessert together and fell asleep on my bed watching old classics like The Glass Menagerie or La Dolce Vita. That big newlywed home must have felt empty on her own. It took a lot of work to maintain, too. Any way I looked atit, I thought it’d be better if she lived with me, but I kept my thoughts to myself. I was sure she’d come back to my side after having the baby anyway. She was back again that day with the excuse that she didn’t have enough winter clothes and she wanted to try on my fur coats. You have such a good eye, she said while looking through them. All of these are so timeless. What could I say? I didn’t find her flattery annoying, but adorable. “Umma, how about this one?” The Armani coat I’d bought when I was around her age now looked better on her than me. When I told her she could have it, she reached for the tweed Chanel dress in the corner of my closet. “Then give me this one, too.” The dress had been a gift from my mother-in-law for my fortieth birthday. She’d seen it on the mannequin and bought it for me right away, claiming we all needed something like this in our closets. She herself only wore the same stretched-out, pilling clothes for years, but would always open her wallet without reservation when it came to me. It was a dress I loved, but I nodded, thinking this one would also look better on Seojin. She started humming and took off her clothes to try it on. I felt awkward about seeing my child’s naked body, but when I asked her if she wasn’t embarrassed, Seojin shrugged and said, “What’s there to be embarrassed about? We’re family.” She twisted her arm behind her back and struggled with the zipper for a while. I went to hold her long hair and zipped up the back, but around her neck was a silver necklace I’d never seen before. “What’s this?” I asked. Seojin paused. “It’s from Jiji,” she finally said. “Apparently silver is good for pregnancy.” Under the necklace, her skin looked red and itchy from an allergic reaction, yet she was busy defending the man. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked. I knew from personal experience that my father-in-law’s generation fell for any and all superstitions if they concerned their children. He was particularly bad, but my own mother had gone to see a mudang to make sure my fortune would be good for marriage when I was still single past thirty. She made me carry special bujeok slips for good luck and almost put on a gut ceremony to pray to the spirits, but I couldn’t see what good this belief—neither logical nor useful—did for me, her child. It wasn’t like it was any sort of carefully considered plan. Now I was worried that my father-in-law would force Seojin to carry bujeok slips around or drink random herbal tonics. I demanded Seojin take off her necklace right that moment. “You sure your grandfather hasn’t put up a bujeok in your home or anything? Wait, he doesn’t know the passcode to your door, does he? You only told me.” Seojin ignored me and changed the subject. “I went to the doctor’s today.” On her phone was a video from the ultrasound. I forgot the creeping feeling that she was hiding something from me and smiled at the video of the baby. Its face and body were sharper now that there were only two and a half months left until the birth. I rewound the video a couple times to check where its nose and ears were, as well as to count how many fingers it had. The baby was starting to look human. I watched its smooth skin and shut eyes. “I see your face in the baby, and my face, too. Don’t you?” Seojin shrugged. “It doesn’t look like Jung Kiseok?” “. . . Why would it? It’s your baby.” Any mention of Kiseok made my blood boil. How careful I had been in choosing Seojin’s future partner. This was a child I’d raised with so much caution I was scared even a gust of wind could blow her away. I wanted her husband to be on equal footing and of a similar background, and I’d attended all sorts of introductions and visited a number of companies to find the best candidatepossible. Kiseok had been just perfect for the role. His looks, his wealth, his schooling—everything matched up to Seojin’s. I liked that there were no particular illnesses that ran in his family—though his father’s baldness was a little concerning—and he had American citizenship to boot. I’d searched everywhere to find someone that matched my standards, but my father-in-law disapproved right away. “He doesn’t have the face of a good person.” I knew he was also searching for a good match for Seojin behind my back. Maybe it was just to spite him that I hurried the wedding arrangements with Kiseok. Was that the issue? Seojin and Kiseok had divorced because of irreconcilable differences not even two years after tying the knot, and my father-in-law continued to subtly mock me while he comforted her. “It’s not your fault, Bok, so hold your head high. I knew this would happen—he gave me a bad impression from the very beginning. Who picked him, anyway?” Making me feel inferior, and guilty too. Standing in the closet, I told Seojin to not bring Kiseok up again. She nodded, then carefully added, “The doctor said to prepare some blue baby clothes, Umma.” I let out a cry of joy—I could have died from happiness. But Seojin seemed to have a lot on her mind. She looked at the baby in the video. “Do you think I can raise him well?” she asked, speaking slowly. She was probably feeling anxious. And even more nervous and unsure because she’d have to raise him alone. I put my hand on her stomach and thought of what to say. What words my daughter would need to hear, what words she would want to hear. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll raise him for you.” Her belly was warm under my hand. There was a lot to prepare now—all the things I hoped to give my grandson. I had already paid the deposit for the overseas birth agency that I’d worked hard to book. As a boy eligible for mandatory military service, he would need the dual citizenship even more. The broker will take care of all the legal stuff, I told Seojin, so just focus on the baby. All you have to do is follow the process and there won’t be any issues. “Let’s decide his name before, though. Since you have to submit the birth certificate right away in the US.” Ian, Yul, Jay—I listed a few names that would work easily in both English and Korean. “Deu-rim is pretty popular too,” I said excitedly, but a shadow came over Seojin’s face. “Is this because you’reworried about raising him?” I asked. “Don’t worry, I can raise him, and we can get a nanny if we need to.” But she still seemed a little reluctant. Her eyes flitted back and forth, and then it hit me. “You . . . You told your grandfather, didn’t you?” Seojin twisted her body back and forth. “Umma, can’t I just have the baby here?” “Why?” “Jiji said he’s already booked a hospital in Mukjeong-dong.” “We can cancel it.” “No, it’s just . . . ” “What? What’s the matter?” Seojin hesitated before finally spitting out the truth. “The thing is . . . Jiji told me it’s actually a crime. He said you shouldn’t break the law . . .” “A crime?” It was so ridiculous all I could do was laugh. Don’t break the law? From the man who’d gotten a secret private tutor to send his son to college when tutoring was outlawed in this country? The man who’d sent thousands of dollars under the table to bribe his trade partners? I couldn’t believe he would try and frame my love and sacrifice for my grandson like that. Seojin continued, not leaving out a word he’d said. “He asked, if there are enough international schools here, why are we trying to commit a crime abroad? I got kind of scared listening to him . . .” I couldn’t believe it. How much had he grilled my innocent daughter to make her so terrified? I could only imagine how much he’d insulted me and criticized my choices, my affection, in front of her. “Seojin. Who do you think is on your side here: me or your grandfather?” I knew pitting us against each other like that was childish. But sometimes Seojin seemed to forget that I was her mother. That it was me, not her grandfather, who would throw everything away just for her. “Do you think I’d send you all the way to the US to cause you harm? Or invest this time and money to turn you into a criminal? I don’t know what your grandfather told you, but it wasn’t in your interest. That crazy old man has no idea what he’s talking about.” Seojin let out a sigh. “I know you’re right, but then I listen to Jiji and he seems right, too. He said I could go to jail if I get caught. Umma, I don’t want to go to jail.” I kept explaining that it wasn’t dangerous and that it would all be for her own son, but Seojin still hesitated. I started to wonder whether she was unsure because of what her grandfather had said, or if there was a chance that money was involved. My father-in-law had always said he would hand over a small building in Eunpyeong-gu to Seojin before the gift tax was raised. He’d promised it as a wedding gift so she could start a dance studio and rent the rest out for some extra money, but once he found out that Kiseok was her fiancé, he’d gone back on his word and never mentioned the building again. Though she hadn’t shown it, maybe Seojin had also felt let down. Maybe that was the reason why she was following that man’s words even now. “Is this . . . because of his money?” Seojin looked confused. “What do you mean?” “Because of that building he said he’d give you. I understand if that’s the reason, but trust me, your grandfather isn’t someone who keeps his promises. I don’t want you to be swayed by empty words like that.” Her face fell. “You think I’m doing this for a building?” That’s enough for today, I thought to myself. You’ve shown her what’s right and what’s wrong. But my words somehow outran my thoughts. “What is it then? Would you have listened to your grandfather spewing nonsense about crimes or whatever if he hadn’t fooled you with his money? No, you would’ve ignored him.” “What?” “Am I wrong? I swear you and your father are the same—when that man gets hold of you two, you can’t see straight.” I shouldn’t have said that. I shook myself out of it. Seojin glared at me, her face stone cold. “He’s right,” she muttered under her breath. “You are superficial.” “What did you say?” “That’s what Jiji says about you. That you’re superficial. I just ignored him up till now, but he was right. You’re a snob.” Seojin took off my dress and threw on her clothes before walking out the door. I stared after her for a while. I knew one couldn’t be rational when it came to love for their children, but I always seemed to crumble and lose all sight of reason whenever my father-in-law was involved. And get ugly, so very ugly. * The tension between my father-in-law and me had gotten worse as Seojin grew older. It was inevitable, as we lived under one roof for a long time. Until Seojin entered middle school, we lived in my in-laws’ house in Pyeongchang-dong. We originally planned to stay there just until the new apartment in Dogok-dong we’d bought was finished, but the move had been pushed further and further back until one day, fifteen years had gone by. “Just rent that place out and stay here,” my father-in-law said. “We have enough rooms as it is. It’s nice for families to live together—remember that old story about nine generations of the same family living under one roof? No one will get lonely, either.” I should have rejected his proposal right there, but my dense husband seemed more pleased than anything. “Should we actually?” he’d said. My in-laws’ neighbors called their place “the house with the conjoined tree.” The year my husband was born, my father-in-law had planted an aralia and zelkova tree side-by-side in the front yard. It was said that the two trees couldn’t coexist, but they began to join together from the roots up, entangling as they grew, and the house became known for having a rare conjoined tree. For being a family full of love. What the neighbors didn’t know was that the tree had actually been artificially grown by my father-in-law, who’d planted the two saplings right next to each other and tied their stems together with string, scraping off the bark between them. I still remembered the first time I’d stepped into that house to meet my husband’s parents. It was a two-story mansion with big windows and an impressive view. The quiet sprinklers in the yard set small rainbows alight, and the neatly groomed conjoined tree created a wide patch of shade. My father-in-law sat on the deck, leisurely listening to some music. I recognized the piece. “Handel, right?” He broke into a wide smile. “I prefer him to Bach.” “Me too. He’s the mother of music, after all.” He and I continued our discussion about classical music throughout the dinner. We had a lot of things in common. We both loved classical music and Luis Buñuel’s films. We both supported the conservative party. We loved food and preferred to eat nothing but the very best. My parents had sent jeonggwa and small tea desserts as a gift. Like a proper gourmand, my father-in-law showered them with compliments. “Their shape and taste are perfect.” Watching this good-natured man, I waved away my mother’s warnings from earlier. “You have to be on your best behavior there,” she had said. “I heard one of the parents is quite eccentric.” Someone who was said to have intervened in all of their son’s potential matches and rejected dozens of candidates, whose horrible ambush calls were avoided by even the matchmakers, who resembled a century-old snake in hiding—at first, I’d thought those infamous stories were about my mother-in-law. Though I hadn’t known before getting married, my father-in-law had my husband wrapped around his finger. He followed his father’s every order when he worked beneath him, and nothing changed after he inherited the family’s paper company. He was the one with the real decision-making power, and yet he made all his business decisions according to his father’s wishes. It was the same story with Seojin. When my father-in-law and I would clash on the proper way to educate her, my husband could never make up his mind, much less support me. “I think my dad’s right on this one . . .” he would say. “Right?” The only person I could somewhat rely on for emotional support was my mother-in-law. She was also tired of her spineless son and her stubborn husband. “But who can stop the man when he’s been calling apples oranges his whole life?” she said. “And now your husband lives by his father’s word.” The casual complaints and insults we traded gave me strength, but she was no help against her husband. When he and I got in a fight, she would hide in her room, only slipping out once the conflict had been resolved. She didn’t stand on anyone’s side and didn’t speak for anyone. But she must have felt sorry about always sitting on the sidelines, because she’d occasionally show me her jewelry box and tell me to pick out anything I wanted. Even when I refused, she insisted on putting her gold engagement ring on my index finger. “I wanted to give this to my future daughter, but I didn’t get to have one. You take it.” “No, that’s all right,” I replied. “It doesn’t even fit my finger.” She told me to sell it and take the money as a gift, but I couldn’t say yes to that either. We went back and forth—Take it, No I can’t, Just take it—until she told me to give it to Seojin when she was older. I said yes. “I swear,” she said, “you and that old man are so alike.” “What do you mean?” “You both want to give everything to your children to make up for the love you’ve been missing.” She laid out the details of my father-in-law’s childhood. How he was sold for adoption to his rich uncle’s family when he was six years old, then kicked out when they conceived a child of their own, only to come back when they had a daughter instead of a son. How he’d then walked twenty kilometers to see his birth family but was ignored and turned away. “That man never got proper love from his family his whole life. Didn’t you say yours was the same? Listen, this is just my opinion. But I don’t think your own lack should lead to an obsession. Even affection should be given out appropriately. So take the ring yourself. And don’t give it to Seojin. That’s what I’d want. ” “Don’t live like him, dear,” she concluded. “I don’t want you to turn out like that.” Sometimes it really did seem like my father-in-law and I were alike, just as she’d said. Like when he, the most hierarchical man I knew, would crouch down to my daughter’s eye-level and talk to her in a baby voice. Or when he would lie on his arm and stay still to watch her sleep even if it hurt. When I noticed a melancholy look flit across his face, which was usually obstinate and stubborn. Once in a while I felt sympathy for him, but more often, it was hostility that bubbled up inside me. Every time we’d disagree over some part of Seojin’s education, he showed no effort to compromise. Instead, he would insult me outright, saying, What would a girl who went to school on the other side of the river know? Then he’d try and make Seojin follow his outdated college admissions strategies that would have only worked a generation ago. Each time I ignored my mother-in-law’s warning and told myself there wasn’t anything alike about us. My husband might’ve been outside of my control, but I wouldn’t let my kid be taken advantage of like that. The year Seojin turned fourteen, we left the house with the conjoined tree with the excuse of sending her to study abroad. When I told my father-in-law I would take Seojin to the US, he was furious. Never mind the special college admissions for Korean students abroad or the language study, he argued. Why would you whisk away a kid who’s doing perfectly well in school here? Are you trying to take her away from me forever? Everyone who goes to the US comes back addicted to gambling or drugs, don’t you know? He refused to get out of bed and wrapped a cold cloth around his forehead. There was nothing I could do. Of course, my husband and mother-in-law weren’t there to protect me—they were busy hiding and waiting to see what would happen. This is it, I thought. But one day, while eating the mideodeok stew I’d made for him, my father-in-law said, “Okay. I understand what you mean. If it’s for our Boki, then studying abroad might be worth it.” Finally. He had listened to me. My anger and resentment toward him suddenly softened. Before we got on the plane to New York, I offered him countless pots of mideodeok stew, working to please him. I was completely unaware that his true intentions would come back to bite me. For the first six months after arriving in the US, I felt calm. Seojin had entered a middle school with an ESL program, and meanwhile I had gotten closer to the other Korean moms and gathered information about the best schools and most trustworthy tutors in the area. As part of her education, Seojin and I visited the Met and watched Broadway shows on the weekends. Things were going smoothly. Until that day, that is. I went to pick up Seojin from ballet class that afternoon. But for some reason, I felt a bit uneasy on the way back home. And would you believe it? A strange car was parked outside the house we’d rented. Behind it, a familiar silhouette was pulling a suitcase into the front yard. “Jiji!” Seojin ran toward my father-in-law, and he took her in for a hug. “Why are you here?” I asked, unable to hide my astonishment. His reply was natural, smooth. “I came just to sightsee.” Yet it soon became clear that he had no intention of visiting Times Square or the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, he tagged along to Seojin’s classes and watched her every move, trying to use his meager English to help with her homework. Our weekend routine fell apart, and Seojin ended up spending more time with her grandfather than me. At my offer to find him a hotel, he still insisted on staying in a room at our place. “Give me bread instead of rice, will you? Western food suits my palate.” “I always thought it was uncomfortable to wear your shoes inside, but it’s great once you get used to it.” Each and every word he said shocked me. Once, during an attempt to find a tutor for Seojin, I’d just finished a successful interview with a Cornell graduate and was wondering how much to offer her when my father-in-law pulled me into the next room. “That kid had a strange way of pronouncing things—everything was so harsh. She might not have enough experience either, because she’s so young. What about finding an Ivy League graduate instead?” “I thought she was fine,” I replied. “And Abeonim, Cornell is an Ivy League school.” His face went red. “You need to fix that habit of talking back to people. Otherwise they’ll gossip behind your back.” “I’m not talking back,” I replied. “I’m just telling the truth.” I refused to let him have the last word. Maybe because I didn’t want to lose my standing. Or like my mother-in-law had said, because I saw something similar in the two of us. The whole time we were in the US, he and I butted heads over the smallest things and argued for days. I would try and hold it in for Seojin, but the intensity of my feelings always won out. He’ll hurry back to Korea as soon as he can, I hoped, but he stayed for the entire duration of his tourist visa before finally going home. He visited like that every three months until Seojin finished ninth grade. More often than my husband, even. When Seojin and I were preparing to return to Korea, I found out that the other Korean moms in the area had thought I was his trophy wife. It was like I was raising my child with my father-in-law, not my husband. Intensely and fiercely—like we were sparring. * Seojin’s belly showed no signs of change, even at thirty-two weeks. Worried it was a vitamin deficiency, I fed her folic acid and iron supplements, but she remained the same. “Are you still skipping meals?” I asked her. I had kept watch over Seojin’s weight her whole life and only became stricter as she prepared to compete and audition for ballet schools. She’d needed that discipline for her physique then. I used to measure her waistline every morning and fed her laxatives in the hopes that it would take even a gram off her weight, but things were different now. “You can’t do that anymore, Hon. Everything you eat will go to the baby.” Seojin waved off my worries and said she’d been eating well and sleeping more than enough. The baby was kicking more often, too. “Maybe it’s because he’s a boy, but he’s full of energy, Umma.” She said she could feel him moving dozens of times a day. I let out a sigh of relief. The crude thought that immigration would go smoother if her stomach wasn’t showing crossed my mind. Two weeks before her departure, I picked out the condo she would stay in before the birth and examined the hospital’s procedure manual. I checked what kind of food would be available, if the postnatal caretakers and nannies were experienced, and how often the newborn baby’s belly button and milk bottles would be cleaned. Everything was going according to plan. Now all that was left was for Seojin to agree, but I couldn’t grasp how she felt. Our earlier argument had simply fizzled out after she had called me up like nothing had changed, but some emotions still lingered. Between the two of us ran a quiet tension. “Is there anything you want to eat?” I asked her, breaking the silence. She said she would like the mideodeok stew she wasn’t able to eat the time before. It ran in her blood, this kid. My chest began to feel tight, but I tried to stay as rational as possible. Seojin was pregnant, and this was about her cravings, not what tastes ran in her family. But no matter how much I tried to convince myself, I had a bad feeling that my daughter’s life was caught squarely in the shadow of her grandfather’s. I tried to shake it off as I took out the mideodeok from the freezer. I had gone to thaw the seafood under the tap when Seojin suddenly embraced me from behind. “Umma,” she whispered, “Jiji has pneumonia.” I paused. “Really? Are you sure?” “That’s what the doctor said. His body is pretty run down.” Her swollen stomach touched my back. She continued slowly with that particular nasal voice of hers. “Umma, I want to go to the US too. I know that would be good for Dubok. But . . . Jiji started crying when I told him. He doesn’t know how much longer he’s got to live. He asked if I really have to go. It’s not just getting birthright citizenship, you know. You have to live there for at least ten years, but Jiji can’t get on a plane anymore, with his health and everything. Seeing him cry like that really shook me.” A while had passed since I’d last seen my father-in-law. I hated how he always blamed me for Seojin’s divorce, so I’d stopped going over entirely. The man I remembered was healthy, like you could push him and he wouldn’t fall over, but maybe he’d aged too. The mideodeok began to thaw in the cold water. I’d used to think those creatures were so gross, with their bumpy tops and bodies that resembled little severed fingers. Not to mention the fact that they had both male and female sexual organs. There was a time when touching one would send shivers down my back, but somewhere along the way I must’ve gotten used to them, because now they didn’t bother me anymore. The desire to give my child only the best of the best, the determination to do anything for her—these wishes my father-in-law and I shared and couldn’t separate, even if we wanted to. That was our relationship. Two bodies that had twisted together out of a common love and were becoming one. Would I also get used to him one day? Would we ever be able to peacefully share this love of ours? I was lost in my thoughts for a moment before I opened my mouth. “I’ll go see Harabeoji. That’ll help, right?” Seojin nodded, hugging my waist again. “Umma, don’t be too harsh on Jiji. He’s family.” I thought of the old saying that sometimes family was akin to a close enemy, but I decided to let it go. I didn’t want to pour everything into hating him anymore. He was my daughter’s grandfather, after all. “All right. I’ll try.” * The front yard of my in-laws’ house was as well-groomed as always. The grass, cut every other week by a gardener hired by my father-in-law, looked glossy and clean, and in the sandy flower beds stood the expensive zelkova, plum, and fir tree shrubs that he’d ordered from the landscaping wholesaler. But out of all the trees showing off their deep fall foliage, the conjoined tree caught my eye. When I first came to this house, only the bottom part of its trunk was intertwined, but now the whole tree and its tangled branches had grown so large that you could barely wrap your arms around its thickest point. Sitting beneath its wide shade was my father-in-law, listening to music. I recognized the piece from the intro. Handel’s “Minuet in G minor,” performed by Wilhelm Kempff. Much had changed since the days when I would go on and on, bright-eyed, about how Kempff’s rendition of Handel was so somber and poignant yet simple and unpretentious. Now the man sat listening with his eyes closed, looking pitiful and frail. “Abeonim, it’s me.” He blinked his heavy lids open at my call. His eyes were dull, his cheeks caved in. My father-in-law had aged noticeably in the time since I’d last seen him. So you got older, too. You became weak. Sure, we weren’t linked by blood, but maybe Seojin was right and I had been holding too much animosity toward a member of our own family. Today was the day to resolve any misunderstandings and let go of old grudges. I could do it. I had to do it. My father-in-law didn’t greet me with an “It’s been a while” or “How are you?” but just glanced around me. “Where’s Boki?” “Seojin didn’t come along. I let you know over the phone that it’d just be me today.” “You did? I don’t remember.” I had definitely told him, and here he was acting like it was the first time he’d ever heard such a thing. A sharp anger rose inside me, but I made an effort to continue with the kindest voice possible. “Aren’t you cold out here? It might be better to go inside if you’re not feeling well.” He let out a wet cough. “What, did you come to check if I’m dead? It’s not like you would visit for any other reason.” “Why would you say something like that? That hurts my feelings. Here, I made some doraji jeonggwa for you too. They say the root is good for the lungs. Let’s go inside and—” “I like it outside,” he cut me off and pulled the blanket that was on his knees up to his chest. “If you have anything to say to me, you can say it here. The house is dirty because I haven’t been able to clean it the last few days.” A chilly breeze grazed the back of my neck. I stood awkwardly with the jeonggwa in my arms. “That housekeeper you got me turned out to be a kleptomaniac,” he said bluntly. “I should have known when some of the gochugaru and tissue paper went missing.” She had a nasty habit of touching everything, he went on. He was positive she had taken the golden toad figurine he’d kept next to his bed. “I should have chased her out from the beginning. Can’t trust anyone after that insolent woman. Guess who insisted on taking her last paycheck and didn’t even clean? Now the house is a wreck.” I stood listening to all of his complaints. “Are you sure?” I asked him carefully. “You might be making someassumptions.” “What, you don’t believe me? I turned the whole place over looking for it. It isn’t anywhere. She must’ve taken it.” He paused. “Where do you even find these people?” he said, clicking his tongue. There it was—his old habit of stretching out his words to force you to listen. His nasty language that would intimidate anyone. Any compassion I’d briefly held for him disappeared. There he was. The man I knew. A man so particular and eccentric you couldn’t possibly get used to him. A man so self-righteous he’d always insist he was correct, no matter what you might think or feel. My father-in-law lay in his rocking chair, his expression sour. “Nothing I do will ever make you happy, will it, Abeonim?” I asked him. “What?” “Well, this is all I’m going to say. Seojin will leave for the US soon. That’s what she wants, and I intend to send her there.” “How many times do I have to tell you no—” “Why? Because it’s a crime? Or because of the baby’s birthplace on his birth certificate? Abeonim, please. You know that’s nonsense.” He straightened his back and glared at me. He didn’t look well, but I didn’t care. All the anger that had welled up deep inside was forcing its way upwards. “You’re just unhappy because you can’t steer this in the direction you want,” I said. “Is having Seojin’s dad not enough? Do you need to do this to my daughter too? Telling her useless things, like what she’s doing is illegal . . . Why are you so set on ruining her life?” “Ruin? Me?” My father-in-law scoffed, and I glimpsed his perfect teeth. “You’re the one sabotaging your own child’s life, using Boki to satisfy your own greed. You think buying your way into citizenship is everything? Do you know how hard it is to live in a foreign country? I knew you were short-sighted, but this . . .” My rage boiled over. I didn’t even try to suppress it, I just let it explode. “Please! Stop calling her that. Her name is Seojin!” “What?” What had I been thinking? There was no way I could compromise with this person. No way we could share our affection or our beliefs. “Stop calling her Boki. She’s my child! My daughter, not yours!” His eyes widened as his mouth gaped open. “You’ve lost it, haven’t you?” He kept on muttering to himself, “That’s it. She’s finally gone crazy.” I left him there and stormed out of the house. My heated emotions only began to cool once I started the car. I took a deep breath and looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror. My hair was all tangled, my face flushed red. Maybe my father-in-law was right. I had lost it. Gone wild and crossed a line with an elder, behaved against my better knowledge, burdened my daughter with a weight even I couldn’t carry. But if I had gone crazy, really crazy, then what had finally set me off? The jeonggwa I spent all night making—boiling the doraji root and soaking the pieces in honey—sat in the passenger seat. Looking at it, my anger rose again. No, my actions were justified. Any mother would’ve done the same for their child. Anyone would’ve gone crazy. You couldn’t survive otherwise. You couldn’t. Not without . . . I threw the jeonggwa out the window and drove away to the sound of it being crushed under the wheels of my car. * Sitting in the airport lobby, I checked Seojin’s bags one more time. “You’ve got your belly band on?” She nodded. Her due date was almost here, but her stomach was small enough that the belly band didn’t make that big of a difference. But I still made sure, just in case. “There are a lot of Korean tourists there, so immigration control shouldn’t be too strict . . .” “Umma, don’t worry. I’m not a child,” she reassured me. I still felt nervous, though. I would go with her if I could, but it wasn’t easy for two people to stay for that long, and the agency had even said there might be issues at passport control if a parent tagged along. I’d decided to give up. “You and Jiji talked things out, right?” Seojin asked me before she checked in. The memories of the day I’d tried to forget bubbled up again. After barging out of his house, I debated calling my father-in-law for days. Had I been too harsh? Was there a chance we could resolve things, even now? I picked up my phone and put it down again. I drank whiskey, which I usually didn’t like. And when the alcohol hit and my insides burned hot, it came to me. A memory I had buried in the past: a day when my father-in-law and I had been on the same team. Seojin must have been seven or so. She was rushed to the emergency room with a stomachache. But there happened to be a lot of patients waiting that day, and an hour passed without her being called. I held my pale daughter in my arms and demanded to know when the doctor would see her. As my voice grew louder, my embarrassed husband told me to quiet down while my mother-in-law sat in her chair, hands clasped in prayer. With no one to help me, I shouted alone like a hopeless woman gone mad until someone burst into the emergency room yelling even louder than I was. “Who is it? Who’s making my baby wait?” He made a scene and insisted on seeing the doctor, and I began to shout alongside him. Let us in now! Our baby might die! I didn’t care about my husband looking at us with shock and disgust, my mother-in-law slowly walking away, or the other patients whispering under their breath. My father-in-law and I dropped to the floor together, crying and stomping our feet. Oh, my baby’s going to die! All because of you people, she’s going to die. Just like that. As if we’d both gone crazy. There had been times like that. And that other time, and then, too . . . In a daze, I ran through all the instances when my father-in-law and I had worked together until I willed myself to stop. I knew from experience that memories were easily romanticized and corrupted, that they could find your soft spots and make you believe there was hope. If I trusted those memories and acted on them, I’d only regret it right away. My father-in-law wasn’t someone who’d change after a single conversation. That’s what I wanted to believe. “We did, and it went well,” I told my daughter. “You don’t have to worry about us anymore.” Seojin said she was glad we had cleared the air and went to the check-in queue for business class. My baby. She fumbled through getting her single ticket and struggled to put her luggage on the scale with her weak arms. Would she be okay on her own? A month, and an extra two weeks on top of that. It was the longest we’d ever been apart. As I looked at her preparing to leave the country without me, tears began to well. “Are you crying, Umma?” Seojin ran up to me and rubbed my shoulder. “Why? I’ll be fine. Don’t cry.” I had even taken a sedative to prevent this, but the tears wouldn’t stop. My daughter. I’d thought she would stay a child forever, but soon she would be a mom, too. They said you only understood your parents’ love when you had your own child. Would she see now how much I loved her? I thought of that saying that a parent’s love was so great you could put your child in your eye and it wouldn’t hurt. Would she see now that these weren’t empty words but the proof of our genuine affection, the essence of a love that couldn’t be expressed otherwise? I was sobbing into Seojin’s shoulder when a familiar voice came from behind us. “Boki.” My tears dried instantly. Seojin waved to her grandfather before she glanced at me and quickly lowered her hand. Her brown eyes flitted back and forth. She tried to explain, but my father-in-law stopped her and scanned my expression. I forced my lips into a stiff smile. “Abeonim. You came.” I spoke as nicely as possible, trying to put what had happened behind us. I waited for his reply, but of course he pretended not to have noticed me and went straight to Seojin instead. “Our little Boki. Did you check your luggage already? When is the flight?” Seojin told him there was still an hour and a half left until take-off. All she had to do was go past security now. He nodded. “Let’s get a coffee,” he said, pulling her toward a café. I would have dragged her back, but they were already a few steps ahead. I didn’t want to make a scene when she was already under a lot of stress. I hurried to follow them. While I waited for our coffees, my father-in-law grabbed the seat next to Seojin. I ended up sitting across from her. Outside the window, a plane took off. The sky was gray. Low, heavy clouds covered the sun until the last rays of light disappeared entirely. “It doesn’t look good. Not at all,” my father-in-law grumbled. He took out a thick paper envelope from his pocket and handed it to Seojin. “For our Boki. So you can get yourself everything you want to eat there. Don’t worry about money, okay?” “Thanks, Jiji.” Seojin slipped the envelope into her bag, taking what was hers without a single show of hesitation or humility. I’d always found this side of her endearing, but not this time. “You need some extra pocket money,” my father-in-law went on. “And it’s not like anyone else prepared it for you, I’m sure.” He was trying to subtly take his revenge again, probably still angry from the other day. What a petty old man. He continued acting as if I were invisible, talking only to Seojin. I did the same and brought up stories that only we would know. Seojin glanced back and forth between us. “Umma. Jiji. Did you know that in Guam, they say ‘Håfa adai’ to greet each other? It kind of sounds like a Korean regional word, right? Håfa adai.” She curled her hand into a fist, then stretched out her thumb and pinky to gesture “hello” in the Guam way. She was trying to break the ice. My father-in-law pressed on his eyelids. “Why bother learning the greeting if you’re not even going to live there?” he muttered. He seemed prepared to stay until Seojin left. He kept making cynical comments like the plane might not take off in this rain, or it looks like it’s going to start storming soon anyway. Seojin subtly changed the subject. “Jiji, are you feeling better?” At her question, my father-in-law, who hadn’t coughed once since arriving, suddenly began to wheeze. Hard, like he might cough up blood. His eyebrows and lips furrowed in a frown so dramatic you couldn’t help but think he was acting to get her attention. That sly old geezer. He coughed for a while longer before grabbing Seojin’s hand in his. “Boki, do you have to go?” he asked. “I’ve been having some strange dreams lately. I have a feeling that something bad’s going to happen. It’s not too late to cancel the tickets.” Of course. Of course you have to hold back my daughter until the very end. “Seojin.” I interrupted before he could get any further. “Honey, it’s time now. You should go in.” I wanted to stay with her as long as I could before she left, but I had no other choice. Cutting them off now was the only way. Seojin hesitated. “What are you doing?” I scolded. “Didn’t I say you need to go?” My father-in-law frowned again. As he glared my way, I muttered something under my breath—something petty and barely audible. Just as he always did. “Why would he come to the airport, anyway . . . All he’s doing is making us uncomfortable.” My father-in-law’s face went red. His lower lip began to tremble. “Ya!” he screamed, loud enough that everyone in the café turned to look. “You keep crossing the line since last time, you know that? What, are you annoyed that I came?” “Just annoyed?” I yelled back. “I’m sick and tired of you. Did you even listen to what I said last time? Why do you have to come all the way here to torture her?” “I’m here to see my granddaughter off. You call that torture?” “Is that it? Come on, I know why you’re here. You want to force her to stay.” “Oh, so you’re trying to frame me now.” We shouted at each other, our faces feeling like they might burst. All our anger and resentment exploded at once. “Umma, stop,” Seojin said. She looked stressed. “Everyone’s looking.” She glanced around us. “You too, Jiji. Stop, please.” That word pushed me over the edge. “I told you not to call him that.” “Call him what?” “Jiji, or whatever that nonsense is. Stop calling him that!” I’m the one who will always be here for you. So why! Why? “What are you attacking Boki for?” my father-in-law yelled back. Don’t you know it’s all because of you? I wanted to scream. Because you tried to take my spot, because you stole the child I loved . . . The argument quickly devolved into curses and accusations. Remember that time, and that other time—we dug up every detail from our long history and went after each other. It was petty, so very petty. “I knew from the day I first met you. Such a vicious young girl.” “You’re the one that’s vicious,” I shot back. “You think I’m the only one who’s tired of you? Your own son is, and your wife was too.” I stopped calling him Abeonim. He struck back with harsh “you”s and “hey”s. Our fierce argument went on, and neither of us cared about manners, etiquette, or what the people around us thought. When his voice rose, so did mine. When I pointed my finger at him, he did the same. Like two people losing their minds. Two maniacs. We were busy picking out each other’s flaws and tearing the other apart when my father-in-law paused. “Boki! Where did Boki go?” Only then did my mind clear. The world came into focus again. I could hear chattering behind us. I ran toward the corner of the café, where Seojin was crouching in her tweed dress and holding her stomach. “What is it? What’s wrong?” I made my way through the whispering crowd and squatted down next to her. I was hit with a light, almost fishy, smell. A clear liquid ran down her legs. My head spun. My body went cold. No. Was her water breaking already? My father-in-law pushed me out of the way. “Boki, Boki, let’s go to the hospital now.” No. She was supposed to go to the States now. The end was right in front of us. So why was that man once again taking my spot next to my daughter? My father-in-law helped her up and tried to take her out of the airport. I hurried and grabbed a tissue from my handbag to wipe down her legs. “Seojin, honey, they won’t be able to tell anyway. Just hang in there, okay? Let’s get you on the plane. Wait until then . . . ” “Y-You’ve gone insane!” my father-in-law cried. “And you call yourself a mother?” He grabbed Seojin’s right arm and pulled her away. “Don’t listen to her. I’ll take you to Mukjeong-dong. We can take a taxi. It’ll be quick.” “Come on.” I took hold of Seojin’s left arm. “Let’s get on that plane. This is what’s best for you.” “Don’t listen, Boki. Let’s go to Mukjeong-dong. That’s where all our family was born. It’s only right that you should go there.” Boki! Seojin! We shouted, each holding onto one of Seojin’s arms. Come on, wake up, let’s get you out of here, you can hold on, are you crazy, you’re the one that’s crazy, you call yourself a parent, what about you then, here, no, not here, you can, you can’t, can, can’t, can, can’t, can, can’t . . . We screamed back and forth. Back and forth until our voices mixed together, until I couldn’t tell whose was whose. Until I couldn’t tell what we were saying anymore. A boarding announcement came on for the flight to Guam. Caught between me and my father-in-law, Seojin looked back and forth with those light brown eyes of hers and said something. Softly, her voice exhausted. She spoke with all the strength she had left. But I . . . I couldn’t hear what she was saying. And neither could you.

lti Translation is Not a One-way Street, But a Gift After Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize win, many Korean writers, critics, and thinkers have been asked some variation of the following questions: What does this mean for Korean literature? How do international readers see Korean literature? Where does Korean literature go from here? Landmark feminist poet, essayist, and critic Kim Hyesoon’s answer to these questions during the 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum this past July elicited laughter from her audience: “I don’t even know the direction of my own literature, let alone the future of Korean literature as a whole.” In a panel titled “What is Korean Literature to International Readers,” Kim discussed these issues in dialogue with Jeffrey Yang, a poet and Editor-at-Large at New Directions Publishing. Kim and Yang reflected on their experiences writing and publishing Korean poetry while offering insights into topics such as the role of literary translators, domestic vs. international readers, and the impact of AI on the publishing industry. “The term ‘Korean literature’ is used rather frequently, but I’ve always gotten the impression that outside of Korea, the focus tends to be more on individual works than, say, ‘German literature’ or ‘UK literature’ collectively,” Kim said. In her own work, she strives to transcend the bounds of Korean literature to expand “the territory of this nation we call poetry.” If this has the added effect of boosting global interest in Korean literature, all the better. Yang added that as an editor, he’s seeing an increasing number of Korean works being published in recent years—a trend he partially attributes to (in the US at least) a rise in general interest in translation. As far as the role of literary translators goes, Kim sees poetry translation as a way of expanding the boundaries of the target language. “Translation is not a one-way street or an export,” she said. “It is a sort of revelation that occurs within the reciprocal interaction between the source and target languages.” She encouraged translators to break free from the established expressions of their target language and seek instead to push the limits of language. “I see translation as an extremely demanding endeavor, much like performing transplant surgery, which is why I admire translators very much. What they offer is a gift, a method of exchange.” As one of her most meaningful memories, Kim pointed to how her longtime English translator Don Mee Choi became a decorated poet in her own right. “Translation calls forth creation. Translation is writing, and it is closely connected to my own act of creating poetry as well,” Kim said. When asked about the impact of AI on the publishing industry, Yang responded, “As an editor and publisher, it’s very dangerous to automatically think you’re going to cut some corners by using AI.” He emphasized how it’s particularly difficult to use AI to translate or write poetry, given the many layers of language and meaning embedded within these works as well as the existence of a “resistance to the commodification of poetry.” New Directions is currently celebrating its ninetieth anniversary and has published Kim’s poetry collections Autobiography of Death and Phantom Pain Wings, both translated by Don Mee Choi. Yang has also contributed two articles to KLN, both on Kim’s poetry. “If you have time, I think those two pieces say a lot that I don’t have time to say here about her work,” he said. Ultimately, Kim’s stance was clear: We must view writers as distinct individuals and avoid grouping them together under the umbrella of Korean literature. “Each poet and each writer is their own nation, their own republic,” she said. “Even if someone were to suggest an overall direction, nobody would follow it anyway.” Regarding the role of organizations like LTI Korea, Kim stressed the importance of recruiting a diverse array of translation professionals to assist with both promotion and outreach. She also highlighted the need for meaningful criticism of translated works, focusing on literary merit rather than translation errors. Yang, meanwhile, pointed to the benefits of funded residencies for translators and the submission of strong sample translations to publishers.

poetry Two Poems by Moon Boyoung LOSS Water Rushes up to my knees Then drains away I’m the only one watching this fountain So if I don’t watch the fountain The fountain is wasted There is a faint light in the water So as not to waste you I watch you As I leave I look back The water pressure may cause injury please do not touch Please do not drink the water in the fountain How’s that For a farewell Or a how are you Walk through the overgrown path Past the walnut tree The tree ripples so Leave it to rot Passing a place you’ve passed before Is a kind of review The fountain is no longer watching me So I am for a while wasted UNDERSTANDING ADAPTATION It takes 0.4 seconds on average for a human to blink. Isn’t that too fast? Olivia thinks people need to live a little slower. Included in this slow life: staying in the bathroom longer, not exercising, closing and then opening your eyes slowly. When someone blinked during a conversation they died and came back to life in 0.4 second intervals, Olivia felt. Or they transformed into someone else. Which would mean that a person transforms 15,000 times a day. Which is also the reason I can’t ever adapt to being myself. Olivia believes in blinking less often but keeping your eyes shut longer. In the world she envisions, it takes people about three seconds to blink. I believe we need to keep our eyes shut a little longer. I think that’s healthier. In the world she made up, people blink significantly slower as they age. For instance, an eighty-year-old takes ten seconds to blink. It takes a long time to finish a round of chess or janggi because the two old people playing take turns closing their eyes for ten seconds while talking. Of old people who keep their eyes closed too long, people say, “That person is adapting.” Olivia’s daughter who lives on a marblejust asked “Mom, why does grandpa close his eyes for such a long time before he opens them?”“Grandpa is adapting.”“To what?” For Oliviathe ideal person is one who is a little more exhausted than others.

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