[REVIEW] “To Write Properly: Hwang Bo-reum’s 𝑊𝑒𝑙𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑦𝑢𝑛𝑎𝑚-𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑝” by Jack Greenberg

📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Hwang Bo-reum (author), Shanna Tan (translator), Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. 320 pgs.

Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is now available to English readers, in a recent translation from Bloomsbury. The novel is the fiction debut of author Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Singapore-based Shanna Tan, her own first book-length translation. It was written in 2018 and published serially the following year on Brunch, a blog platform operated by tech giant Kakao Corporation, which allows aspiring writers to share their stories and ideas with its community of users. Although it garnered little feedback from readers on the site, it became an instant sensation after Hwang submitted it to a contest and won, which allowed it to be published in full on Millie’s Library, one of South Korea’s largest eBook subscription platforms. Reader demand then led to 13 paperback runs and over 100,000 copies sold in just five months.

The book fits within a genre immensely popular in Korea over recent years—“healing fiction”. Authors of this genre often explore the mundane realities of people in everyday settings. The stories envelop readers in feelings of emotional security and warmth. They contain messages that are psychologically soothing and give comfort to those seeking happiness and fulfilment of their dreams but who feel that this is beyond reach in a society that has so many expectations of what each of us must do and who we must be.

The protagonist, a woman named Yeongju, was a successful corporate employee until she was brought down by burnout. She resigns from her job, her marriage falls apart, and her relationship with her mother deteriorates. As she finds herself alone, she decides to start over and realise her childhood dream of opening a bookstore. She moves to quaint Hyunam-dong, attracted by the character hyu (휴), which comes from the hanja character for “rest”, and establishes the shop on a quiet backstreet. The first months are not easy. Yeongju is overwhelmed by sadness, and she fails to mask this, which drives away any customers there are. But things eventually start to fall into place as Yeongju understands that it takes more than being a bibliophile to run a successful bookstore. She learns to connect readers with books that might resonate with them, rather than simply recommending her favourite titles. She hosts events, seminars, and book club meetings. She hires a young man, Minjung, to help her out and manage the shop’s café. Nevertheless, Yeongju remains filled with anxiety, unsure whether the bookshop will ever truly find its place and how long she will be able to keep its doors open.

The book engages with the destructive effects of social and work pressures in Korea’s capitalist modernity. In doing so, it addresses the self- and externally imposed obstacles to work-life balance and psychosocial wellbeing that so many individuals contend with as they chase dreams that do not serve their true aspirations. Minjung humanises the situation of an increasing number of highly educated young Koreans who have been isolated and bedevilled by a bleak employment picture. He has followed his parents’ desires, studied hard, earned top grades, and graduated from a prestigious university, but he fails repeatedly to find a company job. Another character, Jungsuh, was a corporate contract worker who has again and again been denied a permanent position. For years she went above and beyond while her superiors took credit for her work and treated her as disposable, with little regard for her emotional state. Her tribulations encapsulate those of South Korea’s non-regular contract workers who toil without proper job security and earn substantially less pay and benefits than permanent staff. The circumstances of other characters poke at issues of family life, including the pain of unhappiness in marriage and confronting the feelings of selfishness and guilt over ending relationships. The bookshop ultimately becomes a safe space for those who have deviated—some willingly, others unwillingly—from their paths and helps bring down the barriers of age, gender, and background that might divide them elsewhere in society. It becomes somewhat of a refuge for its community of readers and regulars to rest, read, and chat.

The conversations that unfold within the space lend the characters the strength of mind, confidence, and bravery to accept themselves, enjoy everyday life, and pursue their dreams and passions. I found myself cheering for them and their victories as they each took small steps forward on paths that carve out space for the pursuit of meaning, fulfilment, and contributing to the good of others. A strength of Tan’s translation is the straightforward and simple prose. Hwang’s gentle dialogues flow and stop when needed. They are meaningful and create room for self-reflection but avoid coming off as preachy or insincere. In this regard, the author adheres faithfully to the advice the writer Seongwoo shares with student Mincheol in the bookshop’s café as the later struggles “to write properly”. She writes honestly, with effort and sincerity, drawing upon her own experience of leaving an unsatisfying job as a software engineer at LG Electronics and the intensity of her life in the period after as she worked to justify her decision.  

In a book talk Yeongju organises she asks an author—very likely a stand-in for Hwang herself—whether it is okay for readers to not remember all the details of what they read. The author says there is no need to obsess over details because “books are not meant to remain in your mind, but in your heart. Maybe they exist in your mind too, but as something more than memories… a forgotten sentence or a story from years ago can come back to offer an invisible hand…” (p. 40). I expect that the memory of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is one that I will think about often and continue to find solace in. There were many messages that resonated personally, but it especially encouraged me to pick up my pen. As someone who nurses a desire to write but often feels inadequate in my ability or worried whether what I write is “correct” or representative of myself, I’ll remember the author who tells Yeongju that, instead of worrying whether they had talent or not they told themselves to write because it was the way they wanted to live their life, and also Seongwoo who challenges her on the notion that one really ever knows whether they are similar to their writing because even the truths we tell ourselves are subjective. I’ll write because I want to write, and that’s enough.

How to cite: Greenberg, Jack. “To Write Properly: Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Nov. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/11/24/hyunam-dong.

Jack Greenberg resides in Seoul where he is pursuing a master’s degree at Korea University’s Graduate School of International Studies as a Global Korea Scholarship recipient. He is a former management consultant and originally hails from Toronto, Canada. Jack regularly contributes to KoreaPro, an online subscription resource that provides objective insights and analysis on the most important stories in South Korea. His writing has also been featured in The Korea Times and Asian Labour Review. He is interested in housing issues and urban development and enjoys documenting changing cityscapes through photography in his free time and travels abroad. Follow his work on Twitter at @jackwgreenberg. [All contributions by Jack Greenberg.]