My review of "I Live in Bongcheon-dong" (2004) by Kyung-ran Jo

[Peter]

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I'd like to highlight "I Live in Bongcheon-dong" ahead of this group's August 14, 2025, gathering.

I posted a long review of the story at its GR entry:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The story is a good example of what Kyung-ran Jo was up to in the 2000s, in the years around the writing of Blowfish . And of who she is, how she thinks, and how she crafts stories.

To me, "I Live in Bongcheon-dong" is more interesting than her other translated-to-English short-stories.

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See also: "Kyung-ran Jo's short stories in English translation (available online and otherwise)" at https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

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---> ACCESS TO THE STORY: For those who cannot find a way to access this story (the 2013 English translation; it's a little hard to find): Contact me, and I'll get it to you.

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The review starts just below:

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REVIEW OF "I LIVE IN BONGCHEON-DONG" by Kyung-ran Jo
Review by Peter J., 2025 (written July 26, 2025; revised July 30)
3000 words

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(note --- This story is not the kind that needs "spoiler warnings"; no great secrets are revealed in this review.)

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BOOK INFO

"I Live in Bongcheon-dong" (나는 봉천동에 산다) --- published originally (in Korean) in December 2004, in the author Kyung-ran Jo (조경란)'s short-story volume titled Story of a Ladle.

English translation by Kari Schenk, published in October 2013 by Asia Publishers (Seoul).

Length: about 8000 English words for the main story, plus (in the 2013 printing) about 1750 words for an Afterword, author's-bio, and such material.

(In the 2020s, this story is hard to find. It came out before the recent rise of interest in Korean literature-in-translation. But that's another story...)

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REVIEW

"I Live in Bongcheon-dong" is an interesting and alluring short-story narrative, which seems based closely on the life of the author, Kyung-ran Jo.

The story opens with the remnants of a typhoon (hurricane) passing over in Seoul. We encounter the narrator. She is reflecting on her place in the world, observing the clouds, questioning whether they're really from the typhoon. The symbolic value of framing the story in this way becomes clearer later.

This is a first-person-narrator story. With such works, you never know exactly how much that is outwardly autobiographical is "real," and how much is "made up."

Kyung-ran Jo offers us a few clues to suggest it is "nearly all true": The narrator, whose life nearly matches hers, was born in 1968 (whereas the author was born in 1969). A few other small hints, which the astute reader may pick up on, suggest that Kyung-ran Jo seeks to signal this to her reader this idea: "This is not 100% me. But it is a close variant of me and my life, of my thinking, experiences, and identity."

(By "astute reader" in the preceding paragraph, by the way, I mean the one who has read the brief author-bio; Korean fiction usually publishes prominently the year-of-birth of the author in the bio-section. Readers can be expected to have seen the actual birth-year and to have noticed the one-year gap when the story's narrator identifies herself as born 1968.)

As with much literature, "Bongcheon-dong" is designed to be read on several levels, and different readers will take different things from it. As a profile-sketch of the neighborhood known as Bongcheon, it works. (In Korean geographic place-name system "dong" refers to a city sub-district; a place typically with a few tens of thousands of residents within a wider area, "ku/gu," of several-hundred-thousand residents.)

But there's far more to "I Live in Bongcheon-dong" than somebody's essay-like account of a neighborhood. Gradually, and especially towards the end, the story's likely true intention becomes clear, and there is a coherence to the whole thing: It's "more about" inter-generational dynamics, identity, growth, coping with living in the wake of growth, and other such things.

WHEN: The story does not specify when it's taking place. But from multiple references it is actually easily and precisely dateable: The story takes place over a month-long period between late-August and late-September 2002, between the named typhoon and the "Chuseok" autumn harvest-festival holiday (September 20-22, 2002).

WHEN WRITTEN: It could be that Kyung-ran Jo (the real one) was writing at exactly the time as the story is set. Her narrator is having these few weeks of experiences in August-September 2002, and the narrator is (like the real Kyung-ran Jo), a writer who lives in a kind of attic in a house on a hill. It could that she went for a barely-modified realism (as was so popular, for so long, in Korean fiction). The writer of the Afterword ("Son Jeong-su, literary critic") seems to assume it was written in 2002 during the events described. Maybe it's the case. There are, however, good reasons to believe she could've been writing either earlier or later (up to late 2004 publication) and chose to book-end the story between the typhoon and the Chuseok holiday for story-purposes.

WHERE: The places that things are taking place are identified, and identifiable (and re-traceable to those who may want to poke around the area, as I will try to get around doing) in oddly specific, precise ways. She names very specific places all throughout. This I find unusual for fiction, and even unsettling, as if getting too much information about someone's life or daily habits. The kind of specificity here is more characteristic again of nonfiction writing.

The action of the story is not just the general region of southern-central Seoul known as Bongcheon-dong, but in the more-specific sub-locality known as Bongcheon sub-district 10. Bongcheon-10 is around a 400,000-square-meter (100 acre) area, which you might imagine as a box, a corner of which starts the northwest-facing exits of Seoul National University Station (Seoul Subway Line 2; which also get several references).

The narrator gives many more-precise landmarks and place-names than that. Even the street-block of the narrator's house is given. Maybe some of these are fictionalized. The story, though, shows every sign of needing to be read as a "close version of the author's real life, observations, and experiences," as I say. To the extent exact details on place-references are fictionalized, I expect the real ones are comparable and a stone's throw away.

The narrator makes repeated reference to what the relocation of Seoul National University (SNU) in the mid-1970s did to the area. The SNU campus today sits on a semi-majestic hillside, a ways south of Bongcheon-dong's core area but clearly influencing it, the the gravitational field of a massive astronomical body will beat up on lesser bodies around it.

The SNU relocation (completed over the period 1975-80) was another in a very-long line of mega-projects in South Korea, of a type identifiable at least since about the mid-1960s. In important ways, this mega-project imperative continues in the 2020s (to a degree that often disturbs Western observers who encounter the process; and one of the interesting phenomena to observe, on the sociocultural scene, are the anti-redevelopment protest(or)s that are easily found but not easily recognized by a pure outsider like a Western tourist just off a plane).

The new SNU, by the close of the 1970s, towered over the poor people who had settled, often extra-legally, in villages in the hills of the area. This had especially began in the 1960s, as the narrator finds out. This movement happened just before her lifetime, or at least life-stage at which any cognizance of such things is possible (remembering that the narrator is b.1968; the author b.1969).

There are a lot of reasons, the narrator suggests, to be ashamed of Bongcheon-dong and its shabby history. It was the site of dozens of the "moon villages," in which people illegally built up shacks on hillsides outside the reach of the arm of the law. They were later chased away to varying degrees. But there is little to be proud of with this history.

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"I Live in Bongcheon-dong" opens with the author pondering whether the clouds seen over her family house's rooftop are brought in by Typhoon Rusa.

Koreans reading this work upon initial publication in the mid-2000s would likely remember that hurricane, in maybe the way Americans would remember the name "Hurricane Katrina" which hit New Orleans in 2005. Hundreds were killed by that summer-2002 Typhoon Rusa. The scenes of destruction were all on the east coast, not Seoul. The reference to Typhoon Rusa would create a resonance in readers' minds. The same reference, however, surely fails to connect with non-Korean readers who couldn't be expected to know the reference. (A reviewer who gave this story low marks indicates that not knowing the place-references limited his enjoyment.)

Dating a story so specifically is a risk: Will people remember the reference? What is conjured up for to Koreans by the Tyhpoon Rusa reference in 2025, twenty-three years having passed since the storm?

Yes, reading this story in the 2020s creates an interesting similar effect to what the characters are going through: With typhoons and floods on people's minds, they talk through other floods they remember. Floods which were important in their memories. The narrator learns, or re-learns and tells us, that that which is important to one person may not even register in the memories of others who ostensibly also lived through it.

The narrator repeatedly references a major flood of 1984, which she remembers hitting Bongcheon-dong. The thing is, no one else seems to remember this 1984 flood. She was then about age 15; it affected her. The narrator's father doesn't remember the supposed 1984 flood. Instead, he repeatedly calls back to a different one: the big flood of 1972. The significance of that period, around-about 1972, is revealed as the conflict of this story unfolds. [. . . . ] (Continued below)

(Part 1 / 2)

[Peter]

(Part 2 / 2)
. . .

Review of "I Love in Bongcheon-dong," continued (Part 2 / 2)

The questioning of a distinction between "real" and "not real" is one aim of "I Live in Bongcheon-dong." Is the city-district known as Bongcheon real, or is it not real? Is it part of Seoul, or not? The people who live there, are they part of Seoul, or not? What about the people who originally settled decades ago? Many of them were a close variant of homeless squatters. Surely they were not part of Seoul? But then if they are all part of Seoul now, when did they become so? If they weren't part of Seoul ca.1970, were they part of it by the mid-1980s (the narrator's remembered-flood that the older-generation residents didn't even take notice of)? What about by the early 2000s (the time of the story)?

A sense of mystery begins to permeate this ordinary-seeming story, related to the questions I pose in the preceding paragraph. The character driving it most is actually the narrator's father. The narrator has turned into an investigator of the history and soul of her area, Bongcheon-dong. Various experiences lead her to ask around about Bongcheon-dong and look into some histories of her place. She learns -- or realizes a hazily-known fact now in the sharp clearness of adult concentration on a quetion -- that virtually every in-migrant group to today's Bongcheon-dong, in the 1960s and early 1970s, was one sort of hard-luck story or another, or even shameful story.

The more-or-less respectable-seeming people living in the 2000s would not want to remember the old stories. She knows her father moved in, back in the early 1970s (well before she was old enough to remember anything). Her father's repeated references to a flood of 1972 seem to bear out that he was there and was having formative experiences as regards the place at the time. But, wait, where was the 1972 that the father remembered as so important? No one respectable, it dawns on her, moved into Bongcheon-dong in those days.

Which group was her father? Could he have been a homeless person, chased out of some other raided "moon village" shantytown out there? A flood victim, who lost his house and pitifully retreated to one of the poorest spots people were congregating (was that why he recalled the 1972 flood)? Had he been an illegal squatter? Or maybe just an ordinary rural-to-city mover, the least shameful of the options.

The father repeatedly evades the question, giving vague non-answers. The narrator is left pondering. As she continues to circulate through Bongcheon-dong, meeting people, observing its street-scenes, and focusing more and more on her observations, she faces a small crisis of confidence or of identity. It's a just-slightly-jarring unease, subtly rendered by the author (and translator).

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Of course there are implications for the entire society, with this little, personal-seeming, close-in, autobiographical-like character-arc. But it's not really about some government-oppression narrative, which is far too easy (which is to say, lazy). It's more a personal-identity struggle.

The story drives itself onward as the profile of a neighborhood, the people of it, and the changes in it. The story's Bongcheon-dong may be a microcosm of Seoul itself (or at least large elements of it); or of the entire South Korean society; or, if you want, of something like rising-per-capita-GDP postmodernity. The transition from pre-modernity to modernity to postmodernity? I know this sounds heavy. As I say, it's done subtly, and with levity on every page by a more-than-slightly frivolous narrator.

Distressingly many Korean novels and short-stories are angrily political and therefore tend towards the preachy, insular, and didactic in a heavy-handed way; but also have lots of cheerleaders who are in favor of the political-didactic message. I see none of those pitfalls in "I Live in Bongcheon-dong." Those who insist on seeing political messages can probably write a review of at least the length of this one, in which they go on such things. Find the story and read it for yourself and see if you agree that the real message(s) are not politicized morality-tales. The growth of Seoul in the mid-late 20th century was a trauma in itself: that seems to be one lesson.

The story narrator comments often on how accessible Bongcheon-dong was by the 1990s, but that is only the physical, not the psychological.

This place, Bongcheon-dong, didn't exist at all in anyone's conception of Seoul before the 1970s at least. It long retained its image of shabbiness as part of the vast expansion of Seoul. It was tacked on, annexed to Seoul. We can say Seoul colonized this land (and, by now, a lot more adjoining land); the colonists, which this ever-hungry monster called Seoul tossed at this place, were the squatters.

Classic Seoul was above Namsan Mountain, and between the two "great gates" (East and West). There were plenty of people attached to the city living outside the walls/gates but anything as far south as the Han River's north shore was definitively countryside, except a few spots adjacent to ferry-terminuses leading to Seoul (early urban-spillover). Definitely anything south of the river, such as the future site of Bongcheon-dong, was considered countryside outright.

Koreans use the word "ji-bang" [지방] to mean "all the non-(Greater?-)Seoul-area out there." I've noticed everyone's concept of exactly what ji-bang refers to, is different; the definition has evolved. Bongcheon was out; now it's in (or is it?).

Bongcheon-dong remade itself in the 1960s-70s. A period of sweeping changes is a funny thing: normal people living normal lives follow. What will they make of things, of living in the wake of upheaval? How will they deal with discontinuities involved in parents of grandparents doing something completely new? That seems to be a point of the story. It can be thought of as migrant fiction despite zero characters being foreigners.

Another theme of the story is Re-Development. The part of Seoul she refers to is, as usual with South Korea, pockmarked with enormous mega-developments, large areas clear-cut a terraformed, expelling the small-time house-dwellers that had lived there before, severing their ties with the community, bringing in completely new people (with more money). This necessarily creates a little siege-mentality in the minds of people like the narrator, who calls herself a native of Bongcheon-dong. Her mother, she reports, shops at the humble little Bongcheon Central Market. More fashionable people, and most mega-development apartment-dwellers by the early 2000s, were shopping at the shiny new Lotte Department store and the fashionable supermarket in its basement floor. A friend of the narrator's who has moved into the area does that.

The narrator relates wanting to leave Bongcheon-dong but coming back to it. That's another feature of the story. By the time of the story, 2002, the narrator was 33 or 34 (the actual author, Kyung-ran Jo, was one year younger but had done similar things and also returned to Bongcheon). The narrator says how school-redistricting had pushed her successively farther away from the core of Bongcheon-dong with each step. Finally she went north of the river for college, traditionally something triumphant. But she eventually comes back.

Birth and rebirth. Long-running cliches for Seoul, of course. But behind such big stories stand families and individuals. The inter-generational theme in the story blends in.

The narrator reports that her father (presumably b.1940s) looked to possibly die in infancy. Her grandmother forced the family to rename him "Hoe-saeng," or Return Life. The grandmother died (by suicide) one year after that re-naming; the father survived.

Towards the end, she recalls the scenes, then of recent memory, of the chasing out of the final dwellers of the final shantytown (moon village) in the area. One had hung on even to 2002, in the area of Sillim-7-dong, a long walk from the narrator's house. Another huge mega-redevelopment project, ongoing between 2001 and expected to be completed in 2006, had chased them out. Once new families began moving in, the mega-development hosted 3300 higher-end apartment units (which I presume still stand), the space surely used a lot more efficiently than the shantytown people had used it.

Meanwhile, the father still won't say what brought him to Bongcheon-dong back in the early 1970s, except in the vaguest of terms. She stops asking.

The Afterword indicates that this story, published in late 2004, has an ironic coda: In 2008, the Seoul City government renamed Bongcheon-10-dong to "Jung-Ang-dong" (Central District) within the larger administrative area Gwanak-gu. This renaming, along with a lot of the other ongoing changes referenced throughout the story (and similar ones) induced many more thoughts in Kyung-ran Jo. In 2010, soon after completing Blowfish , wrote a story revisiting Bongcheon-dong directly. The 2010 story was titled "The Phantom of Bongcheon-dong" (untranslated, as far as I know).

The translator Kari Schenck does an excellent job with this story. Some of the early-mid 2010s translation-output from this mid-2010s series from Asia Publishers is spotty. Some of the stories, however, are effective. Kari Schenk's rendering of "Bongcheon-dong" is effective. My respect goes to her for rendering this story effectively, that it may be discovered by people well into future. Similar to the author's own apparent goal with this walk through several decades Bongcheon-dong.

(end of review)

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[Hannah]

This was a very interesting review to read. Thanks for sharing it, Peter. It is amazing the amount of detail you put into your reviews, and how deeply you think about certain aspects of the content. I also find it interesting that you care about the author's life and how it relates to the book, and I recall that you did so with 한강's books as well. It's a distinct way of being which is valuable, although obviously very time-consuming. I tend to read a bunch of books all at once like a lion devouring a carcass (i.e. not thoroughly but intensely and managing to extract the best parts efficiently) and I often barely skim or even skip introductions, author's note, translator's notes and anything else I can possibly cut out. This makes me the opposite of an astute reader I guess.

Anyway, the narrator's father's vague evasive answers about how he ended up in Bongcheondong annoy me. It's one thing to be ashamed of your origins in front of acquaintances whom you know are above you, but to withhold information from your own child is foolish. just a few hours ago I saw Bowen Yang on The Late Show sharing a picture of himself in front of the ruins of the mud hut his father grew up in in I think inner mongolia. He wasn't ashamed his father came from such poor roots and apparently neither was his father. although I cognitively understand how the situation described in the story could occur, I effectively have no empathy for that. Also all the questions about what is real and not real and is the district part of Soul or not and what about the people there-- I have a lot of impatience for people who ask questions like that. Every category that exists is arbitrary and all categories have fuzzy boundaries if you magnify them enough, and questions like that to me are rather meaningless. I think this is one reason why I have difficulty sometimes enjoying fiction as an adult. People and their questions annoy me and fiction very often has people in it. Alas! Tangentially, I started reading Soseki's 1906 novel "I am a Cat" and the cat seems to share my irritation with people too.

Anyway reading your review made me feel better though as I'm quite tired today. So thank you for that. I wonder if anything about this story spoke to you personally or was it more of a intellectual exploration of all the things you mentioned above?