Category: South Korea

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, South Korea

Do Not Be Ill, If Spring Must Come After All (아프지 마라, 기어이 올 봄이라면)

!Epic Tomorrows

By Pak Jong-hee

A gentle breeze brushes past, carrying a scent that feels like an old memory. This pungent, slightly fishy aroma that fills my nostrils is the breath of mugwort, rising in clusters as it leans against the spring sunlight. In a corner of the park, on a sun-drenched mound, I see a woman crouched low, picking mugwort. Each time a tender shoot—hardly larger than a baby’s fingertip —is placed in her basket, a warmth like the earth’s own body temperature quietly spreads to my feet.

The woman speaks to me in an excited voice, saying the sky is flawlessly clear today. Looking up, I see that the hue of the sky is indeed different from before. Where the achromatic winter has retreated, has the delicate texture of the pale green grass ever been this vivid? Yet, the brighter the world becomes, the more Spring has always been a precarious guest to me. It is as if I can hear the moans of living things breaking through the stubborn ice of winter.

Spring never arrives for free. The backs of the new shoots tearing through the frozen earth are hunched, and the gestures of the trees squeezing out every drop of their essence to bloom are nothing short of desperate. Whenever I see petals trembling under the lash of a late-frost gale, my heart grows anxious, thinking that such brilliance might actually be a final, frantic struggle bartered for death.

This sense of peril stems from the duality of Spring. On the surface, a hymn of vitality seems to resound, but beneath it, withered grasses and ancient trees—baring their gaunt skeletons—lie scattered like the wreckage of winter. Upon that threshold where warmth and cold intersect, fragile lives cross the boundary between life and death several times a day. To me, Spring has always been a season of pity. Like the late-winter cold that strikes just when you think you’ve arrived, it resembles the seasons of trial that visited me without warning at every turning point in my life.

Spring was just beginning to show its face even at the place where my mother left this world. Perhaps because the void of loss was so deep, I suffered from a severe, aching malaise every Spring. Living with a dry cough throughout the winter, I could only manage to stand up again when the cherry blossoms burst into pink buds, as if tearing their own bodies open. To me, Spring was not a season of vitality but a cold current that I had to swim against with my whole body, year after year.

Looking back, my childhood was also a succession of chilly Springs where I couldn’t even take a single clean breath. Time spent in a village beside a cement factory. Every morning when we opened the door, a thick layer of dust, white as snow, had settled in the yard. The lids of the clay jars, polished to a shine by my mother’s hands, would soon hold their breath under a shroud of gray powder, which would harden like stone after a few days.

Dusting off the particles that settled on each other’s hair was our family’s simplest and warmest kindness in those days. Yet, the fine powder that seeped through that kindness was quietly taking root deep within my mother’s lungs. As a child, I did not know. I did not realize that those hours spent living beneath the factory chimneys were gnawing away at my mother’s breath.

The dry cough that began in her forties became chronic, eventually pinning her to a hospital bed under the name ‘pulmonary edema.’ By the time the environmental lawsuits began, Mother had already passed away. All that remained for me was a Spring illness that resembled her cough and a single scar in my heart that flared up every change of season.

I quietly watch the fingertips of the woman picking mugwort. I try to imagine how long those tender shoots must have endured before pushing up through the hard earth. The vitality of mugwort, erupting through frozen ground, is by no means docile. It is a force of struggle, ultimately heaving the very crust of the earth upward. Like the mugwort that perfects its fragrance even while swaying in the biting wind, perhaps our lives only gain a subtle radiance after passing through the tunnels of ordeal.

The woman suddenly holds out a bag of mugwort toward me as I stand still. With a soft smile, she tells me that if I boil a bowl of soup with some soybean paste, it will be better than any medicine. That smile is as gentle yet sturdy as the pale green shoots that rose after steadfastly enduring all manner of cold.

Returning home with the bag, I fill the kitchen sink with water. As I wash the mugwort several times, bits of dirt and dried leaves float up, and the clear water soon turns a faint green. Dissolving soybean paste in a pot and adding a handful of mugwort, a pungent aroma slowly rises amidst the savory scent. The moment a spoonful of soup enters my mouth, a bitter yet sweet taste lingers on the tip of my tongue.

A sense I had long forgotten awakens. Amidst the rising steam, the memory of sitting on the edge of the wooden porch as a child, blowing on the mugwort soup my mother had boiled for me, comes vividly back to life. Back then, not knowing what this fragrance had endured to rise, I probably just rejoiced that spring had come.

Silently, I set down my spoon and wrap both hands around the bowl where the warmth remains. Then, I step outside again. The wind brushing against my skin is still spicy and cold. But now I know. One must endure this precarious wind for flowers to bloom, and only after passing through this cold does the mugwort truly complete its fragrance.

I lower my mask for a moment and breathe in the air deeply. Leaning my heart into the pungent breath of Spring that seeps deep into my lungs, I whisper softly:

“Do not be ill. If spring must come after all, shouldn’t you cross this season safely?”

If I am still in pain, then this radiant Spring is ultimately nothing more than a season of pain. Today, the green shoots swaying in the breeze appear exceptionally clear. Each of those pale green textures is swaying quietly, yet firmly, as if remembering the freezing seasons they have passed through. Standing before that vitality, I reverently inhale all the pain and endurance dwelling within this fragrance of Spring and this breath of green.

Ecology of the absurd, South Korea

The Threshold of the Monsoon

!Epic Tomorrows

by YOON JAEMIN

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There is a certain “myth” about Korean geography and climate, passed down among those born and raised in Korea, though one senses its meaning gradually fading with age. “A peninsula surrounded by seas on three sides.” “A climate with four distinct seasons.” These are deeply familiar notions of the homeland’s nature and landscape for those born and educated in the south of the Korean Peninsula in the latter half of the twentieth century and after. From early childhood, Koreans were taught to recognize the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands—the constitutional territory of the Republic of Korea— as “our country,” likened to the shape of a rising tiger. We believed that the 365 days of this fierce tiger-shaped land, roaring toward northeastern China with the Taebaek Mountains as its spine, were painted in the ever-shifting colors of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The “distinct four seasons of the complete Korean nation-state,” stretching from Mount Paektu to Mount Halla, formed one of the foundational images of nation and landscape in the minds of Korean children.

To a certain extent, this was grounded in reality. For more than eighty years, the two governments on the Korean Peninsula have regarded each other with hostility while each claims the tiger-shaped peninsula facing the continent as its homeland. The climate, too, is severe and mercurial. In the central region of the peninsula where I was born and have lived for nearly forty years, every year brings heavy snow and bitter cold during the year’s end and beginning, followed by summer heat soaring well above 30 degrees Celsius from June through August. Such cycles have long shaped the rhythms and lifeworlds of ordinary Koreans like myself. Spring and autumn—the transitional periods between winter and summer—were relatively mild seasons, moments of temporary recovery for bodies and minds exhausted by the brutality of the extremes.

Yet Koreans, myself included, also know that this “myth” is slowly collapsing. Our actual lived experience as Koreans educated and raised in Korea increasingly compels us to doubt it. As is well known, the practical territory of Korea for most Koreans is limited to the land south of the Military Demarcation Line, which stretches in a wavering curve from Baengnyeong Island in the west to Goseong County in Gangwon Province in the east. We were taught to regard Mount Paektu, rising 2,744 meters along the Yalu River bordering China, as “the sacred mountain of our people” and “the highest mountain in our country.” Yet from South Korea there is no way to visit “our territory” on Mount Paektu directly. The only possible route is through China, and even then one may only stand on the land outside the territory effectively controlled by North Korea. For this reason, many South Koreans, myself included, tend in practice to think of Mount Halla on Jeju Island, standing 1,947 meters above sea level, as the nation’s highest peak. The collective imaginary geography of a fierce tiger peninsula divided by the Military Demarcation Line often diverges from the actual geographical sensibilities of Koreans like myself. For South Koreans, whose human and material exchanges with North Korea are completely severed, the Republic of Korea is effectively an island.

There is equally much to say about the climate. “Four distinct seasons”? Controversial though it may sound, I increasingly feel that spring and autumn are disappearing from Korea. The 365 days of the year seem to be collapsing into the two brutal extremes of summer and winter. This is not merely a personal impression. According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, the average annual temperature of the Korean Peninsula rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius over roughly a century, from 1912 to 2020. The rate of warming, moreover, continues to accelerate. Over the past thirty years (1991–2020), summer has lengthened by an average of twenty days, and the trend is expected to intensify further. Rising temperatures have caused spring and autumn to converge into summer. As a result, unlike in the past, we now experience the year as though we pass abruptly from summer into winter, having lost the buffer zones once provided by spring and autumn.

What was it like in the past? Consider Monsoon (1935), a work by the celebrated modernist writer Yi Tae-jun (1904–1978) from colonial-era Korea. The story unfolds at the threshold of summer after spring has passed, during the humid and sweltering season Koreans call the ‘Jangma,’ the East Asian monsoon rains. Traditionally, the monsoon season has been difficult for Koreans to endure. Premodern living spaces on the peninsula, designed primarily to survive the harshest period of the year—the winter—were ill-suited to withstand a hot, humid climate that brought nearly thirty percent of the annual rainfall. The narrator, “I” (effectively Yi Tae-jun himself), feels the same. For a man drifting through colonial Korea under Japanese rule without any real occupation, passing his days idly, the monsoon season is unbearable in every sense. Each morning he must wake to the damp smell of mold clinging to the bedroom, bedding, and bookshelves. His wife suffers as well. The oppressive humidity filling the house aggravates her already frayed nerves over their meager household finances. It is hardly surprising that arguments erupt between them. Irritated by his wife’s nagging, “I” has little choice but to leave the house and wander the streets.

Yet he has nowhere in particular to go. He merely drifts endlessly through the humid, sweltering boulevards of colonial Seoul. Thus “I,” as an anonymous urban subject, surrenders himself to the fluid dynamism of metropolitan space, wandering aimlessly in thought. He hopes to run into friends such as Yi Sang and Gubo—modernist writers of colonial Korea, much like Yi Tae-jun himself—men who share his circumstances. But the city does not permit such encounters. There is no special reason for it. His small gamble of going out that day simply fails. Nothing changes. It is only an ordinary afternoon during the monsoon season, much like all our urban walks.

The reality of Korea in the mid-1930s was deeply complex. The Great Depression had made ordinary life even more difficult. Meaningful employment for Korean intellectuals—second-class citizens within the imperial order—was extremely scarce. The narrator’s wandering through the city captures the unremarkable everydayness of that era. His groundless optimism that he might accidentally meet fellow Korean writers in similar circumstances forms the other side of the same coin as his powerlessness before reality. In Gyeongseong, the colonial capital of Korea and a forward base for the Japanese military’s invasion of China, Koreans endured each day under intensifying ideological repression and growing intellectual humiliation.
And yet, the worst had not yet arrived. The people of colonial Korea were unknowingly waiting for the total-war era of the 1940s that would soon descend upon them. Of course, neither the narrator nor anyone else knew the fate awaiting them. But while strolling through a colonial Seoul outwardly more glamorous and bustling than ever before, “I” suddenly voices a reflection that seems almost prophetic of the catastrophe to come:

“I transferred to the streetcar at Anguk-dong. It may be Anguk-machi now, but it still feels right to call it Anguk-dong. I cannot help but resent how every dong and ri has been entirely transformed into machi. To regulate culture solely according to the efficiency of business is a misguided importation of Nazism. (…) At this rate, in a few years they may even decide that names like Lee, Kim, Park, and Jeong are too disorderly, and find some way to control citizens’ personal names as well.”

Remarkably, this did in fact come to pass only a few years later. Under the military regime’s radical expansionist policies and in the name of Pan-Asianism, the people of colonial Korea were mobilized into the total-war system and forced to adopt Japanese names in place of their Korean ones. Seen in this light, the narrator’s insight is astonishing. Yet he did not seriously predict the future. It was merely a passing thought during an idle urban stroll.

Now, nearly a century later, in the year 2026, I often walk through the old downtown districts of Seoul where Monsoon was set whenever I feel restless. A brutal winter during which I suffered badly from influenza has finally passed, and I am writing this essay at the threshold of a summer that seems to grow shorter every year. Korea will soon enter the monsoon season again. The monsoon is not the harshest season for Koreans. It is unpleasant and melancholy, but it is not the worst. The worst is yet to come. That is what I feel now. Nor is it merely a premonition about the climate. Like Yi Tae-jun before me, I stand at the threshold of the monsoon and sense keenly that the world’s worst days have not yet arrived. What will become of the world ahead? I pray for everyone’s well-being.

AI Tomorrows, DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, FLASH!, Many feminisms, Reflections, South Korea

The Woman Not on Any List

!Epic Tomorrows

by Jo Eunyoung (South Korea, poet); see also Meet Me at Three O’clock at the LerDevagar Bookstore and The Summer We Once Wanted

*******

“Noblesse Matchmaking — we find you the partner you deserve.“

Even past forty, matchmaking agencies still send me messages. Maybe I’m still on their list of women who haven’t — or couldn’t — marry. Maybe it’s just an automated system firing into the void. Either way, I feel two things at once: a small admiration for their persistence, and a faint irritation at still being considered a target. I never delete the messages immediately. I leave them there for hours, as if one day even this might begin to feel urgent.

One day, a younger colleague leaned in close, as if sharing classified information. “Unni, I actually met my husband through a matchmaking agency (gyeolhon jeongbo hoesa: Korea’s paid marriage brokerage service that scores and ranks members by age, education, income, and appearance). You should try it too — I worked really hard at it.” She believed she was doing me a favor. The story of their fated, romantic meeting had apparently been constructed overnight — a tidy narrative designed to erase the fact that it had started with a checklist.

It’s not that I never tried. I dated steadily, loved recklessly. I was a bitch to some and an angel to others, just as certain exes were to me. I broke up and started over, again and again, and somewhere in that repetition, time slipped away — “hulsseok”(the sound Koreans make while swallowing tears).

People offered what they called gentle advice. You studied too long. You were too focused on work. They followed this with their own marriage success stories. A question rose in my throat — so are you actually happy?— but I swallowed it every time. I didn’t want to come across as the bitter unmarried woman, sneering at other people’s choices.

What they said always sounded less like advice and more like self-reassurance: that raising children is nobler than any career, that some men feel burdened by women who think too much, that love is fine but marriage is reality. I listened and nodded. You’re doing so well. I’m honestly envious. It was the kindest thing I could offer.

They say marriage is a choice now. But most people I know — born, like me, in the 1980s — didn’t quite choose it or reject it. They simply married, the way you do things when that’s just what’s done. A small number of us didn’t. Not entirely by choice, but not entirely by accident either. I live in the gap between those two worlds, and sometimes it’s hard to breathe.

I had actually joined that agency years earlier. Even then, in my mid-thirties, I was categorized as high-risk — too old for safe childbirth, too educated to be appealing. My PhD was a liability, they said; men worried I might correct them. They suggested I list only my bachelor’s degree. Still, they found reasons for optimism: I looked younger than my age, I wasn’t overweight, and my voice was soft and pleasant.

Suddenly I was a product approaching its expiration date. A new agency promised AI-based matching, as if intimacy were a logistics problem. When I saw the ad, I thought: I’ve walked into the wrong place entirely.

This isn’t where I belong. Run.

An unmarried woman in her forties. Neither young nor old. Studying literature. On television, forty-something single women are always successful — corner offices and sleek apartments. The term gold miss (a glamorous, financially independent single woman) comes from that image.

But I can’t claim the gold. My degree didn’t translate into salary. I spend my nights revising poems, asking myself: will I ever publish a collection? Will I become the poet I want to be? I am, by most measures, badly out of step with this era.

I can’t join my friends’ conversations about stocks, real estate, their children’s tutoring costs, the latest housing policy. I’ve grown a little strange, just as they predicted. The future still frightens me, but I’ve stopped chasing someone to make that fear quieter. That’s left me lonelier in some ways.

I’ve also stopped obsessing over my weight. I prefer streets with trees to streets with people. I’ve started to understand why middle-aged people photograph flowers. I have no children, but I tend my writing with the same careful attention — softly, gently — and I love it deeply. I take care of myself. I protect my small world.

Then I heard that younger Koreans had coined a term for people like me: yeong-poti (Young Forty: started as a compliment for energetic forty-somethings, now a slur for those who refuse to act their age). I checked myself against the criteria. I don’t wear streetwear brands. I have no money to spend chasing younger company. I didn’t buy property cheaply and profit from rising prices. I wasn’t even pretending to be young. I’ve just never quite grown up, if I’m honest.

In the marriage market: not on the list. Among the targets of generational contempt: not on that list either. Nowhere do I fit neatly into the available categories. For a while, I shrank under the weight of that. The world says it has changed — women’s rights, feminism, marriage as personal choice. In some ways, yes. But I still have one foot in a world that sees my life as a problem, and one foot in a world that has no name for what I am. Too hot, too cold. I move between them, belonging fully to neither.

I live alone. I cook for myself. I write. I handle each poem the way you’d handle something you love — carefully, then carelessly, fighting with it, making up with it, coming back to it again. Sometimes someone looks me in the eyes first, and there is warmth. Not fire, but warmth. Somewhere between the cold bath and the hot one, in that lukewarm in-between place — that’s where I am.

Reflections, South Korea

“Walking Is My Strength” / (poet, Sa Yoon-su)

!Epic Tomorrows
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Walking is a primordial and exceedingly simple human act. Yet it is not merely a means of survival; it also carries a special significance as a way of exploring and expanding the horizons of existence. As I confront the confusion within myself and this ambiguous world, walking becomes the most economical and effective remedy to quench the nomadic instinct of Homo erectus. Is there any mode of being more essential and urgent than strolling slowly around one’s humble dwelling in light attire, seeking a forest in retreat, or walking for a long time across a vast and distant land? While it is already something to be grateful for that many bodily functions operate smoothly, the ability to walk is among the greatest blessings of all.

Walking does not simply move us through space; it also pioneers the territory of thought. The wealth gained through walking endures, and such riches are worth accumulating. Walking is an intangible analgesic. Was it not by walking, and walking again, that I escaped the floods of sorrow and the valleys of life heated like a
burning grill? When mental impurities accumulate, or when a quiet joy wells up and warms the heart, I put on my sneakers and step outside. Even if I were to lose many things, as long as I could walk, I believe I could endure anything. When the time comes to conclude my living hours, though it may be an excessive wish, I hope to walk once more along a narrow path before closing my eyes. Someone once said that even the gods converse while walking. There are precious scenes hidden in this world that can only be encountered and seen by walking.

Reflections, South Korea

The Green Power Illuminating Planet Earth

!Epic Tomorrows

Submitted anonymously from South Korea

A temporary but urgent call to action! Centre of the Web partner Versy Talks is kindly running a free public online debate about the publishing industry from 21st to 31st May 2026. It does not take long to take part in the debate and state your opinion, and everyone is welcome! Sharing your voice will help boost both COTW and Versy Talks. Please help us grow, so that we can platform diverse and underrepresented voices from around the world. More information can be found here.

The greenery is deepening day by day. I metaphorically interpret the deepening of leaves into verdant foliage as the sorrow of the trees. The leaves of those that bloomed last season must be deepening on their own accord with the sadness of the departed flowers. Then, lost in the joyful imagination that the tree’s blood must be a warm blue light, I press my ear against the trunk of the tree. The planet Earth, where we live, must also be a tree planted in the universe. The blue light created by the leaves vying with one another becomes the blue blood of the tree called Earth, and it is through that blood that the planet Earth shines blue in the vast universe. Are we not living our lives merely enjoying the moment of blooming, unaware of the passion of the flower stalk that pushes the blossom upward? Even for the hollyhock to bloom, there is a time of such intense passion. Human love is the same. This is because love is a flower that blooms after two people have become passionate for one another. You. Just as with the green power that this young hollyhock is pushing up right now, the tree called Earth must be burning with heat throughout its entire body, just like me.