Apartment Women — Dinaburg Writes

by Gu Byeong-mo

translated by Chi-Young Kim

I don’t ever consider myself the smartest person in a room. This concept as a superstructure for which to frame the world around me rarely even comes up—if I were to consider the pat phrasing of “smartest person in a room,” it would be as simple shorthand to ex post describe a moment where an interjection during someone’s story broke down a basic concept already being discussed— “Oh, let me tell you about my personal experience with capital losses and tax writedowns.” Duh, friend!

Part of this is naïveté, and part of this is ego–I now consider that mindlessly expecting others to have and process information similar to the way ones’ own self might is not actually a kindness: some people know less than you, and that’s ok; some people know different than you, and that’s ok too. If you want to share information, that’s great—and a response of, “Oh, I know 😀!” isn’t read by most people as a flex. I’ve come to accept being a little bit defensive when someone shares knowledge that I already know is a personal hang-up I carry with me from a childhood as a nerd in an anti-intellectual small town; I would never dare tell you a fact you might not know, but also what if you did know it and made it obvious I was both a braggy nerd and also not actually interesting? Quelle horreur. Coming of age back when it wasn’t socially acceptable to know things was a real trip. Was Sponge the aspirational cool kid in Salute Your Shorts, or Screech from Saved By the Bell? Lesson from ‘80s child TV: don’t be smart if you want to be cool.

Additionally, and possibly contra to my stated position on “knowing things,” I have always been fixated by novelty within mine own thought. This, to the exclusion or purposeful ignorance of other people’s concepts or grand ideas, helps me very minimally. If I haven’t come up with my own intellectual scaffolding for an idea yet, I don’t want to know someone else’s, lest it infect my own interpretation before I have the chance to draw one (see, again: egotism).

Have no fear: I have shaken off most of this stuff as a full-blown adult. I like when people share facts, gracious even when it is common knowledge or highly detailed technical talk; if you want to share it, then I want to listen. In return, faithful friend, is that you let me repeat ad nauseam how regularly and openly I grapple with the fact that reading The New Yorker each week is a blessed problem with which to be confronted.

It does impact my book reading and reviewing in two major ways: first, a simple decrease in time available to read anything else; second, I get to read so much non-fiction in the pages of the NYer that when it comes time for a new book, I now lean novels more than anything else. The first impact has lessened over time. Much like distance running, one gets used to the routine; one starts to recognize the course. For many years, it was a struggle to read the magazine cover-to-cover before the next magazine showed up. It took me nearly a decade of running as an adult to be comfortable pushing out a half marathon at pace for weekend training. As with all things, one must start slow.

I can recall when I fell in love with the idea of The New Yorker. Back in 2004, I would idly flip through the pages, maybe read a single article that appealed to me, testing myself against the prose each week and coming up short. I was still in my early 20s and wanted to be the type of person that read the NYer. I still have the first issue I bought for myself, with that iconic Adriane Tomine subway cover. I can recall being heartbroken when I splattered some paint on it during a harried attempt to recoup my security deposit while leaving my first studio apartment; Now, those cheap white blobs contain the soul of the object, which lies within its imperfections.

I remember when things changed, though its has been nearly two decades. One week, there was an article about Antarctica and it seemed quite boring but I decided to read it anyway. Midway through, after a section break, the article shifted completely to some other topic before eventually threading the second large concept back into the first (which I did then, and do still now, consider as the NYer house style). As much as I would try to ape that style in my own writing, the more important take away for me was realizing that no matter what the ostensible subject an article purports to cover was, you might be served a detailed breakdown of anything within its delineated space.

Eventually, I realized I was reading for the writing and editing as much as for the subject, and then moreso: the combination of letting each article take me where ever it wills in terms of content and enjoying the view on the way transformed me from someone who wanted to like the NYer into someone who did.

Coming to this conclusion about the NYer–that the content will be interesting because of the excellence of the writing–is one thing that has made me feel smart, though I’ve never been able to eloquently articulate it in writing before. So, of course, leave it to The New Yorker to do it for me: “The defining experience of good magazine reading is “I didn’t think I was interested, but”: the medium is made not in its choice of subjects but in its qualities of execution.”

did i take a picture of this without intending it for this website? yes.

I felt vindicated, of course–here was my idea, inscribed like law onto the very pages of the beloved object itself! Also, I felt a bit deflated: “Oh, that’s the point; all I did was correctly interpret their intentions. I’ve uncovered nothing novel, drawn no fresh perspective about the content I am receiving.” I get it, clearly, but I don’t get it in a way unique unto myself (see, again: egotism).

Even if (when?) you stop reading the NYer for content, though, the content will seep in. An article about collapsing birth rates colored my understanding of modern Korea far more strongly than the slew of k-dramas Netflix keeps handing me. Without this context, I don’t think I would have understood the basic premise of Apartment Women in the same way. The book would still have been good–the intersecting characters, the fascinating insights–but recognizing the governmental incentives on childbirth; the current anti-child sentiment; the crushing challenge in finding one’s place in an outlandishly competitive marketplace; the extreme cost of living, all detailed the world and made the book a richer experience. Quite clearly, in the book’s home market all of these concepts would be clear as glass: here in the US, I don’t know how much a reader with zero personal ties to Korea would be aware of this context. Could you figure it out that the current youth generation refers to mothers as “bugs”? That cafés have “No Children” signs, or that some towns haven’t had a birth since before I even tried to start reading The New Yorker?

The article certainly gave me more insight into Minjun, from Welcome To The Hyunam Dong Bookshop, and his academic burnout:

All of this context (“all” meaning the one article, I guess) added understanding and flavor to Apartment Women:

…the handwritten pledge was the icing on the cake–you were asked to promise to do your best to have at least three children, given that the purpose of these pilot communal apartments was to reverse the plummeting birth rate…[b]ut human bodies being what they are, nobody knew whether anyone would be able to follow this mandate; couples could apply to be reimbursed for the cost of in vitro fertilization if that became necessary, and if they were unable to have three children (pregnancies included) within ten years of residence despite various efforts, they could simply move out.

The civilization-level impact of extremely low birthrates is an explained phenomenon within the book; perhaps it simply hits a little harder knowing it is a direct reference to current events rather than veiled allusion to, say, climate change, or a fantastical metaphor for bodily autonomy. It is a one-to-one “many people in Korea cannot afford children and are opting out of even trying” reference. But the character writing and scenarios in Apartment Women are more than capable of standing on their own, even with no outside understanding. “...[S]he didn’t know why someone would say she wasn’t sure if she should ask a question and then go ahead and ask it anyway….” is the most universal sentence I’ve read in quite some time.

Unlike the Popeye flex in Morisaki 2, a reference to “the Ford Explorer parked in front of their apartment building” will forever remain a mystery to me: my Korean is not good enough, and page 134 is buried too deeply within the text, for me to auto-translate my way into discovering if this was localized or if someone truly was driving a Ford in the outskirts of Seoul. What type of cultural caché might a big clunky American car carry with it—or what the Korean equivalent might be? MYSTERIES REMAIN!

The rough plot has families move into a communal living space, each of them a loose representation of a seemingly common issue in Korean society: under-employment; sexual peril; freelance misery; bills, bills, bills; all are steeped in the potent challenges of parenthood. They grind against each other in ways that undermine the communal dream until the whole microcosm collapses.

A large-scale challenge of parenthood that I reckon with constantly is finding time to work on this hobbyist website: a solution was, say, combining Crying in H-Mart and If I Had Your Face into one review. The timeline for that review also coincided with the reintroduction of the NYer into my reading, so finding a way to balance a book, a magazine, and writing little bits during free time that little tiny humans made vanishingly rare turned experimental writing styles like this elision a necessity, but one that doesn't feel great. Stuffing them together because they were both “about Korea” seems, in retrospect, incredibly naïve to the point of embarrassing. Hopefully something, as they say, is better than nothing.

The women and men of Apartment Women–machine transliterated as “The Neighbors Table” (perhaps a possessive “neighbor’s” but I, after reading the book, prefer not)–have to make similar compromises. The petty nuances of reality, like, oh, I don’t know, attempting to write book reviews while contending with the middling concern of “completing” a dense weekly culture magazine before the next issue arrives can authenticate a representational person in a way that just making them a straight archetype cannot. In Apartment Women, the people are outlines and structures of the standardized difficulties families might face, but with just enough detailing to stay aware that all lives are complex lives. Some of the people process information in different ways, some of them know more or less than the others. And that’s ok. To expect them all to live together in the same way, with the same expectations, is part naïveté and part ego. It is no surprise when the book elegantly shows us how this is not a kindness.