![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pcxsx1namun1ljpw72henvgf.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/KB-April-Book-Club-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Back in December, I wrote up a Seoul Book and Culture Club event featuring four Korean writers<\/a> as a spectator. This past weekend, I experienced another as a participant, and specifically as the interviewer who talked with another group of Korean writers about their stories, all recently put out by ASIA Publishers<\/a> in compact dual-language editions. I highly recommend these books (and all their predecessors in ASIA\u2019s \u201cK-Fiction\u201d series) as learning tools to anyone studying the Korea language at an intermediate or advanced level. I also highly recommend, should the opportunity arise after reading the books, getting up on stage and talking to their authors about them.<\/p>\n
This time we had three writers: Chang Kangmyoung, author of Fired\u00a0<\/em>(\uc54c\ubc14\uc0dd \uc790\ub974\uae30); Kim Min-jung, author of The World\u2019s Most Expensive Novel<\/em> (\uc138\uc0c1\uc5d0\uc11c \uac00\uc7a5 \ube44\uc2fc \uc18c\uc124); and Kim Ae-ran, author of Where Would You Like to Go?<\/em> (\uc5b4\ub514\ub85c \uac00\uace0 \uc2f6\uc73c\uc2e0\uac00\uc694). All three stories, so it seemed to me after reading them and considering them together, have to do with the condition of \u201cyoung-ish\u201d Koreans, those in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties who, while hardly kids, have for a variety of economic, societal, or personal reasons not quite made it to what the generation before them would have considered a full-fledged adult life. This sort of thing as provided fodder even in America for trend piece after hand-wringing trend piece, but the society of South Korea, a country that more recently came to the end of a much more dramatic period of growth, has felt it with special acuteness.<\/p>\n
Chang Kangmyoung deals with this this most directly in Fired<\/em>, which comes with its own nonfictional appendix explaining how the South Korean economy has changed with each generation. Hye-mi, a part-time front-desk worker at a mid-sized Korean company who turns up late, takes long lunches, spends hours on the internet clicking around travel and music sites, and never makes it to after-work company dinners. But rather than telling it from Hye-mi\u2019s point of view, Chang makes a protagonist of Hye-mi\u2019s supervisor, who at first feels sorry for her young-ish underling but then, when the aggravations built up, decides to get rid of her, running into a host of unexpected difficulties in the process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n