(4/6)
Correspondence and Difference

Today I had no energy, cancelled everything, laid down for a bit, then reorganized my bookshelf at the pace of a slug that can't even muster the strength to carry its shell. I'd spent my whole life up until last year running purely on physical stamina, so the days when nothing comes out — after feeling truly depleted — still catch me off guard. Slotting the books back into their new places, I was able to retrace the flow of thought I'd moved through over the past five years. This simple process helped me unsnarl a badly tangled thread of memories.

Going through the shelves, I set aside — in a cardboard box, to go meet new people — the books I'd clearly read but couldn't remember, the ones I knew I'd never open again, the ones I'd decided I wouldn't get to this year. Some books, once read, don't just stay with you — they settle somewhere deep inside, and when you pull them out again at some later moment, there's a new story layered into them. Others are hard to hold onto even after two or three reads. I think this difference comes from how far a person's intention, life, and writing align. And from how much imagination has been brought to the work, whether or not it sets the reader's imagination going in turn.

The new place I found has no floor heating, so I tracked down a 360-degree electric heater on a secondhand market to avoid catching cold. Even though April has arrived and the magnolias and cherry blossoms have already bloomed and fallen, the temperature still drops sharply at night, so it's been getting good use. I put a big pot of water on top of the heater and turned on a tower fan to keep the air circulating. When I stepped out briefly for dinner and came back, the whole apartment had turned warm and cozy, and I felt good.

(4/7)
A Diary of Rights

In 2023, just by laying out a clear plan for what I wanted to do, I was lucky enough to receive — without any particular track record — a translator's grant from the Centre national du livre in France, covering two months' salary and airfare. In 2024, I received support for event preparation from a residency in Berlin. Getting anything from the Korean institutional funding system — which had been difficult from the very step of registering as an artist — was the first time in five years. The fact that solving half the problem for seven months already makes me feel like I can breathe again strikes me as a little absurd.

I set the deadline for a long-running project at the end of this month, and went to my part-time job. Today's shift was serving tables at a 120-seat restaurant five minutes from my place. My role was to help out for three hours during the busiest lunch rush — the restaurant's main menu is donkatsu, soba, and udon, and they sell over 200 portions at lunch alone. The kitchen has four people; the floor has two, total. Even at a glance, it's clear the floor needs at least three people to handle the volume. Most customers are employees from the electronics market nearby, then solo diners, with the occasional family.

The same ajeossi who look puzzled just to see a woman serving food without shrinking — they shout across the room for banchan refills, two, three times, the kind of thing solo diners quietly get up and fetch for themselves. Whether on a mountain or in a field, any group of three or more ajeossi seems so busy tracking one another's hierarchy that they never developed the capacity to consider the people around them. I can't recall ever seeing a group of them behave like decent human beings.

Near the end of the shift, an old man who looked like a living fossil of patriarchy, his wife, and a woman who appeared to be their daughter sat down at the table the puzzled ajeossi had just vacated. When I served, I set the food in front of the youngest woman first, then added that the next dish would follow shortly. At this small shift, the ajeossi who had never once waited his turn or yielded at a table made a sour face, and the old man was already offended, on the verge of anger.
I was thinking how pitiful it was — to live your whole life believing that getting food into your own mouth first matters more than the children growing up around you — when the old man, having finished his meal and risen to leave, opened his mouth. Miss, you can see Hyochang Park out that window there, can't you? — and without so much as glancing over, I replied:

Then I walked away. The woman who had apparently spent her whole life beside him gave her characteristic smile. I know. Just play along a little.

That same day, a solo diner came in and visibly startled when he saw me — someone who had disappeared from my social circle a few years ago after allegations of sexual harassment. I don't know how he's been living since. I gave no sign of recognizing him. Did he wonder how much I knew about what he'd done? Did he wonder why I was working here? Did he even know enough about me to have thoughts like that? I can't quite remember.

After the peak hours passed, I looked out the window and could see my own room. From my room I'd always had a clear view out, and I'd wondered how visible the inside was from out here — during daylight at least, it seemed you couldn't see much, which was a small relief. I turned to look toward Hyochang Park where the old man had pointed, but all there was to see was a newly built apartment tower. When the shift ended, I asked to be called in again next week. If they contact me, I'll ask for a raise — two people doing three people's work; they should either raise the hourly rate or hire someone else.

Being able to assert your rights without fear of being fired — isn't that the one privilege of short-term work?
When I got home that evening, the inside of the restaurant I'd never been able to see before was now fully visible.

(4/8)
When Bread Becomes Bang!¹

After 10 p.m. last night, my dad called. Out of nowhere he asked me to make him a little booklet telling the story of how he became a devoted churchgoer. I didn't bother holding back my irritation — I raised my voice and fought with him. Even after hanging up, the agitation didn't clear right away, so I sent a text telling him to think about the question he'd just asked me. Does the word yeomchi (basic decency) not appear anywhere in the Bible? And if you're being nice to me because you want something back in return, maybe it's better to just stop.

It took real effort to learn that how I spend my energy is my own choice, and because of that I've mostly stopped getting angry at things — I can hold out two or three years without complaint, and when I do get angry I can usually settle it quickly — but words or attitudes that treat me as a resource they're naturally entitled to, or handle me like an object, make me angry every single time, without fail.

Flipping my dad's question — how much could a little booklet possibly cost? — I found myself thinking about independent publishing. I've had some skepticism about making small zines and chapbooks, because I've never been genuinely moved reading one, and it's hard to believe I could move someone else through a form that's never moved me. People say as though it's obvious that independent publishing is free from capital-driven choices, that it has a character of resistance — but does it really? Has it actually produced that effect?

If anything, isn't it accelerating the speed at which ideas and images get consumed like fashion?
A label or a format doesn't guarantee the content of what's made.

What matters more than whether something is independently published or not is whether what I felt, the future I'm dreaming of, can be transmitted to someone different from me. The reason you read a writer's work is the perspective you've never encountered before and the quality of the writing — not their gender. Whether what I make can run on a different track from simply landing in a sellable category — I'm writing this in my laptop as a journal entry, carried along on a bus, whole body soaking in pleasant sunlight, on my way to eat curry at Simdoo in Yeonhui-dong.

Is there anything that feels better right now than looking at trees putting out their new yellow-green shoots? Hoping that what I'm trying to make might be worth more than these trees, I walked through the neighborhood I lived in for a year last year. Sitting on a bench outside the bakery across from my old apartment, I was gathering up the sensations of that year again. A little girl came running up and punched a low metal sign that read bread — bbang — with her fist, and the word bread [bbang] transformed into bang! — the sound of something hitting, or bursting.