Average Girl

“That spring I had it all. Relatively mild right-wing parents, a clean super-single size bed, a translucent green Motorola beeper and four handbags. On weekends I went out on dates with my boyfriend who had recently gotten a job at a stock-broking firm.” (An excerpt from Sampoong Department Store).

Sampoong Department Store is Jeong I-hyeon’s (35) autobiography. The woman, unable to find a job after college, dropping by the National Library before heading for the mall wasn’t so different from the woman the writer had been.

Many would probably expect there to be minimal pain associated with writing about a blind date with a worldly dentist. This book shows how an average girl, the eldest daughter in a middle-class family, began to write.

What drove a girl, who grew up in a peaceful Gangnam home, to choose the painful path of literature?

Jeong’s new novel, “Today’s Lie,” published by Moonji Publishing Co., tells us what “generation without complex” writing (critic Kim Byeong-ik) really is. They were “transitioning from pagers to cell phones, from ‘I love school’ websites to personal homepages (from Sampoong Department Store)” and “drinking ice mocha lattes in Starbucks and buying Belgian beer that was 2,000 won more expensive than Korean beer (from Today’s Lie).”

The life that the author depicts is surely different from older writers’ described-lives of war, fear, and rebellion. The fact that it shows such variety draws a line from previous Korean literature.

In the first book of short stories called “Romantic Love and Society,” Jeong illustrates through tough talk an unprecedented female image, one strange to the literature of old yet so familiar to the modern reality. With ten short stories, Today’s Lie is still as vivid, fun, and real, but a tad more “literary.”

We can feel it when reading about a man who is insensitive to a woman he meets through a matchmaking company, but is compassionate towards his ex-wife, who says, “I really want to make it work with my new boyfriend,” in A Stranger’s Loneliness, or about a college friend who knows about an alumna’s amnesia and uses it to meet her in Dangerous Single Woman.

Back to the autobiography Sampoong Department Store. The story was written not because of the shock of having been through the crumbling Sampoong Department Store disaster, but because her friend, with whom they shared the despair of unemployment, died in the building.

What makes her write? The answer is in all of her stories – inter-human relationships.

kimjy@donga.com