Author's Note: Going After My Damn Brother

For the past two years I devoted myself entirely to writing novels. I call that grueling time my “creative march.” Of the novels I wrote during the march, I am sending the most recent one out into the world first.

When I began the march, I tried a big change. Once I started a draft, I would write every single day, without exception, until it was finished. I tracked my progress in a spreadsheet. By the time I met my daily target it was usually the small hours, and I often fell asleep only after the sky had begun to lighten. To my routine of stretching, strength training and running, I added playing the piano.

I wondered whether a time like this would ever come again. Whenever I finished a novel and was revising it, the idea for the next one would inevitably arrive. Running around the lake park, in the middle of a sit-up, halfway through a shower, something like a flash would light up in my head. The urge to write it down quickly overpowered the pain of revision. As soon as I finished revising, I went straight to work.

I wrote novel after novel set in all kinds of places: a cave in Gangwon Province, a fishing village with a lighthouse, Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe, even outer space. Without a break. The characters were just as varied: teenagers, a middle-aged astronaut, a suspicious stage actor, a high-school girl who boxes. African wild dogs, aliens, even ghosts appeared. I sank deep into my own stories. That fierce immersion is what got me through the days, extremely simple and tedious, of repeating the same things, writing and routine, every single day. More than once I swore I would take a break after just this one, and broke my word; the manuscripts piled up.

Getting together on weekends to eat, watch a movie and talk about it afterward has long been a custom in our family. One Sunday evening, watching a movie together, I suddenly saw my younger sister's face anew. In that instant, the sentence “I'm going after my damn brother” popped out of my mouth. In a few minutes I had the skeleton of a story, and I saved it on my phone as a four-line memo.

Around then, my family, worried that I was too absorbed in writing, told me to take a rest for at least a few months, no, for a year. It is true that I had spent a long stretch doing nothing but write, forgetting how tired I was, and I also had to figure out what to do with the manuscripts I had piled up. I listened to my family.

When I was in college I once quit my business and suddenly went off traveling, saying I was going to write. Of all the places I went, Taebaek left the deepest impression, and that is where I headed. At night I would go to Petupe, near Hwangji, and drink draft beer. I had no idea then that the woman at the next table was Chae Ha-na.

Last spring I had to spend a night near Anyang Station to prepare for a literary magazine event. I wandered around the nearby market and stopped by the Samdeok Library. I stayed there a little over an hour, working out the story. It was the work of putting the flesh of Taebaek on the skeleton, and I felt a thrill setting the story in places that are still vivid before my eyes.

I put in the places I had seen and the words I had heard all over Taebaek, starting with Hoeryongpo, exactly as they were. No special research was needed. While hosting a podcast I interviewed countless con artists, and I spent many years in the lecture market and the startup world. Above all, I have a younger sister, and we care for each other terribly.

This is the only one of my novels with almost no allegory. You can simply follow, in chronological order, the core of the story: a brother and sister reconciling. Of course, here and there it asks the reader questions, like the siblings' conversation about what you think people live by. Perhaps Ha-na was held by that one question, and spent her whole life looking for the answer. So was Gang-cheon.

Chae Ha-na, born in 1999, is a healthy, ordinary young woman. She has an unusual history: a shot-putter turned factory worker. From the start we see her look at everything her brother does through tinted glasses, because she worries about him. She hates him to death, and loves him just as much. Between family members and lovers, and especially between siblings, love and hatred for each other can work at the same time. Opposites welling up from the same source: paradox and contradiction.

What divides the characters is whether they conform to the order of the age or refuse it. Ha-na and her brother Gang-cheon are people who have broken free of the world's inertia. They left their orbits and chose the path they wanted. They can hardly be unaware that they must pay the price, so you might call them a brave brother and sister.

Ha-na says she gave up her sport on her own, but she was also refusing a winner-take-all system in which competition is the one and absolute order. That she does not take other people's desires as her own standard shows even in her taste in food. So does the job she chose. She likes factory work because you can work honestly and be paid fairly for it. So she has no complaints about working there.

Ha-na believed her mother's suicide was proof that love has no power. Gang-cheon thought differently. It was, on the contrary, proof that love does have power, he argues to the sister who has come to catch him. There is no way to decide which of them is right, because it is not a verifiable proposition but a matter of choice.

Gang-cheon is a prickly character who refuses to submit to vulgar capitalism and is at odds with his age. You might say the “book swindlers” in the novel are not really con artists, but he is adamant. He believes the platform companies that tolerate, and even promote, a system that encourages the swindling of all by all are themselves encouraging fraud, or committing it. A restaurant piles up favorable reviews by handing out vouchers and becomes a must-visit spot; run enough product-tester programs to raise the star rating and a product becomes a bestseller.

The restaurants a portal calls must-visits are usually terrible. The products you buy because the reviews call them great value often turn out pricier and shoddier than what you'd find in a store. Gang-cheon does not stop at grumbling about this reality; he pursues change. He believes that even if you can't overturn it all at once, the world will get better if you move forward one step at a time.

The people Ha-na meets in Seoul are of uncertain identity. Even the interior of the cutting-edge tower soaring in the middle of Gangnam looks flimsy to her. What fills it are beings with no substance. A world where you must inflate yourself to the bursting point to be recognized does not sit well with her. We must not other someone, or fear them, because they aim for different things. Ha-na and Mi-ju, as different as two people can be, can stay friends and stand by each other because they accept their differences and are honest with each other.

The book swindlers in the story are my invention, but they could exist. Swindlers who fatten themselves on the blood, sweat and tears of young people in similar ways have a long history. Many modern jobs resemble what the book swindlers do. They just stay inside, or on the edge of, the law. Ha-yeon's job is like that too. We live in a world where, like her, you know the essence of your own work and have no choice but to go along with it.

The members of the Hwangji Misfits drink often. In several scenes Ha-na gets blackout drunk, and each time she misses something small but important. Forgetting is like the two sides of a coin. For someone drowning in shame and guilt it is as desperately needed as a painkiller, yet it does not come easily. For someone who erases whatever is inconvenient the way you hit the delete button on a comment, forgetting is as quick and easy as an antacid.

I don't want to intrude any further on the reader's territory. I will close with a few remarks.

From the day I wrote the first sentence of this book to the day I wrote the last took one month and two days. That includes a week lost when my desktop broke down, so it was fairly fast. I wrote an average of thirty-five manuscript pages a day. Polishing it, of course, took many times longer.

Opening the novel with its own title as the first sentence was my intention from the start, but that the last sentence turned out the same, framing the book, was not planned. In the small hours of the last day of writing, as if drawn by something, I changed what I had originally meant to write. I liked that it ended with the same sentence it began with.

A senior alumnus who has always supported me once said, at a tuna restaurant near Seolleung Station, that I was like a 21st-century Heo Saeng. He said it around the time I quit my business and started writing fiction, telling me I could become a good writer. The remark struck me, and perhaps it stayed in my subconscious.

I have put into this book everything I love about Taebaek. Until recently I was even thinking of moving there. I plan to stop by soon to visit the places in the novel and hang out with the Hwangji Misfits. I wonder whether the young woman I met at Petupe is writing a novel by now, as I told her to.

All characters and organizations in this work are fictional; any resemblance to actual events is coincidental.