Schoolgirl Champ King Arthur
여고생 챔프 아서왕
Yeogosaeng Chaempeu Aseowang
To pay for her dying mother's surgery, a teenage amateur boxing champion takes the fall for a rich girl's crime and goes to prison. Everyone expects her to come out swinging. Her revenge will be something else entirely.
Synopsis
Wang Seo-a, born in 2003, has been called “King Arthur” since an elementary-school English class, when she introduced herself with “My name is Aseo Wang,” and Aseo-wang is how Koreans say King Arthur. She took up boxing at the urging of her best friend, an idol trainee, and under a gruff old coach who trains her the old-fashioned way she became Korea's amateur flyweight champion in her first year of high school.
She lives with the single mother who raised her, in a sandwich-panel shack built inside a vinyl greenhouse. When her mother falls seriously ill, a man in a suit appears with an offer: if Seo-a takes the blame for his daughter's crime, he will get her mother the surgery she needs and pay her besides. He is the director of a hospital.
Seo-a takes the bait, and the novel follows her through a detention center and prison. There she meets enemies and an unlikely family: a cellmate who killed her abusive husband, a former CEO serving ten years for killing the bully who drove her child to death, a judo athlete fighting depression, a young guard who becomes a sister.
The author sums up the book in two near-identical Korean words: angapeum, a child repaying a parent's love, and anggapeum, revenge. Seo-a's love for her mother is what sends her into the abyss, and what she finally chooses as revenge is not what anyone expects.
Why it works on screen
- In an elementary-school English class she introduced herself as “My name is Aseo Wang,” and became King Arthur. A bright, funny first act that starts with the title itself.
- A sandwich-panel shack built inside a vinyl greenhouse, a gravely ill mother, and a hospital director in a suit with an offer: take the blame for my daughter's crime and your mother gets her surgery. Korea's divide in a single scene.
- The women of the detention center and prison: a cellmate who killed her abusive husband, a former CEO serving ten years for killing the bully who drove her child to death, a judo athlete fighting depression, a young guard who becomes a sister.
- Instead of the satisfying revenge everyone is waiting for, Seo-a chooses another answer. That ending is what sets the book apart.