Gu Byeong-mo
ISBN: 9780778387312
Publication Date: December 3, 2024
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
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Book Summary:
From the New York Times Notable
author of The Old Woman with the Knife, comes a bracingly
original story of family, marriage, the cultural expectations of motherhood,
about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a
government-run apartment complex outside Seoul
When Yojin moves with her husband and
daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a
fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a
government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her
neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next
ten years.
Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels
uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as
communal child care begins and the other parents begin to show their true
colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the
apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to
live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked
against them from the start?
A trenchant social novel from an
award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates
the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old
assumption that “it takes a village” to raise a child.
About the Author:
Gu Byeong-mo is an award-winning author. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she now resides in Jinju, South Korea with her family. The Old Woman with the Knife, her first book to be translated into English, was a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of the Year.
Chi-Young Kim is an award-winning literary translator and editor who has
translated works by You-jeong Jeong, Sun-mi Hwang, Young-ha Kim, Kyung Ran Jo,
J.M. Lee, and Kyung-sook Shin, among others.
Excerpt:
The recycling truck kicked up pieces of
cardboard and dust as it drove off. Soda cans and bottle caps that had fallen
off the back tumbled along the ground. Danhui’s hands became sticky as she
picked up the trash and put it in the sack.
After she
cleaned up the recycling, she broomed the dust into a metal dustpan, dumped it
into a trash bag, and headed up to the third floor. She could hear the baby’s
cries from the bottom of the stairs.
“Hyonae-ssi, are
you there? Hyonae-ssi? Sounds like Darim’s crying?”
She heard
rustling as the crying settled, then the front door swung open. Exhausted, her
eyes bloodshot, Jo Hyonae came outside holding Darim. She looked as desperate
as a trembling drop of water clinging to the faucet. “Yes, what is it?”
Hyonae’s voice was hoarse.
“Were you
sleeping all this time? You don’t look like you got any rest!” “What’s going on
so early in the morning?”
“Oh, Hyonae-ssi!
You sent Sangnak-ssi down by himself the other day when we were all meeting the
new family, and you haven’t shown your face since. It’s not early, everyone’s
gone off to work and it’s already nine! I thought I told you the recycling truck
comes at eight on Mondays.”
Hyonae shifted
Darim to her other arm and scratched her tousled head. “I had to pull an
allnighter again. I’m happy to take it on next time.”
This woman was
the complete opposite of the new tenant Euno, who had come out to see if he
could help when he heard the truck. Even though his family was still unpacking
and settling in, Euno had come anyway and hovered about, asking if there was
anything he could do, while Danhui and Gyowon waved him off, declining any
assistance. What Danhui did want, although she refrained from asking, was for
him to go pound on Hyonae’s door and wake her up. All this time Danhui had
nodded and smiled sympathetically when Hyonae claimed to be too worn out from
work to offer a hand; though she knew it wasn’t that big of a deal, Danhui had
been waiting for a chance to have a serious talk with that self-centered Hyonae
to make sure her neighbor knew she couldn’t walk all over her.
“Now you’re
making me feel like I’m in the wrong here,” Danhui protested. “I’m not trying
to imply that the work is hard. The workers collecting the recyclables are the
ones doing the heavy lifting, and all we need to do is gather everything in one
place so things don’t go flying around everywhere.”
“Right, that’s
why I’m saying I can be the one to handle it next time.”
Danhui wanted to
believe that Hyonae wasn’t purposely shirking her duties, but irresponsibility
and laziness seemed something of a second nature to Hyonae. Even if Hyonae
herself didn’t care, it was exhausting for the rest of them to have to deal
with her.
“You know that’s
not the issue. Doing communal work together is what makes it meaningful. Like I
said before, if someone does it on their own this week and someone else handles
it on their own the next week, it gets tricky and the system falls apart. Even
if we made a schedule of whose turn it is to do what, there are always going to
be times when we can’t follow it. That’s why everyone needs to come out and do
this together. We can be flexible when someone has an unavoidable conflict. But
if you can’t do the bare minimum, how will we be able to live together in
harmony?”
This was when
Darim, whose lips had been trembling during Danhui’s speech, burst into tears
again, and Hyonae took that opportunity to cut her neighbor off. “Well, I need
to nurse her right now.”
Danhui let out a
sigh as she glanced over Hyonae’s slender shoulders into her apartment—the
rumpled baby blankets, an open bag of sliced bread, toys strewn across the
floor, clothes thrown every which way. “Sure. Text me later once Darim’s
asleep. I’ll stop by for a second and we can finish talking.”
Danhui headed
back downstairs, telling herself she shouldn’t be irritated by Hyonae, who, as
always, had merely given a curt nod to put an end to their conversation.
It wasn’t a
shock that Hyonae was exhausted—Danhui herself had experienced this fatigue
when her two boys were younger, and she wouldn’t have been able to survive
those years if the people around her hadn’t been unconditionally accommodating
and considerate. You could try your best but not make it out of the apartment
on time. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to wake up, it felt truly
impossible to pry a single eye open, even with a wailing child beside you.
Raising children was all about dragging yourself forward. Despite all your
maternal love and inner strength, you’d still find yourself marooned from time
to time, and you had no choice but to continue on until your last breath.
Those feelings
were normal, but she couldn’t help but be annoyed. Whenever childcare
obligations kept Danhui from upholding her side of the communal bargain (like
the time she missed a general meeting at her boys’ day care center), she would
apologize in a manner appropriate to the magnitude of her act. She would
personally deliver a handwritten note—I’m sorry I missed the meeting, my son
was sick again—with a fruit basket or a cake box. Then she would bow in apology
at the next opportunity and work twice as hard whenever a small task came her
way. Even if the others were put out before, they would end up doing her a
favor when she needed something; they might push her turn back or let her go
first.
Long before they
moved here, back when Jeongmok was a baby, Jaegang had been away on a business
trip and the recycling had piled up for three weeks in the utility room of
their tiny twenty-four-pyeong apartment. Of course it did; since the baby’s
arrival, they had started buying and using more and more personal hygiene
products, and all of them had come packaged in plastic. Recycling days were
once a week like at most apartment buildings in Seoul, and the residents were
supposed to bring their recyclables out between six in the evening on Thursday
and five thirty the following morning when the recycling truck arrived. But
Jaegang had come home late after work the first week, then returned drunk off
his feet from a work dinner the following week, and then had gone overseas for
business the third week.
She had opened
the door to the utility room to discover Styrofoam dishes and plastic
recyclables piled around the large overflowing polypropylene tote bag in which
they carried recycling downstairs; the plastic refuse blocked the path to the
washing machine, barring her from entry. If someone were to see the utility
room, they would assume she was a hoarder, the kind you saw on the news, or an
alcoholic who neglected her child, and she was made miserable by this thought;
it felt as though everything she had done earlier in her marriage to live a
more environmentally friendly life, which of course had taken attention and
effort, had gone down the drain.
Deciding to
handle this problem herself instead of waiting for Jaegang to get home, she
carefully slipped sleeping Jeongmok in his baby carrier. She should have done
this from the get-go, but she had been trying not to expose Jeongmok to the
freezing winter wind, which they’d confront on the seven-minute walk down the
long corridor to the elevator and out the front doors to the trash and
recycling area. Danhui went out with the bag filled with cardboard boxes and
plastic. As she made the second trip with the baby on her back—after all, she
only had two hands—other residents and the security guard spotted her and
rushed over to help. She gratefully accepted their kindness, though she hadn’t
brought Jeongmok to evoke sympathy, but rather because of all the tragedies she
heard about on the news, stories of a child falling or suffocating to death
during the brief moments their mom washed the dishes or ran to the supermarket
just across the street. By her third trip, the security guard and the residents
who had been breaking down her boxes and stacking them offered to come up to
her apartment to help bring the rest down.
She had, of
course, bowed in gratitude, and later, once she had her wits about her, she
found out which units the kind neighbors lived in and brought gifts of tteok
and fruit for them and the security guard. After that, her neighbors were
naturally happy to help out. This was just one of the many ways a young mother
could pay back the inevitable debt she racked up among her neighbors; you just
had to show your gratitude.
But Hyonae
didn’t bother doing any of that. It wasn’t that she was incapable; she just
didn’t care. As an example, a salesperson hawking red ginseng or health
supplements might offer a regular customer a bottle of vitamins for free, and,
if that customer had any sense, they would kindly refuse after the first time,
appreciating the thought behind the gesture. But Hyonae never even gave out
copies of the picture books she illustrated. She claimed to be embarrassed
because they weren’t published by a well-known company, and said they were sold
as a box set and therefore hard for her to give out only the one she
illustrated; still, if she handed out a few books to the neighbors, whose
children were all around the same age, she could easily generate some goodwill
by showing everyone what kind of work she did and help them understand why she
couldn’t fully participate in their day-to-day schedule, but she didn’t put in
any effort. Relationships were like joints that creaked without fluid between
them, and Danhui’s biggest complaint was that the same people always felt the
resulting pain and discomfort. She wasn’t annoyed by the fact that she wasn’t
on the receiving end of niceties; she sincerely believed that these small acts
were the bare minimum when you lived in an apartment building.
Even if you
weren’t a people person, all you had to do was merely say the right things at
the right time. Reflecting on her experience raising two kids, Danhui felt that
a mother had to constantly say “sorry” and “thank you” even if she had done
nothing wrong. All Hyonae had to do was add just one more sentence; just now,
after saying, “I had to pull an allnighter again,” she could have easily added,
I’m so sorry. Again, it wasn’t that Danhui wanted Hyonae to prostrate
herself, it was just that these were the skills— or rather, the basic
courtesy—of maintaining relationships. Intellectually she knew she should
forgive Hyonae’s disorganized disposition and not judge her based on her line
of work, but her lack of social skills was obvious, sitting as she did in her
room, working on projects alone.
Two days ago,
Sangnak had emphasized that Hyonae had fallen asleep after meeting a deadline,
which was why she couldn’t come to the welcome party for the new family. He had
even brought Darim to the backyard on his own to allow Hyonae to rest. But here
she was, up all night again despite her husband’s support. Was she drawing all
the pictures in the world, all by herself? Danhui had gone upstairs merely to
tell her that they should try to work more effectively together, and Hyonae had
cut her off, saying she’d just handle the recycling by herself the next time.
Not only was it incredibly unclear when exactly this next time would be, but
this disorganized approach would also render a turn-taking system useless and
confusing. Maybe someone might think Hyonae was being ostracized over the
trivial issue of recycling…
But it wasn’t
trivial.
Trivial things
weren’t so trivial when they piled up, not a corn on the sole of a foot or dust
heaped on a forgotten shelf. Danhui just wanted Hyonae to understand this.
Excerpted from APARTMENT WOMEN by Gu
Byeong-mo. Copyright © 2018 by Gu Byeong-mo. English translation © 2024 by
Chi-Young Kim. Published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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