“Never imagined I’d be hooked on literature one day” (vol***)
“How on earth do you have such entertaining imagination?” (bky***)

Recipient of the Changbi Prize in Novels and the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, writer Chung Serang’s first short story collection in eight years!
“Accurate” consolation given by a refreshing and lighthearted imagination and warmhearted sentences

The winner of the Changbi Prize in Novels in 2013 for This Close and the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2017 for Fifty People, writer Chung Serang has presented her first short story collection in eight years since she embarked on her literary career. This collection gathers a total of nine works including “Wedding Dress 44,” which received attention on social networking services (SNS) at the time of its presentation for its unconventional form and episodes that vividly show the reality today. In the volume, readers therefore will meet the talents that only Jeong can display including: the weighty message of Fifty People, which was assessed as “A work that, with its powerful readability and magnetism, revives this society’s will to solidarity”; and the lighthearted imagination of An Eun-yeong the Health Teacher, which the author herself disclosed that she had “[written] it only for pleasure.” As such, this book can be seen as the starting point and essence of the “Chung Serang World.” It amply proves as well that, via Chung, any tale is bound to shine.

Worries about you, who are seated in the place that I have left behind
A story of firm solidarity created by such a sentiment
The titular work, “See You on the Rooftop” recounts a story about the ways in which the first-person narrator, who, suffering from unjust labor and sexual harassment at work and always feeling the urge to hurl herself from the rooftop of the office building, inherits a book of magical solutions to emergencies from older female colleagues and finally overcomes her despair. Though the magical book lies on the surface of the tale, what has sustained and empowered her, in fact, are the people who, “tenderly leaning their heads toward her, together pondered on how to unravel each day, which was like tangled yarn,” the older female coworkers who prevent the protagonist from leaping from the rooftop. Consequently, “I” is concerned about “you,” her successor, and hopes that this new employee will discover “the story about me and my older women workmates.” Concerns about someone who is seated in the place that one has left behind in themselves create the power of firm solidarity.

A work reflecting the voices of 44 women who are linked by a single frock, “Wedding Dress 44” recounts the stories of women who either have married or will marry in one rented wedding gown in the format of 44 short episodes. Vividly recounting marriage not as a romantic myth but as an institution, this work presents a variety of women’s narratives. In particular, it is significant that the final group of women to wear this gown consists of high school students. By the time they grow up and choose to get married or not, what indeed will be the landscape of the institution?

A tale about I-jae, who comes to hold a “divorce sale” in order to sell everything in her house after getting a divorce, and her friends, “Divorce Sale” encompasses the voices of women including: one who speaks out about the difficulties of work life, asking, “I don’t see women in their 40s… 50s. Where have all senior women employees disappeared?”; and another who, feeling “other people’s lives [were] glamorous and she alone [had been] discarded in hell,” raises her child and looks back on her choice.

The titular heroine of “Hyo-jin” is a figure who has escaped from “something that sticks darkly.” She runs away and away from: her father, who forces her to live according to her name, which means “performing filial piety to the full”; and her ex-lover, who, full of an inferiority complex, thinks that she has left him due to his poverty. The voice of Hyo-jin, who only urges herself to flee instead of fighting against forewarned unhappiness, imbues us with strange courage as we live on here and now.

Meanwhile, works including the following amply demonstrate just how freely the author unfolds her variegated imagination: “Forever Size 77,” a story about a woman who has turned into a vampire and will die if she eats dried persimmons; “As You Know, Eun-yeol,” which imagines a female character named Eun-yeol and places her in the history of premodern relations between Korea and Japan; and “Forehead and Sand,” where misunderstanding accumulated between two countries that use disparate languages due to arrow letters.