To kick off the year, we’re reading novels in translation that explore gender, race, and class in East Asia past and present.
Apartment Women
Gu Byeong-mo, trans. Chi-Young Kim (Hanover Square Press, 224 pp., $21.99, December 2024)
Cynical writing about heterosexual marriage seems to be everywhere. Last week, Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan wondered whether she is “Doomed to Be a Tradwife” because even her “enlightened” husband cannot hold up his end of the parenting bargain. Months earlier, the New York Times published a viral exposé of how an influencer couple’s seemingly glitzy life spiraled into suicide. That followed a jaw-dropping contribution to the Cut, which proffered that young women might be best served by getting hitched to older men.
South Korean writer Gu Byeong-mo adds to this canon with her latest novel, Apartment Women. First published in Korean in 2018, the book’s English translation was released last month.
Gu’s story is set at a new housing complex on the outskirts of Seoul. The South Korean government constructed the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments in an attempt to combat the country’s low birth rates; after a competitive application process, couples must pledge to live in the building for 10 years and try to have three kids by the end of that time.
Four of the lucky winners—the “apartment women”—are Yojin, Danhui, Gyowon, and Hyonae. All are married to men and have at least one young child. Yojin, a cashier, is the breadwinner in her family who must nevertheless micromanage her husband as he embarks on stay-at-home parenting while “moping around like a bum.” Danhui is the queen bee of the bunch, a control freak “driven by a preternaturally outgoing personality and love for appraising and organizing various matters.” Gyowon, Danhui’s loyal sidekick, is thrifty and deeply insecure, but at least she is “an excellent cook.” Hyonae, a freelance children’s book illustrator, struggles to prove to the others that her work is legitimate.
Apartment Women reads like a dystopian novel, but there is nothing unrealistic or exaggerated about its contents. The book is haunting precisely because it is so relatable, peppered with uncomfortable truisms about modern heterosexual relationships and the trade-offs people (usually women) make to get married and have children. Gu puts a magnifying glass on quotidian situations and smartly reveals the troubling gender dynamics beneath them. She recounts the women’s mental dialogues as they go through their daily lives, overthinking just about everything—by necessity.
When the parents start a collective daycare program, run by Yojin’s husband and the three other moms, Yojin is still the one to get up early and prepare banchan for all of the children in the building. “It would have been logical for [her husband] to take on the cooking instead of Yojin,” Gu writes, “but like many men, [he] had never made a thing until Yojin began working … he’d never cooked before they got married.” For the kids to eat, Yojin has no choice but to mobilize.
Similarly infuriating scenarios unfold related to sexual harassment and the delegation of chores. When Danhui bemoans that her husband won’t preemptively handle most household tasks, such as taking out the recycling—forcing her to “do all the mental labor”—Yojin’s husband gives Danhui the following advice: “Don’t think of a man as a human being. Think of him as an animal that understands what to do only when you order him to do it, every single time.”
For all its universal applicability, Apartment Women also alludes to unique features of South Korean motherhood. The women reflect on their stays in postpartum centers, which are slowly gaining popularity in the United States. The translation also retains the Korean word jipsaram, which is defined as “the person at home, the common moniker for wife.”
When Yojin’s husband refers to her as “my jipsaram,” she nearly loses it. “Who are you calling jipsaram when I’m the one who goes to work?” she thinks to herself. Yojin is irate, but, like most of the wives, she also knows better than to cause a scene.
—Allison Meakem
Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel
Yang Shuang-zi, trans. Lin King (Graywolf Press, 320 pp., $18, November 2024)
Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue is, as translator Lin King puts it, a “Taiwanese novel that claims to be a Taiwanese translation of a Japanese novel.” If that sounds confusing, you’re not alone—when the book first came out in Mandarin in 2020, it sparked controversy in the Taiwanese literary world, as some readers picked it up expecting to find a new translation of a historic Japanese text. Its multiple afterwords and translator’s notes don’t exactly help.
But getting lost in this intricate narrative is part of the joy of the novel, which won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Yang clearly revels in the complexities and confusions of translation across both language and culture. The book centers on a long trip that Aoyama Chizuko, a young novelist from Nagasaki, takes to Taiwan (then a Japanese colony) in 1938, and her relationship with her interpreter, Chizuru, a Taiwanese woman four years her junior. Colonial authorities have invited Chizuko for a lecture tour on the island—presumably to help bolster the empire’s southern expansion movement in the Pacific—but she’s far more interested in the act of travel than any political agenda.
The question of what travel should consist of, and what it offers, is one of the book’s main preoccupations. Chizuko is the consummate do-gooder tourist—well-meaning yet naive and incognizant of her own assumptions about the islanders. Rather than check off tourist sites, she tells Chizuru that she is “trying to find some new feeling in the mere act of being alive in this world.” She wants to dine like the locals, understand cultural differences, and “preserve the state of this island” through her writing. And she forms a genuinely close bond with her interpreter.
But Chizuko also romanticizes Taiwan, which she calls a “formidable colony” full of “resilience and vitality,” and often expresses her awe that the island’s school system could produce a mind as sharp as Chizuru’s. The enigmatic Chizuru, for her part, is often bemused by her cheeky, hot-headed interlocuter as the two crisscross the island by train.
Even as it deconstructs “travel writing,” Taiwan Travelogue hews closely to one classic trope of the genre: eating good food, and lots of it. Readers will encounter page upon page of mouth-watering descriptions of Taiwanese dishes, from braised minced park to bitter melon tea. It’s fitting for a book set in Taiwan—Foreign Policy has long documented the importance of food to the island’s politics and diplomacy; just take a look at Clarissa Wei’s delightful dispatch from President Lai Ching-te’s inauguration banquet last May, or FP reporter Rishi Iyengar’s recent article on how the soup dumpling chain Din Tai Fung has become a powerful global symbol of Taiwan.
Yet while much of Taiwan Travelogue consists of these meals and the breezy conversations the women share over them, the book makes it clear from the outset that we should not mistake the trivial for the apolitical. The fictionalized introduction to the supposed Mandarin translation ends on a sobering note: “[P]ower imbalance is more subtle and delicate—as well as more ubiquitous—than most people imagine. Therefore, when reading this book, please remain cognizant of Aoyama Chizuko’s status as one of the colonizers within the story.”
—Chloe Hadavas
January Releases, in Brief
Han Kang, the recipient of last year’s Nobel Prize in literature, fictionalizes a forgotten chapter in Korean history in We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon. A Nigerian American protagonist pens a sci-fi hit that upends her life—and human society—in Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. Kittitian British writer Caryl Phillips’s Another Man in the Street traces the life of a member of Britain’s Windrush generation arriving in London during the swinging ’60s. Playwright Betty Shamieh makes her fiction debut with Too Soon, a tale that explores the lives of three generations of Palestinian American women. In Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten, two disgruntled journalists flee New York for Copenhagen for a vacation that quickly goes awry.
Bernhard Schlink’s The Granddaughter, translated by Charlotte Collins, probes the past’s hold on present-day Germany as an old man seeks to pry a girl away from a neo-Nazi community. In Anita Desai’s latest work of magical realism, Rosarita, an Indian woman studying in Mexico uncovers possible secrets about her mother. Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Lee Murdoch forays into fiction with Nobody’s Empire, a coming-of-age novel about a Scottish boy’s musical awakening in Glasgow and California. Two long-lost lovers from Shanghai meet again in a Los Angeles grocery store in Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking, which follows the pair over 60 years. And Catherine Airey’s debut novel, Confessions, crisscrosses New York and rural Ireland, weaving together the lives of multiple generations of Irish women.—CH
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