Review of ‘Counterattacks at Thirty' by Won-pyung Sohn

The Hindu

11-07-2025

South Korea is notorious for its workaholic culture. For long, it has championed a system where seniority plays a major role in decision-making, long hours are common, work-life balance is skewed, and company dinners are all too frequent. But the younger generation is challenging this rigidity and it is in this changing environment that Won-pyung Sohn sets her latest book, Counterattacks at Thirty, translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. From the lens of Kim Jihye, an 'extended intern' in Seoul, Sohn examines the sheer banality of the corporate sector in her country.
Jihye is an ordinary woman with little to brag about. After a dramatic birth, she struggles to have an identity in a sea of Jihyes at school. 'It was so bad that sometimes 'Kim Jihye' felt more like a common noun, like dog or cat,' she says.
Now 30, Jihye holds an administrative job at Diamant Academy, an institution that offers courses in the liberal arts. Her work involves photocopying bundles of material, stacking chairs, and running errands. Jihye is frustrated with her mundane life, but has also come to accept it with a fatalistic ennui. All she hopes for is to become a regular employee.
Her life takes a turn when a new intern, Lee Gyuok, joins the Academy. He is everything that Jihye is not: an industrious worker, cheerful, and philosophical. Gyuok is also quietly rebellious. By slowly casting his charm, he enlists Jihye and two others, Mr. Nam and Muin, to carry out pranks against people who abuse their authority, for 'even the smallest practical jokes can cause a storm'.
Stark realism
The rebels do not have lofty goals; they simply want to make mean and unethical people 'feel uncomfortable' and 'ashamed'. With a sense of purpose, they get to work, throwing eggs and spraying graffiti. Each successful prank makes them more daring until their pacifist revolution comes to an expected halt.
By situating most of the story within the vicinity of the office, Sohn captures the suffocating hierarchy of the Academy and its insularity, which only perpetuates Jihye's loneliness.
While Jihye feels largely defeated by the system, her boss, Team Leader Yun, plods on, tolerating injustice and misogyny and choosing her battles carefully. 'Someday you'll understand, Jihye,' she says. 'Maybe after you get married and have two kids.' In an increasingly profit-driven world, liberal arts get commodified as well. Diamant Academy epitomises this tragedy, as it cares little for education or ethics.
Though these are serious themes, Sohn chooses to treat them with a feather-like lightness and injects the narrative with ample humour and small doses of drama. This, along with the relatability of the characters, is what makes Counterattacks at Thirty, originally published in 2017, enjoyable. But while the book, and particularly its ending, is gratifying for its stark realism, it is also for precisely this reason that it doesn't quite pack a punch.
Micro-aggressions can lead to internal change even if they don't transform society. When she finally comes into her own, Jihye wonders if her ordinariness was, in fact, her most extraordinary quality, and if it was her love for being truly alone that had kept her sane. 'I was grateful for my insignificance,' she contends. Counterattacks at Thirty is an acknowledgement of, and sometimes a hat tip to, the everyman and everywoman in a dog-eat-dog world.
[e-mail]