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The Hindu
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of ‘Counterattacks at Thirty' by Won-pyung Sohn
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. radhika.s@
Scroll.in
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Sunday book pick: What if you could fire your boss, asks the Korean novel ‘Counterattacks at Thirty'
'Believing that we can right one small wrong, even if we can't change the world – that's the kind of coup I'm talking about. A moral coup.' In South Korean writer Won-Pyung Sohn's 2025 novel Counterattacks at Thirty, translated by Sean Lin Halbert, a group of four 'office allies' manages to get the boss fired. The boss, in addition to being mean to his juniors, freely passes air and picks his teeth in the middle of conversations. His uncouth ways are not just offensive to the lower downs but also hypocritical – why is decorum and respect reserved only for the higher ups, when the interns and junior employees work just as hard? The fatigue of corporate life Jihye, a 30-year-old 'extended intern' at Seoul's Diamant Group, is in an administrative role at the group's Academy that offers fluff courses on soft skills that promise to give an edge to its students by making them better suited for the corporate world. Those who sign up for the courses are on the verge of giving up, while those who teach the courses are grifters and frauds. The Group, not too interested in being ethical, hires rapists and cheats, and even influencers with no real skills to 'teach' at the Academy. Everything goes as long as the money keeps coming. Jihye's existence is as ordinary as her name. As a child, she was accustomed to sharing her name with at least four other girls in her class. So when the future turns out to be utterly ordinary for her, she accepts it without protest. At the Academy, her role as an intern encompasses stacking chairs and making photocopies of the study materials. As someone who has tried and failed to get a decent job, she knows that liberal arts subjects that the Academy teaches or its personality development courses are nothing more than a waste of money. In the real world, nobody cared about high literature or the grand ideals of philosophers. She is angry, but not angry enough to put up a fight or even say no to the drab tasks that her seniors demand she do. Fatigue has already set in and knowing that she might be stuck indefinitely, she sees no point in resisting what she considers her sealed fate. Her college friend Dabin spent millions of won, went abroad and came back to marry early and start a family. For someone who chose a radically different path from Jihye, their lives merged into similar dissatisfaction and unhappiness not too long after. Don't stick to the status quo The status quo at the Academy is threatened when another intern, Guyok, joins the team. Jihye is at first intrigued by his warm, affectionate nature and reluctantly accepts his friendship. She soon sees something of a friend in him – 30 and still an intern, he's in the same sinking boat as her. However, Guyok doesn't share the same defeatist attitude as Jihye. It's no accident that he has turned up at the Academy, nor has he any intentions of lying low – every snooty, thieving, and dishonourable senior will be shown their place. Guyok quietly bides his time and convinces Jihye and two more office allies, Mr Nam and Muin, to rage against the machine. The first taste of success makes them hungry for more. After getting rid of office bullies, they move on to congressmen and other important people who have made their careers out of fooling the innocent. The plan of taking down the congressman goes exactly as they had envisioned it, but the group isn't so lucky when they confront a major Korean movie studio (despite Mr Nam's repeated warnings). When the short-lived rebellion comes to an end, Jihye realises that individual resistance can spark off change but it cannot overthrow a system that is fed by the silence of overworked and underpaid workers. When she is cruelly ejected from the system, she wonders if her ordinariness was what had protected her and prevented her from being cruelly tossed around. Counterattacks at Thirty asks: Would you fire your boss if you got the chance? Won Pyung-Sohn very convincingly presents the banality of corporate work in the 21st century and the overworking culture that is accepted as normal in many Asian workplaces, including South Korea. She is critical of not only mindless work, but also partaking in arts and culture with the primary goal of putting it to commercial use. With the frenzy to 'monetise' every skill, she presents the hazards of being unable to 'consume' art for personal pleasure and not just for a professional edge. And yet, the author is also alert to the ruthlessness of corporate culture – from top to bottom, everyone has something to lose. It spares no one. Surviving it might be the only sensible thing to do. But should you give up without a fight? If you never try, you'll never know.
