This book has a somewhat complex lineage. By Shin Kyung-sook (sometimes rendered Sin Kyongsuk), it was published in Korea in 1994-95, first as a four-part series in a literary magazine, and then as a book. The English translation, by Jung Ha-yun, came out much later, in 2015. The Korean title (transliterated as Oettanbang, and meaning A Lone Room) is a much better one, I would argue, than the title chosen for the English version, whose vagueness and overwrought pathos jar on me somewhat. My audio-version was very capably narrated by Emily Woo Zeller.

The author starts and finishes the book by characterizing is as "not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between". She continues: "I wonder if it can be called literature. I ponder the act of writing. What does writing mean to me?" For the sake of convenience, I'll refer to the "I" figure of the book as Shin. But there is this potential slippage to take into consideration.

The story follows two timelines. One begins in 1978, when the protagonist is 16, and leaves her parents' rural home to start work in a factory in Seoul; in the other, which ends in September 1995, she is already a successful writer, and has embarked on writing this book.


May 18th Memorial Park, Gwangju, 2015

The great strength of the novel/autobiography is the insight it affords into the rapidly industrializing but still very traditional South Korea of the 1970s, as seen from a vantage-point of less than two decades later.

After some initial training, Shin, along with "Cousin", starts to work on the assembly line at Dongnam Electronics, a stereo-production company. Oldest Brother, with whom the two young women live, in a very basic "lone room", identifies this job opening as a relatively favourable option. Nevertheless, factory labour slowly breaks even young, fit bodies. Looking back, Shin writes: "I did not have the luxury of perceiving my situation as difficult or painful. I could not give much thought to each passing day; I had to live from each passing day to the next. The day was always hectic, from morning to evening, leaving me no time to think about anything else but the most immediate and necessary tasks that had to be done before I had to quickly go to sleep or wake up again. It was only after I approached thirty that I got to thinking about how worn out and exhausted I must have been back then. I was about to turn thirty and one day I felt extremely, utterly tired. I realized, right away, that my fatigue dated back to those years, that I had already turned thirty, or even thirty-two, many years ago."

The pay is low, and often late. Sexual harassment is rife. Night school offers a wonderful opportunity for ultimate betterment, but as it constitutes another commitment to fit into the crowded day, not all the young women can hack it, especially as some need to work two jobs to make ends meet. School is also a window onto other workplace experiences. There's the woman who hand-wraps more than 20,000 candies every day; there are various tales of workplace accidents and injuries.

And the workers find it hard to demand improved conditions, because the employers fight tooth and nail, using every dirty trick in the book, to resist unionization. Shin and Cousin initially join the union, but are then blackmailed into withdrawing because they'll lose their places at night school if they don't... They are deeply ashamed by what they see as their own treachery.



Oldest Brother is only in his early twenties, and yet is weighed down with responsibilities. He studied law at evening classes, while working during the day, and then, when he has to do his military service during the day, he dons a wig to hide his conscript's shaved head, and works a job before and after his army duties. He is generous to the girls, but he's conservative. He expects to be obeyed, and warns Shin away from her friend Hui-jae, whose morals he doesn't approve of. Third Brother, who joins the trio in the lone room at one point, becomes a student activist, much to Oldest Brother's chagrin, and often returns home bearing scars from some sort of confrontation or another.

Money is tight, and the young people's living conditions are basic. With four to a room, there's hardly space to turn over at night. They're cold in winter, stifled in summer.

Their room is one of 37 in the building. Nearby are many similar buildings, equally full of rooms and occupants. The neighbourhood is always busy with people coming and going. "But why was it," Shin asks, "that whenever I thought of that place, the first thing that came to mind was its utter remoteness, loneliness and isolation? We lived in isolation there -- just us. Why is it that such thoughts come to my mind first when I think about that room?" The lone room -- and this is why it makes so much better a title -- is the symbol of having to fend for yourself, sink or swim. Ultimately, it's the place Shin flees when tragedy befalls her friend.

Backgrounding all these personal trials is the evolving political situation in South Korea. Shin hears of, and sometimes witnesses, various industrial protests, although she does not take part in them; President Park Chung-hee is assassinated in October 1979; and a brief "Seoul Spring" gives way to sustained oppression, complete with "education camps", police brutality, and a savage crackdown in Gwangju in May 1980.



This is all very interesting. But my first impressions of the book were not that favourable. It was too long, I felt. And it jumped about too much in time (always extra-confusing when you're listening rather than reading). There was too much diversity in the material (at one point, for example, there's a long letter from a teacher at the industrial worker school programme, then due to close). And it took a long, long time to bring out the terrible event that led to Shin's fleeing the lone room never to return, and that continues to traumatize her (the suicide of Hui-jae, which Shin had unwittingly aided and abetted). I found myself tiring a little of all the circling around. Wasn't it all just that bit too introspective, I wondered. Did its self-absorption not verge on the self-indulgent? Were its many references to "being a writer" and "my first book" not just a little wearying?

Some of those impressions still stand. But having considered some more, and read some more, I think what I failed to appreciate when first listening was what a huge big deal it was in the 1990s for an established writer to come out and say: I used to be a 'yogong' -- a female factory worker.

According to Jamie Forgacs, these women were "the lowest of the low", saddled with multiple negative images (factory slave, subordinated female, uneducated worker...). Translations of yogong in English ("factory girl", for example) do not adequately convey the derogatory connotations of the Korean word. Shin has previously avoided writing about this part of her life (a fact that acquaintances from that time keep reproachfully pointing out to her). So when her work on this topic starts to be published, there's a media flurry. Not hostile, exactly. But certainly curious and tending towards the lurid. Sample headline: "Sixteen-year-old Country Bumpkin Factory Girl Dreamed of Becoming a Writer".

For Forgacs, Shin's "confession" fulfils two needs. Firstly, it supplies a missing narrative. Male activists and academics had often ignored the role of women in the labour movement, and then when women grassroots activists did start to come into the spotlight, this revised focus resulted in "unwittingly condemning their nonactivist coworkers to a deeper level of erasure [both] from the dominant narrative and this first counter-narrative". Shin, on the other hand, speaks for "those workers that shied from activism while still claiming agency and inner complexity". Secondly, she takes on the role of "surrogate griever for the many women who lost their youth, health, and dignity in the harsh working conditions of factories in the 1970s and 1980s". It is this role that demands the constant to and fro between past and present, and the constant self-examination: "Shin’s very process of writing her novel, which is exposed to readers through her musings and present-day encounters, as well as the novel itself, together become a replacement space through which loss can be processed; an enormous need for grieving, which has been denied its proper time and space, finally finds a substitute through writing."



The fact/fiction tension also serves to blur the edges of portrayals that might perhaps have been uncomfortable, given that it seems the first instalments came out while she was still writing the rest (she refers to fending off media interest, and receiving suggestions as to what she should include). Philip Gowman even wonders whether the suicide story is fictional: "The event is indeed traumatic, but with all the distracting metafiction that has been taking place you’re not sure whether this is 'really' the terrible event that she has been blocking from her life for the past decade or whether she is still avoiding the event and has substituted something fictional in place of what actually happened: at her most recent visit to the publishers [she says] she re-wrote and then completely excised a completely different but equally traumatic event, just before the text got sent to the printers. Somehow the impact of this final section is deadened by the distance created by the flashback structure and the ambiguity deliberately woven into the present-day narrative." I incline to the view that the suicide is the traumatizing event. But I'm not sure it's good that we should have to wonder...



For Hye-ryoung Lee, this book's arrival not only made visible people who had been missing in previous works of labour literature, but also "unlatched the narrative taboo placed on 'factory girls' sexuality". (The Hui-jae story brings cohabitation with a man, pregnancy, and the possibility of abortion right into the young Shin's very limited experience.)

But Lee takes issue with the point of view represented by the novelist, who always itched to escape the factory milieu, and has now done so: "While the departure point for Oettanbang was the author’s courage in revealing her background as a factory girl, the novel did not break the episteme that had forced her into a decade of silence; that is to say, it did not break with the conventional prejudices against working-class women which accompany class and sexual degradation... What the novel shows is that the stigma against women workers is so taken for granted that the narrator, with all the authority and authenticity of an insider, is oblivious to it."

Lee also calls into question Shin's capacity to represent "lower-class women". Her reiteration that it is they who have asked her to write their story perhaps signals "the author’s anxiety regarding possible appropriation of lower-class experience by a member of the elite class". And yet the narrator is herself now an intellectual: "Could it be that Sin is inverting her own anxiety about appropriation and claiming that she bears 'their' collective hope to tell their stories?... By writing in this manner, the narrator reveals not only a painful secret and wound that she has kept to herself, but also her status as a middle-class woman writer who is now out of the range of stigmatization." I think this is what bothered me about the constant references to "being a writer". Lee continues: "If an evaluation is allowed, this writer would like to suggest that Sin’s Oettanbang be re-read as a work that reminds us of the dilemma of representing lower-class women in a feminist discourse led by women intellectuals."

All in all, then, I have a number of question-marks. But the book is still a fascinating insight into the birth pangs of Korean democracy, and a moving tribute to what by any standards was a truly heroic band of women.