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K-Fiction Series #14
Where Would You Like To Go?
Kim Ae-ran is a writer with a genius for conveying what life is through her striking, brief depictions of everyday things. This gift shines whether it's in her portrayal of the father running down the hill in his glow-in-the-dark underpants, or the youth of our times losing their dignity under the crushing weight of debt.
135 pages, Paperback
Published January 27, 2016
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About the author
Kim Ae-ran
35 books116 followersAE-RAN KIM was born in Incheon, South Korea, the youngest of three daughters. She has won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award, Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award, and the Prix de l'Inaperçu, among others, for her short fiction and collections. My Brilliant Life is her first novel.
Associated Names:
* Kim Ae-ran
* 김애란 (Korean Profile)
* คิมแอรัน (Thai Profile)
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 7, 2025
Watch my review on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM00P...
April 27, 2016
Infinitely sad, but powerful and with a certain warmth to it.
October 15, 2016
"어디로가고 싶으신가요" / "Where Would You Like To Go" is a volume in the Asia Publishers bi-lingual series of K-fiction from Korean authors.
As with others in the series, the book comes with both the Korean original and the English translation on facing pages. In addition, there is a afterword from the author herself and a detailed critical appraisal. The use of Korean critics to appraise the novels has the advantage of their greater familiarity with the author's overall works, albeit at the slight expense of less clearly placing their work in an international context.
This all makes for a wonderful introduction to Korean literature, particularly for those, like myself, attempting (badly!) to learn the original language.
One downside is that when one considers the already slim volume (120 pages), and then takes away the commentaries and the dual versions of the story, the actual story in English is slim indeed, just a single short story, making the volumes in the series a rather expensive (on a pound per word of English story) purchase.
The original bilingual series from Asia Publishers came under some criticism for unnecessarily commissioning re-translations of works already in print, and for patchy translation quality generally, in part related to the sheer volume of output, although the series served as an excellent introduction to many modern authors not previously published in English, as well as some additional stories from those, such as 2016 MBI winner Han Kang and the 2016 BTBA longlisted Bae Suah, who have already broken through. But in the newer K-fiction series, which focuses on contemporary fiction, more care has been taken with both the selection of works and the translators.
But by far the most significant criticism of the series is that it is so difficult to get hold of outside of Korea, for example many volumes are not sold on Amazon Uk. Indeed, I resorted to going to Korea to get hold of them (at the wonderful Kyobo bookstore in Gangnam). That lack of international availability of a series designed to promote Korean literature, it barely need saying, rather defeats the object.
This particular volume features a story by 김 애란 (Kim Ae-ran), a new author for me, translated by 젬이미 챙 (Jamie Chang), a lecturer at the prestiguous Ewha University, and with a critical commentary from Lee Kyung-jae.
In her commentary, the author writes that "to my understanding, many Korea writers have not been able to write, or have managed with great difficulty since the Spring of 2014 ... poets, novelists and critics of our times set out to find the meaning and use of words at the very place where words had crumbled". What happened in Spring 2014 would be obvious for a Korean reader, but less so for readers of the translation: the Sewol ferry disaster, where 304 people lost their life, mostly high school students, leading to extended national mourning as well as anger against those perceived as responsible.
The story itself is also based around mourning for one who drowned, but at a personal level. The 30-something narrator's husband, a teacher, drowned one day in an accident, trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue a pupil. This happened, a few months before the story, on a day that she, symbolically, made Kimchi for the first time based on her late mother's recipe:
"But I never dared kimchi. It seemed like a big, difficult thing, only mothers could do. But that day, I wanted to try it for some reason. It was a spring day, and I felt like trying something new, perhaps in light of our long discussion and ultimate decision to have a baby"
"... 김치만은 엄두가 안 났다. 그런 건 엄마들만 할 줄 아는 크고 어려운 일처럼 느껴졌다. 그런데 이상하게 그날은 그게 하고 싶었다. 남편과 긴 의는 끝에 아이를 갖기로 결정하고 뭔가 새롭게 시도해보고픈 마음이 든 봄날이라 그랬는지 모른다."
In the story she is invited by her sister to stay at her house in Edinburgh while she travels, for a change of scene from the house the narrator shared with her late husband where now "words floated around the house all day long. Like a bird crashing headfirst into a window-pane and killing itself, the words collided with his absence and fell to the floor every time. Only then would I remember, as if realising it for the first time, Oh, he's not here anymore."
Her first impressions of the UK are:
"The sky of this island reminded me of the sky I once saw in a Japanese animated film. It looked just like the sky a war-worn soldier dreaming of his happy childhood saw in his mind. This radiance felt like a curtain I took down from someone's home and hung in my own. The pretty "present" hanging before me seemed like a happy past or future to come, but whichever it was, it didn't feel like mine."
As she simply lets time flow in Edinburgh, "like pouring rice water down a drain...so that it would not let me sink or sweep me away", she notices a rash appearing on her back, stomach, thighs and buttocs, a skin-condition she eventually self diagnoses as "pityriasis rosea", a condition whose origin is medically unclear but some believe to be enhanced by stress depression.
"Nothing appeared on exposed skin, so that you could seem perfectly fine on the outside ... it wasn't contagious." - the skin condition serving in the story as a metaphor for the grief.
She unsuccessfully tries to share her pain with the AI interface on her phone, Siri, and also fails when she hooks up with an old college friend of her and her husband, now studying in Edinburgh and unaware of her husband's death. But on returning to Korea (the skin condition "latched on to me in Korea, followed me to England, and doggedly flew back home with me") she receives a letter from the sister of the boy her husband died trying to save, enabling her to see how someone else experiences the same absence, and her process of grief moves on:
"Over the spots that had scabbed over, peeled, and emerged again, over the stains that showed no sign of fading, teardrops fell.
I missed you so very badly"
"당신이 사무치게 보고 싶었다."
Overall, a poetic and moving story about the inadequacy and yet necessity of words in the face of overwhelming grief ("the words will never transcend death, but I hope they may pay quiet, abiding respect before the insurmountable" - from the author's note).
The translation generally reads extremely naturally as English literature and is by no means a literal word-for-word rendition. Which makes some obvious errors all the more jarring, suggesting that the book would have benefited from careful editing. E.g. the sentence ""that was also the day you stopped smoking cold turkey", rather missing a "and went" between "smoking" and "cold" (or indeed simply using "quit smoking.", which is closer to the original). Or a reference to the "The intended gone, the uninspired, everyday words I said hung around my lips with nowhere to go..." where the first three words simply make no sense.
As with others in the series, the book comes with both the Korean original and the English translation on facing pages. In addition, there is a afterword from the author herself and a detailed critical appraisal. The use of Korean critics to appraise the novels has the advantage of their greater familiarity with the author's overall works, albeit at the slight expense of less clearly placing their work in an international context.
This all makes for a wonderful introduction to Korean literature, particularly for those, like myself, attempting (badly!) to learn the original language.
One downside is that when one considers the already slim volume (120 pages), and then takes away the commentaries and the dual versions of the story, the actual story in English is slim indeed, just a single short story, making the volumes in the series a rather expensive (on a pound per word of English story) purchase.
The original bilingual series from Asia Publishers came under some criticism for unnecessarily commissioning re-translations of works already in print, and for patchy translation quality generally, in part related to the sheer volume of output, although the series served as an excellent introduction to many modern authors not previously published in English, as well as some additional stories from those, such as 2016 MBI winner Han Kang and the 2016 BTBA longlisted Bae Suah, who have already broken through. But in the newer K-fiction series, which focuses on contemporary fiction, more care has been taken with both the selection of works and the translators.
But by far the most significant criticism of the series is that it is so difficult to get hold of outside of Korea, for example many volumes are not sold on Amazon Uk. Indeed, I resorted to going to Korea to get hold of them (at the wonderful Kyobo bookstore in Gangnam). That lack of international availability of a series designed to promote Korean literature, it barely need saying, rather defeats the object.
This particular volume features a story by 김 애란 (Kim Ae-ran), a new author for me, translated by 젬이미 챙 (Jamie Chang), a lecturer at the prestiguous Ewha University, and with a critical commentary from Lee Kyung-jae.
In her commentary, the author writes that "to my understanding, many Korea writers have not been able to write, or have managed with great difficulty since the Spring of 2014 ... poets, novelists and critics of our times set out to find the meaning and use of words at the very place where words had crumbled". What happened in Spring 2014 would be obvious for a Korean reader, but less so for readers of the translation: the Sewol ferry disaster, where 304 people lost their life, mostly high school students, leading to extended national mourning as well as anger against those perceived as responsible.
The story itself is also based around mourning for one who drowned, but at a personal level. The 30-something narrator's husband, a teacher, drowned one day in an accident, trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue a pupil. This happened, a few months before the story, on a day that she, symbolically, made Kimchi for the first time based on her late mother's recipe:
"But I never dared kimchi. It seemed like a big, difficult thing, only mothers could do. But that day, I wanted to try it for some reason. It was a spring day, and I felt like trying something new, perhaps in light of our long discussion and ultimate decision to have a baby"
"... 김치만은 엄두가 안 났다. 그런 건 엄마들만 할 줄 아는 크고 어려운 일처럼 느껴졌다. 그런데 이상하게 그날은 그게 하고 싶었다. 남편과 긴 의는 끝에 아이를 갖기로 결정하고 뭔가 새롭게 시도해보고픈 마음이 든 봄날이라 그랬는지 모른다."
In the story she is invited by her sister to stay at her house in Edinburgh while she travels, for a change of scene from the house the narrator shared with her late husband where now "words floated around the house all day long. Like a bird crashing headfirst into a window-pane and killing itself, the words collided with his absence and fell to the floor every time. Only then would I remember, as if realising it for the first time, Oh, he's not here anymore."
Her first impressions of the UK are:
"The sky of this island reminded me of the sky I once saw in a Japanese animated film. It looked just like the sky a war-worn soldier dreaming of his happy childhood saw in his mind. This radiance felt like a curtain I took down from someone's home and hung in my own. The pretty "present" hanging before me seemed like a happy past or future to come, but whichever it was, it didn't feel like mine."
As she simply lets time flow in Edinburgh, "like pouring rice water down a drain...so that it would not let me sink or sweep me away", she notices a rash appearing on her back, stomach, thighs and buttocs, a skin-condition she eventually self diagnoses as "pityriasis rosea", a condition whose origin is medically unclear but some believe to be enhanced by stress depression.
"Nothing appeared on exposed skin, so that you could seem perfectly fine on the outside ... it wasn't contagious." - the skin condition serving in the story as a metaphor for the grief.
She unsuccessfully tries to share her pain with the AI interface on her phone, Siri, and also fails when she hooks up with an old college friend of her and her husband, now studying in Edinburgh and unaware of her husband's death. But on returning to Korea (the skin condition "latched on to me in Korea, followed me to England, and doggedly flew back home with me") she receives a letter from the sister of the boy her husband died trying to save, enabling her to see how someone else experiences the same absence, and her process of grief moves on:
"Over the spots that had scabbed over, peeled, and emerged again, over the stains that showed no sign of fading, teardrops fell.
I missed you so very badly"
"당신이 사무치게 보고 싶었다."
Overall, a poetic and moving story about the inadequacy and yet necessity of words in the face of overwhelming grief ("the words will never transcend death, but I hope they may pay quiet, abiding respect before the insurmountable" - from the author's note).
The translation generally reads extremely naturally as English literature and is by no means a literal word-for-word rendition. Which makes some obvious errors all the more jarring, suggesting that the book would have benefited from careful editing. E.g. the sentence ""that was also the day you stopped smoking cold turkey", rather missing a "and went" between "smoking" and "cold" (or indeed simply using "quit smoking.", which is closer to the original). Or a reference to the "The intended gone, the uninspired, everyday words I said hung around my lips with nowhere to go..." where the first three words simply make no sense.
January 4, 2017
Its young. Its international. Its very interesting and I think quite good.
The left hand pages are in Korean, and the right hand pages are in English. At the end are writers notes and some added commentary.
This is a short story of a young Korean woman who has lost her young husband, and who agrees to house sit for a cousin living in Edinburgh. The story details her time in Scotland and her return home and the things that happen in those weeks. Its an interesting and intimate description of being lost and trying to re-orient oneself after a death. I though it was very well done.
The left hand pages are in Korean, and the right hand pages are in English. At the end are writers notes and some added commentary.
This is a short story of a young Korean woman who has lost her young husband, and who agrees to house sit for a cousin living in Edinburgh. The story details her time in Scotland and her return home and the things that happen in those weeks. Its an interesting and intimate description of being lost and trying to re-orient oneself after a death. I though it was very well done.
July 31, 2021
This is a bilingual book Korean-English. I read the English side, I still have to work my way up to reading it in the original Korean. My vocabulary just isn't there yet.
The story is that of a woman living her grief, trying to understand, and accept the sudden passing of her husband. Kim Ae-Ran wrote a short and very touching story here where you really empathize with Myoengji, our protagonist.
It was a great read and I would recommend.
Looking forward to trying it out again once I have more language abilities in Korean.
The story is that of a woman living her grief, trying to understand, and accept the sudden passing of her husband. Kim Ae-Ran wrote a short and very touching story here where you really empathize with Myoengji, our protagonist.
It was a great read and I would recommend.
Looking forward to trying it out again once I have more language abilities in Korean.
January 20, 2021
Read translation
September 26, 2022
A very poignant story coming on the heels of the ferry sinking in 2014. It seems like the author was trying to come to terms with what this meant for the people involved, as was much of Korea at the time.
May 22, 2025
"Where Would You Like To Go?" is a story of a woman experiencing her grief and accepting the sudden passing of her husband. She unsuccessfully tries to share her pain with Siri on her phone and fails when she hooks up with an old college friend of hers and her husband.
It is a short and very touching story. Myeong Ji needs some time to herself as she's recovering from the tragic death of her husband and thinks the time away from home will do her good. Her grief manifests itself in the form of a skin condition becoming more serious during her stay in Scotland.
It was a great read, and I would recommend it.
- Review by Potomac Library Staff
Click here to find the book at Prince William Public Libraries.
It is a short and very touching story. Myeong Ji needs some time to herself as she's recovering from the tragic death of her husband and thinks the time away from home will do her good. Her grief manifests itself in the form of a skin condition becoming more serious during her stay in Scotland.
It was a great read, and I would recommend it.
- Review by Potomac Library Staff
Click here to find the book at Prince William Public Libraries.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews