Everything Belongs to Us: A Novel - Hardcover

Wuertz, Yoojin Grace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812998545 ISBN 13: 9780812998542

Publisher: Random House, 2017

Synopsis

Two young women of vastly different means each struggle to find her own way during the darkest hours of South Korea’s “economic miracle” in a striking debut novel for readers of Anthony Marra and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie.

Seoul, 1978. At South Korea’s top university, the nation’s best and brightest compete to join the professional elite of an authoritarian regime. Success could lead to a life of rarefied privilege and wealth; failure means being left irrevocably behind.

For childhood friends Jisun and Namin, the stakes couldn’t be more different. Jisun, the daughter of a powerful business mogul, grew up on a mountainside estate with lush gardens and a dedicated chauffeur. Namin’s parents run a tented food cart from dawn to curfew; her sister works in a shoe factory. Now Jisun wants as little to do with her father’s world as possible, abandoning her schoolwork in favor of the underground activist movement, while Namin studies tirelessly in the service of one goal: to launch herself and her family out of poverty.

But everything changes when Jisun and Namin meet an ambitious, charming student named Sunam, whose need to please his family has led him to a prestigious club: the Circle. Under the influence of his mentor, Juno, a manipulative social climber, Sunam becomes entangled with both women, as they all make choices that will change their lives forever.

In this sweeping yet intimate debut, Yoojin Grace Wuertz details four intertwining lives that are rife with turmoil and desire, private anxieties and public betrayals, dashed hopes and broken dreams—while a nation moves toward prosperity at any cost.

Praise for Everything Belongs to Us

“The intertwined lives of South Korean university students provide intimacy to a rich and descriptive portrait of the country during the period of authoritarian industrialization in the late 1970s. Wuertz’s debut novel is a Gatsby-esque takedown, full of memorable characters.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Wuertz’s masterful novel traces the paths of two friends who come from very different backgrounds, but whose trajectories have taken them to the same point in time. This is a story of love and passion, betrayal and ambition, and it is an always fascinating look at a country whose many contradictions contribute to its often enigmatic allure.”—Nylon

About this title

About the Author:

Yoojin Grace Wuertz was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States at age six. She holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA in fiction from New York University. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Everything Belongs to Us / Yoojin Grace Wuertz

 

1

Seoul, 1978

They had come to the roof for three days to watch the strike at the Mun-A textile factory. It was April, the early mornings still damp and gray, the sky a ragged blanket thrown over the city. In the pre-dawn, the women gathered like ghosts around the factory yard and formed rows as if on lines etched into the concrete. They sat shoulder to shoulder, close enough to link arms and share warmth. The drumming began with the sun. At first the rhythm was simple, almost laconic. Pum-pum-pum-pum. The pulse rolled over the street like slow thunder, beckoning. By seven thirty, the strike had mustered full force. Three hundred women in khaki uniforms overflowed the narrow yard onto the sidewalk, fists in the air, chanting, shouting, singing. Neighborhood workers watched from behind windows, as if still under curfew. Pedestrians hurried to cross the street.

Dull tan slacks, matching blouse, and navy kerchief: They were an industrial army trained to sew buttonholes and block seams with military precision and discipline. Throughout the city each morning, the public loudspeakers broadcast the president’s slogans: Work cheerfully, courageously, for a more prosperous nation! Let’s be industrial soldiers for a brighter future! If the thrust of the rallying cry was somewhat diminished by the staticky sound quality, more warbling than exalting, no one was surprised. As with most aspects of President Park Chung Hee ’s administration, the objective—and the means—called for force, not finesse. The industrial army did not need a special sound system. It needed earlier mornings, later nights, unity, focus. Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Sacrifice.

So these were the soldiers. Skinny, pale-faced girls and women built like furniture, all limbs and angles. Even in protest, they maintained orderly ranks, churning out dissent with the same single-minded efficiency with which they had created cheap exports for Western markets. They marched in unison, danced in unison. They shouted in antiphonal ecstasy, two megaphones leading the call-and-response that never flagged. When individual voices grew ragged and hoarse, fresh voices took up the amplifiers, rejuvenating the whole. And the drums beat on like a sonic spine.

From a distance, their rigid organization made them appear simultaneously mighty and destructible. They were a focused defiance, conspicuous and easy to stomp.

Guarantee basic labor rights! We are not machines!

Throw out the illegal union election! Union revote!

On the roof across the street, Sunam and his new sunbae, Juno, stood watch. Juno Yoon was a year above Sunam at Seoul National University, the most prestigious college in the country, and Sunam vigilantly took cues from the older boy. Just getting to SNU was an accomplishment, requiring a grueling entrance exam that demanded years of around-the-clock preparation. Succeeding there put you in a different category altogether—it was a chance to become part of the professional elite. The best students transformed from pimply, stressed-out nineteen-year-olds to national assemblymen, judges, doc- tors, chaebol business leaders, and famous scientists. And the fastest ticket to success was gaining entry to a special group known only as the Circle—a kind of social club, founded by the heir to an enormous shipping fortune. Juno was already a member. As Sunam’s sunbae, Juno was meant to be his elder, mentor, initiator. Sunam might squirm under the older boy’s brash shows of authority, but as the younger, or hubae, he had a lot to gain from being considered Juno’s protégé.

“Look alive, Sunam,” barked Juno. Sunam snapped his eyes open as wide as he could. In the previous days, the chanting had grown so embedded in his consciousness that he lay awake at night frantic with exhaustion while the echoes of slogans cycled relentlessly through his mind. After years of rigorous exam preparations, he was no stranger to painful mornings, to burning eyelids and limbs that felt waterlogged with sleep, but dragging himself here for this third day had taken more willpower than any other morning of his life. You are lucky, he told himself in the sternest mental voice he could muster. You have an opportunity ten thousand young men would gladly snatch from your hands. You made it. Now climb.

It was 1978, only a generation after the end of the Korean War, which had flattened Seoul to a pile of rubble. Almost every family had been touched by recent memories of poverty. Sunam’s family had been relatively well-off, but even he could call to mind the lean years of his childhood. While he had never been forced to skip any meals, he re- membered the gnawing preoccupation with food, always hungry for more. At school, his first- and second-grade teachers served gruel, ladling out extra portions for the skinnier, clearly malnourished kids with their eyes huge in their heads, their skin white and flaky with a kind of fungal infection that seemed rampant in those days. He often wondered what had become of those classmates, if their families had managed to pull themselves up.

So a university degree might not have meant the difference between life and death, but for Sunam it meant a job in an office rather than a factory or steel mill. It meant the ability to buy an apartment in a new, high-rise development equipped with indoor plumbing, a kitchen installed with a washing machine, a TV in the living room, and—one day, perhaps—a car. And Juno was not just any sunbae, but a personal friend of Min Ahn, founder of the Circle. All of the Circle ’s members were hand-selected by Min and his cronies. The bullying, the twenty- four-hour demands, the nonsense ritual humiliations—it was all part of the process. A survival game. If he made it, Sunam would gain entry into a rarefied world of status and privilege. If he failed, he ’d be a nobody. No connections, no tribe. He would stay in that middle heap of life—better off than most, perhaps—while his lucky peers broke away into unimaginable echelons.

To survive, there was just one rule: obedience. Blind. Unflinching.

Total.

Thirteen hours the first day. The second, fourteen and a half. The predawn mornings, the thunderous drumming, the eye-watering monotony of watching three hundred women in the throes of misplaced democracy—it was all terrible and life draining, uncomfortable, boring, tedious. What were they doing here? Why this place, this strike? Sometimes hours would pass in stultifying silence. Watch, Juno would say, but nothing more. Watch for what? Sunam knew better than to ask, but the boundless uncertainties filled him with panic. Surely he was missing something of critical importance. Something crucial to his future, which he would learn only in retrospect and regret for the rest of his life. From the moment he greeted Juno in the morning, bowing ninety degrees from the waist, to the final moments of shadowing him an exact half step behind to his bus stop home at night, Sunam wrung his mind for clues. There was nothing.

Eight o’clock. Juno observed the scene below with a hand shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun. Built like a judo wrestler, Juno was thick and short, with biceps that strained against the fabric of his windbreaker. He had a soft, murmuring voice, which could sound deceptively contemplative even as he cut to the bone. “This is the third day, Sunam,” he said in his way, the octogenarian to a toddler. “I hope you’ve gathered some conclusions.”

Sunam cleared his throat. “About the strike?” “Yes, Sunam. About the strike.”

“It seems nothing has changed.” “Does it. What else?”

“They seem well organized.”

“Well organized to strike in front of their place of work, you mean.” “Yes.”

“Sunam, I know you’re a smart guy. When I ask you what conclusions you’ve reached, it’s because I assume you’ve considered the various possible outcomes. Now. I’m tired of this two-word baby nonsense. What conclusions have you reached? And be smart about it.”

So this is what he should have prepared for—an analysis of the strike. Sociopolitical ramifications. Labor. Leadership. Democracy. He had been so busy thinking about himself that he had not bothered to consider those angles. Strikes were what you walked past every day in Seoul. Small, big, the same one, a different one. For most people trying to live their lives and stay out of trouble, strikes were simply obstacles to avoid. Some people might feel a perverse desire to stand by and gawk, but reasonable folks didn’t want to risk getting mixed up with the crowd and possibly taken for a sympathizer or fellow activist. Same for the campus demonstrations at SNU and other universities, called “demos” for short. The campus demos were more political and less practical in nature than the labor strikes—protesting the president’s repressive Yushin Constitution and demanding transparent, democratic elections. Sunam considered these issues the domain of hippies destined for lives on the fringe, not for him. What conclusions had he reached? Sunam had less than a second to think, and he blurted out the only thing that came to mind.

“I don’t care about the strike, really. My conclusions were possibly that you were a labor sympathizer or had some interest in factory girls. They’re not too bad to look at, I guess. Some of them are kind of pretty.”

Juno’s expression did not change, which Sunam took to be an auspicious sign under the circumstances. “Some of them? Tell me which.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly make a list.” “And this is your serious answer?”

Sunam chewed his lip, regretting his moment of flippancy. “No.” “Then try again. Tell me what you see.”

“I see factory workers demanding better conditions. I see that if they don’t get back to work, they’ll probably lose their jobs and have to go back to their families in the country.”

“And?”

“The factory will easily replace them.”

Juno looked at him closely. “We ’ve been here three days. Do you really not know?”

Sunam froze. A bad idea to bluff. Slowly he shook his head. “Activists, Sunam. Some of those girls are college students. Some are even from SNU. They go underground and work in the factories, pretending they’re like anyone else, but they organize strikes and union votes.”

“Is that legal?”

“No, of course not.”

“But even so, what does that have to do with us?” Sunam asked. “You’re not a labor sympathizer, are you? What difference does it make if some of the workers are students?”

“I happen to have an interest in one of the students,” Juno said enigmatically. “I like to keep an eye on her.”

“An interest? Are you . . . in love with one of them?”

Suddenly Juno let out a booming laugh, which stung Sunam as much as being slapped in the face. “You really are a baby, aren’t you? Love? Is that so important to you?”

“I know someone like you doesn’t just take ‘an interest’ in a girl for no reason,” Sunam said, attempting to flatter Juno’s ego. “Who is it? Will you tell me?”

“I intend to marry this girl,” Juno said matter-of-factly. “You’ll laugh if I say it’s fate, but she and I are fated to be together. I’ve known it since I was a ten-year-old boy. It’s the perfect partnership and I intend to see it happen.”

“This sounds like love to me, sunbae,” said Sunam.

Juno shook his head. “You haven’t heard me,” he said. “Not love, Sunam. Just good planning.”

 

The hours of the morning passed in the same monotony he had endured over the past two days. The women yelled. The drums clattered and crashed. Pedestrians streamed by. Juno barely spoke a word, giving no further indication of what they might be looking for.

It was uncomfortable on the roof with nowhere to sit except the hard, dirty floor. Sunam felt his eyes burning with boredom. The ceaseless noise settled into the recesses of his eyes and temples, stirring a fierce headache that made his vision hazy with pain. Juno seemed impervious to the ruckus, as if he were enclosed in a soundproof capsule. Sunam tried to imagine what sort of girl would inspire such stoic concentration. He assumed she must be very beautiful for Juno to overlook the fact that she was an activist.

At lunchtime, Juno sent him to bring up noodles from the restaurant downstairs. “Hot noodles in soup. Don’t spill.” The idea was to bring it back up as quickly as possible so that it was still steaming when he arrived. There were four flights and a roof exit, no elevator. The restaurant ajummas, wary of customers’ complaints about stinginess, filled the enormous steel bowls to the brim. It was impossible not to spill.

Sunam was ascending the final flight with the heavily laden tray, sweating from the effort of simultaneously rushing and holding still, when he heard the drums kick up as if someone had suddenly removed a sound barrier. The bass hit him in the chest like a fist. Scalding soup splayed over his hands and shirt. Cursing, he abandoned the tray and ran the rest of the way, taking the steps two at a time. On the roof, noise overtook everything. The drumming was ramped to a frenetic tempo, reverberating against his rib cage, bouncing beneath his feet. The chanting rose like a groundswell, an intensity so fierce that it could only be described as a roar.

He ran to Juno, who was leaning on the roof to take in the full scope of the street. “What’s happening?” he asked. His voice was immediately swallowed by the noise.

“Cops,” Juno shouted.

They strained over the edge of the roof to catch the line of gray police vans pushing through the street. Red lights whirled over the sidewalk. The eagle police insignia multiplied over every surface as cops rushed out of vehicles. Traffic was stopped and metal barricades erected. Already clots of bystanders, who evidently had nowhere better to go and did not mind risking their own skins for the sake of witnessing a spectacle, were jostling for position.

The protest drums beat on louder, faster, against the encroaching line. Banners rippled and bobbed like a platoon of sails.

Guarantee basic labor rights! We are not machines!

Throw out the illegal union election! Union revote!

“Watch,” Juno said in a low voice.

Men in riot gear streamed out of the vans with a terrible clatter of body-length metal shields and helmets. They moved like automatons, pre-choreographed and bulky in their thick leg and arm padding. In minutes they had flanked the gate, six deep. Dark blue uniforms showed up flat and rich against the faded factory khaki. Light glinted off their visors and helmets. With silent precision they planted their shields at their boots, resting white padded gloves over the edge in a posture of casual aggression. The movement unfolded in increments, suggesting the next step, building fear. The effect was of a slow, calculated escalation.

Below, a male voice boomed from a bullhorn. It was the factory foreman in shiny black pan...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0812998545
• ISBN 13: 9780812998542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368