VOL.84/2025.07

Suffering and Romance: Two Things Korea and Taiwan Share

Picks of a foreign journalist living in Korea

2025.06.02

Around the time the Dec. 3 martial law was declared, I was editing and proofreading the Taiwanese edition of Beyond Death, Beyond the Dark Era (Changbi Publishers). It was hard to imagine the scenes in the book becoming reality, but they soon did. History is often distorted if it is not recorded. In this book, Hwang and two other authors recount the greed of the military dictatorship, the brutality of the soldiers, and the resistance of the people based on the testimonies of eye-witnesses, survivors, and bereaved families of the Gwangju Uprising of May 18, 1945. It has left a sketch of today’s Korean society. The statements come to life even more eerily because they are given as “testimonies” rather than sentences.

The first edition of the book came out in 1985, but when the Taiwanese edition was published in January of this year, the chaotic events in Korea shocked Taiwanese readers. The Gwangju Uprising had become increasingly known in Taiwan through movies and dramas, as well as Han Kang’s novel Human Acts (Changbin Publishers), but a documentary-style book like Beyond Death and Beyond the Dark Era was an additional shock. Many readers commented that it “brought back memories of Taiwan’s White Terror period and 38 years of martial law,” and that Korea’s democratization process is strikingly similar to Taiwan’s.
Facing the truth of history is painful, but it gives us the strength to move forward. I cried many times while reading this book, and in the process, I was reminded of the shared historical pain that Taiwan and Korea share. The Taiwanese version of the book, April 3, 19470301-19540921: Breaking the Long Silence (Hyehwa 1117), was also published. I think it is significant for a democratic society that both books came out at about the same time this year.

It’s time to talk about “romance.” The book I want to introduce next is an independent magazine titled Rock’xury (Just Storage Press). After the first issue in 2012, a total of five issues were published irregularly until 2016, and then it went out of print. However, last year, Just Storage Press, an independent publishing company, released the compilation of the first issue, the previous five issues, and the newly added sixth issue as a new book.
This book presents a whole new humorous and romantic attitude to life, which the author refers to as, “how a poor man enjoys the present.” For example, it offers a variety of imaginative ideas, such as how to bake pork belly in an abandoned house, live for a week on 10,000 won, a 3,000-won cooking contest, and how to make fancy shaved ice from cheap ice cream. These wacky and quirky contents captivate readers with their unconventional vibrancy and keep them turning the pages.
It also wittily parodies various luxury ads and brand images. For example, it turns BALENCIAGA into “BALENCIAGANG,” the IKEA catalog into a guide to park exercise machines, and Instagram feeds into snapshots of unrefined everyday life. The magazine’s title, Rock’xury, combines the words “rock” and “luxury,” and uses the rock spirit to confront modern society’s extreme divide between rich and poor.
This kind of romance, in turn, reflects the poor reality of the young generation. Low income, high prices, and a severe gap between the rich and poor are problems shared by the MZ generation in Korea and Taiwan. Perhaps one hint to the question, “Can you live well without money?” can be found in this book. A sentence from the first interview in the book, “Rock’xury Interview,” struck me the most:

This is a simple phrase I think I have heard before, but it took on a new meaning when I saw it again in Rock’xury. You don’t have to rush to define whether you are useful or not, because there are moments in life when you realize how valuable you are.

Written by Wu Pei Ju (Taiwanese journalist and the manager of “Echo Islands,” an online bookstore in Korea)