Yeon-sik HongCritiques

I was a little worried that this book would be really frustrating because the author/protagonist is a mid-30s straight dude cartoonist (who married a woman who was formerly his student) who spends about half of the book freaking out about his career and not being able to Provide As A Husband Should. This is a formula that often leaves me either bored or furious, but Hong writes with such self-awareness and grace that it really worked for me. Also, this is one of the most realistic/relatable/compelling depictions of what it's like to live with and work alongside people as artists that I've read in a long while. Hong's focus on real, grounded detail--from detailing the exhausting stress of being an underemployed artist to the attention paid to the near-daily commutes up and down the mountain to the mountain's changing landscape in different season--lends the book both urgency and a gentle rhythm.

I think my enjoyment of this book suffered a bit for reading it right after Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide. I loved Yeon-Sik's previous work, Uncomfortably Happy, but this one puts the focus on the protagonist's relationship with his mom (Umma), and her life of always putting her kids (and their abusive alcoholic dad) first. Madang is living his life differently in that he does all the cooking and shares in childcare, but he also resents it when under deadline and snipes about "spoiling" his wife. So it comes so close to directly addressing the gender roles he was raised with, but then never really does, which frustrated me. I did enjoy the book overall, especially the focus on gardening and food.

A pair of artists move to a rural mountain home and overcome various struggles. Very enjoyable, interesting, charming. Also a little upsetting at times — it's not all bucolic happiness. Nice mix of very detailed, rendered art, and more impressionistic surreal sequences. Some of those sequences, dealing with the author's struggling to deal with the pressures on him, didn't quite land for me, but overall it was very effective. Recommended, though be prepared it gets a little dark at times.

I probably would never have picked this up except for the #koreanmarch challenge. I hadn't ever heard of it before, but I showed up to the library looking to find every author with a Korean last name and stumbled on this one.

It won me over completely. This is very long and sometimes slow, but in a way that serves the story it is telling. A young married couple moves to the country to save money and distractions while they work on their graphic novel projects, and they end up more isolated than they expected. They throw themselves into gardening, dodging his editor, landscaping, and yelling at people outside for littering. So, big social distancing mood. (I read this the second weekend of pandemic lockdown in Michigan).

There are also some charming little moments of the shared language and weirdnesses of a newly married couple that I really loved. This was ideal COVID-reading for me, and I was so happy to have found it.

Sequel, not sequel.

This seems like a direct follow-up to Uncomfortably Happily, but suddenly all the people are cats and have different names. That may have something to do with the fact that the author is no longer writing about just him and his wife, branching out to the miserable lives of his aging and quickly deteriorating parents.

So, "Madang" lives in the countryside with his wife and newborn son. He spends his day parenting, fixing up the rental property, gardening, doing housework, and cooking all the meals. He also makes frequent drives into Seoul to check on his mother, who has a heart condition, taking her to medical appointments and the pharmacy and making sure she is exercising and eating healthy. He worries that she lives in a tiny underground apartment with the alcoholic father he resents and avoids.

Much of the book is spent contrasting the growing and blossoming life in the countryside from the wilting and decaying life in the big city. Madang actively works to keep the two separated, rarely taking his wife and child along on his runs to the city and never bringing either of his parents out to his house. Heavy compartmentalization at work.

Throughout the book, though, his cooking at home entwines him with memories of his mother as he copies her recipes and remembers the happiness she visibly projected while cooking for him and his brother.

The book has a slow start, but I found myself drawn into small dramas of caregiving, health crises, and mixed emotions children can have about their aging parents and appreciated that Madang, who is a bit of an ass really, at least has some insights about himself and demonstrates some personal growth.

I am bothered though by the self-centered nature Madang's marriage, with his unnamed wife serving as little more than a sounding board for his thoughts. And he presents himself as doing almost everything around the house in addition to all he does for his parents while all she seems to do is lie around and breastfeed. Unless you have read and can connect this book to Uncomfortably Happily, you don't find out until deep in the story that she, like Madang, works from home as an artist. Even his mother, the heart of the story, is reduced to her role as "Mom" or "Mrs. Bae." Only Madang, his son, and his brother get first names in the story because that's a male privilege, I guess. (And yes, this is a pet peeve of mine because it seems moms and wives go unnamed in so many stories and books.)

In this graphic novel memoir, comic artist Yeon-sik Hong recounts his and his young wife's adventures in 2006-7 moving from Seoul to live in the countryside.

I say "adventures," but it certainly wasn't all fun and games. Hong portrays the difficulties of money woes, two creative people pursuing their dreams, and his own anger issues and challenges trying to keep up with everything. I could relate to his stress of learning a new place and figuring out the budget. There were moments of happiness too: exploring the area, swimming in the mountain lake, growing a garden. A different sort of slice-of-life memoir that was real and relatable.

Madang Bae straddles his responsibilities to his wife and young child in the South Korean countryside and his aging parents back in Seoul. He dives into building a garden with joy and reminisces about eating his mother's kimchi, even while struggling with anger at his alcoholic father and dealing with his mother's medical challenges.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel exploring that unique part of middle age where you're pulled in different directions by the generation older and younger than you. The illustrations of the characters as cats give a sense of whimsy, and there's a blend of lightness and humor as well as more serious reflections on getting older, family, and the connection that - in Madang's case - food brings.½

Yes, childless artist-couples struggle with adversity trying to achieve a balance between what they must do to survive and what they love. This fairly long graphic novel documents these protagonists as they struggle to live an existence that forsakes convenience for the mare clearly demarcated line between necessity and bliss that exists in a wilderness setting. My first impulse was to call this novel "charming" or "cute" (which it is abundantly), but there is a good deal of darkness, especially on the part of the husband as he, almost literally, wrestles with his demons. The upshot, I guess, is that, as humans, we are all traumatized, injured and, as such, subject to emotional struggle, stress, and yearnings we don't fully understand. To distill what is important we must tame our own wilderness.

This book is a bit uneven - I could have done without all the fantasy and dream sequences for instance - but if you commit and make it through to the end, you get a pretty good portrait of a man navigating a psychological and physical crisis through the strength of a loving relationship with his wife. At first I was annoyed by the narrator's whininess and then at one point I worried the narrative was going to take a turn toward [b:The Shining|11588|The Shining (The Shining #1)|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353277730s/11588.jpg|849585], but this semi-autobiographical book stays on a domestic drama track and has a subtle but rewarding ending.

Charming with a capital charm.

Lately it seems as though there has been something of a renaissance or Korean literature in English translation. Korean comics haven't yet experienced quite the same kind of resurgence, but they do continue to be licensed and translated. One of the most recent and notable manhwa releases in English is Yeon-sik Hong's aptly named Uncomfortably Happily. Previously published in France in 2013 under the title Historie d'un Couple (History of a Couple), Uncomfortably Happily was originally released in Korea in two volumes in 2012 where it won the Manhwa Today Award. Drawn and Quarterly's English-language edition of the work collects the entirety of Uncomfortably Happily in a single volume and features a translation by Hellen Jo, an accomplished comics creator and illustrator in her own right. The volume also includes a personal essay by Jo. Uncomfortably Happily is Hong's first major personal work, a memoir of the short time he and his wife lived in the Korean countryside. Prior to its release, Hong was predominantly involved in commercial creative projects.

Yeon-sik Hong and Sohmi Lee are recently married and looking for a new home; their current apartment is on loan to Yeon-sik from one of his previous publishers and it's past time that they move on. Since they'll need to leave anyway, the couple decides to take the opportunity to find a place that's more suited to their needs. Somewhere quiet and less complicated, congested, and expensive than city life in Seoul; somewhere they can both focus on their creative work. Eventually the two become enamored with a house and a bit of land for rent on the top of a mountain in rural Pocheon. With the clean air, beautiful countryside, and calm environment it seems like the perfect place for them–at least at first. Yeon-sik, Sohmi, and their three cats make the move only to discover that living in the country brings along with it its own sorts of challenges. But despite the isolation, inadequate public transportation, confrontations with hostile hikers, inclement weather, and encroaching development, they slowly build a home for themselves. It can be difficult at times, though, and some things never really change–financial hardship, personal anxieties, and looming deadlines don't simply disappear and it's just as easy to find distractions in the countryside as it is in the city.

Though I currently live in a more urban environment, I grew up and have spent most of my life in a very rural area. In Uncomfortably Happily, Hong captures beautifully what it is like to live in the country, both the good and the bad, the satisfaction and the stress. The volume's chapters are divided by season, the narrative perfectly conveying the rhythms of the natural world and the lifestyle that is so closely dependent upon those rhythms, including the winters that seem to last forever with no relief in sight. Hong's style of illustration is relatively simple but the attention given to the detail of the land- and cityscapes establish a real sense of place. In addition to the external world, the visuals in Uncomfortably Happily also reveal Hong's internal mindscapes and imaginative fantasies. Though the subject matter can often be quite serious, Hong takes a charming and lighthearted approach. The small family (animals included) frequently break into musical numbers and Hong's psyche manifests on the page in both amusing and affecting ways. But while humor is generally present in Uncomfortably Happily, the manhwa is also a sincere and honest work.

Uncomfortably Happily is a straightforward yet layered story of the day-to-day life of a newlywed couple going through a major transition in their life. There is the move to the countryside itself and all that entails, but Uncomfortably Happily is also the story about Hong's emotional and mental turmoil as he struggles with professional and personal insecurities. At the beginning of Uncomfortably Happily Hong is already approaching burnout and the potential for a breakdown doesn't seem to be very far behind; meanwhile Lee is making tremendous progress in her career as a picture book illustrator. It was bound to happen eventually regardless of location, but Hong having to confront and come to terms with his own abilities and limitations, wants and needs while living on a secluded mountaintop has a certain poetic appropriateness to it. While Hong's particular situation and psychological journey are certainly unique, the themes explored in the manhwa are universal; Uncomfortably Happily is an engrossing and immensely relatable work.

Experiments in Manga