I quite enjoy Asian literature, and don’t too often take issue with translations; however, either Gu Byeong-mo’s Apartment Women is suffering from a translation disconnect or this book is lacking in some necessary style. The premise sounds pretty incredible, if I am being honest - several families move into an apartment complex in the middle of nowhere as part of a government experiment on communal living. This is my cup of tea because I love social studies.
A couple with a young child moves into a government funded apartment and meets three other couple with children. If each couple have three children within 10-year period, the newly constructed, cheap apartment in nice, quite rural area becomes their own. The four family starts a community based child care for their children, and started to get to know each other-perhaps a bit too much.

There were so many phrases, sentences that describes how women go through while/after becoming mom. The terror that you feel when someone completely become dependent on you was described so vividly. The difficult partnership between male and female, especially with males grown up in Korean standard of gender role feels to touch the reality so well. There was one chapter going through how women (moms) end up with so much more mental/emotional burden of everyday life at work and with family- I think only woman who had struggled with the family duties and her own work would be able to illustrate so well.

I felt one of the main character, YoJin's inner narrative resonate with me so much. Yojin, she continuously doubts herself whether her reaction to social relationship is appropriate. She does not try to listen how she feels, but keep churning whether her reaction is appropriate to avoid conflicts and for being not perceived as a difficult women. I wonder how many of us who grow up with long list of to-dos and must-not-dos as being a girl would go through such inner justification and doubts endlessly, instead of trying to listen to what you're truly feeling or thinking.