Reading The Dwarf in a City That Keeps Rebuilding

Cho Se-hui’s The Dwarf is one of those books you can come to know through an excerpt long before you read it whole. It turns up in textbooks, and its title has become a point of reference in modern Korean literature.

I had come across it at least three times. I read it at school, encountered it again while preparing for a civil service exam after the military, and returned to it as a senior in an ecocriticism class at Sungkyunkwan University.

The other side of South Korea’s industrial growth

The linked stories show what rapid industrialization in the 1970s could cost the people doing the work. The people who own the factories and those who depend on a wage live with very different consequences of the same growth.

In the title story, a family’s home is demolished. Cho traced the story back to seeing the effects of redevelopment for himself. What stayed with me was the difference between what can happen to a family in one afternoon and how easily the loss can disappear from the account of a city’s progress.

Cho reportedly kept photographs of industrialization’s harsher scenes on his walls as he wrote. He also sought out the industrialist Chung Ju-yung, an encounter that, by the account I had read, left him frustrated.

The question came back in Yongsan

The question came back in January 2009, when a fire during the eviction confrontation in Seoul’s Yongsan redevelopment district killed six people. Cho went to the site. He reportedly wept to see events so close to what he had written about still happening decades later.

What a person can change about their circumstances

I rarely begin a reading by assigning a book to a literary school. The naturalist question of how much one’s circumstances determine the course of a life did help me think about these stories.

Cho follows people whose choices are made smaller by the conditions in which they work and live. Their disappointments tell us something about the limits of willpower when somebody else can decide whether you keep your home.

Two worlds in the same city

Professor Kim Won-jung’s class gave me a way to read the pattern of contrasts running through the book. I am still drawing on that discussion here.

One world has the means to turn its desires into factories and machines. The other supplies the bodies that have to keep them running. The workers are treated as if all that matters is what their muscles can do. Their care for one another is part of what the owners’ account cannot see.

The almost fairy-tale division between dwarfs and giants sharpens that difference. I found myself asking what desire would look like if it included some responsibility for the people who bear the costs.

In one story, the father imagines a world held in balance by love. The idea extends from working and raising children to rain and wind. Its reach makes the poverty of the world he has to live in easier to feel.

There is a church in the book, too, and the encounter asks what it can offer people facing eviction or exploitation. The word “love” is easier to give them than a way out.

The Möbius strip and Klein bottle bring the question of inside and outside into the form of the stories. A finger tracing the surface of a Möbius strip can reach what looked like the opposite face without crossing an edge. I read the image as a reason to ask how two lives that look separate can be part of the same system.

Where does the reader stand?

Who gets to call a system fair? Who has to find out what it costs? The figures of dwarf and giant gave me a way to keep asking where I stood in the worlds Cho describes.

Reading the divide again

Reading it again, I thought about how much easier it is to accumulate more when you already have wealth. The book gives that abstract problem a house, a wage and people you can spend time with.

Digital markets have changed how quickly people can buy and sell assets. They still leave a large difference between what a rise in value means to somebody who owns a great deal and somebody trying to buy their first share of it.

When I wrote this in 2023 and 2024, rivalry between the United States and China and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East made a divided world feel close at hand. Cho’s stories brought the question down to a scale I could see: the households that find themselves paying for a decision they did not get to make.

I finished with a question I could not settle. What would it take to share the benefits of a city’s growth without asking the same families to make room for it every time?

Book details

The Dwarf

Author

Cho Se-hui

Korean edition published

July 10, 2000

ISBN-13

9788995151204

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