Thank You, Family — What Three Generations Do under One Roof

In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, people in seventeen advanced economies were asked what made their lives meaningful. Family was the most common answer in most places. In South Korea, material well-being came first and health second. It was an open-ended question, and respondents could mention more than one thing.

One way to read the Korean answers is to think about the conditions that let people feel secure enough to attend to the people around them.

Everyone wants to make a life they can enjoy. Some of the choices we make in pursuit of it can leave us with less time for the things we meant to enjoy.

What Makes a Life Feel Happier?

In Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar writes about the desire for happiness as something people naturally bring to the decisions they make.

Korean households have changed considerably over time. More people live alone, and fewer live in the kind of large household that once brought several generations under one roof.

Three Generations in One House

Baek Il-seong’s Thank You, Family is a cheerful record of one such household. Even when it came out, the arrangement had become unusual enough to draw people’s attention.

The book gathers a series from Daum Agora, a now-defunct Korean online forum. People posted their own stories there, and some popular posts made it to the front page of Daum.

Writing under the name Nayana, Baek made a series out of things that happened at home. Readers could spend a few minutes in a household arranged differently from their own or remember what it had been like to live in one.

There is a father, a mother, a son, a daughter and grandparents. They were introduced as an ordinary family. The ordinary things they do look a little less ordinary when so many of them share the same house.

Things That Happen in an Ordinary Family

Baek tells the story in episodes. The pleasure comes in recognising something of your own family in the way people bump into one another, get on one another’s nerves and carry on together.

The series may have found so many readers partly because it returned them to scenes they remembered and no longer saw as often.

Comedy from Far Away, Trouble up Close

Baek plays with the idea that a life can look comic from a distance and tragic up close. The book makes room for both scales. An incident can be genuinely painful to the person in it and still become a good story once the family has lived through it.

It helps that the father can tell it with humour. A house where someone can retell what went wrong also becomes a place where the people involved can hear it differently.

The People Who Are Already Close

Phones and social media make it easy to reach people outside the room. I sometimes find it harder to notice what has stopped being said inside the room.

Baek’s family gives the reader a chance to think about the ordinary conversations that keep people in one another’s lives.

Book Information

Thank You, Family (Korean title, translated)

Author

Baek Il-seong (Nayana)

Publication date

10 May 2013

ISBN13

9791195031405

View the book on YES24

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