[Bookshelf] - Facing What Matters at the Edge of Collapse
Published December 18th, 2024 - Source
By Gina Kim (Professor at UCLA, Director)
Earlier this year, I had to flee my home. A wildfire was spreading rapidly through the hills of Los Angeles. When the evacuation orders reached the neighborhood next to mine, I watched white ash fall like snow onto my backyard and made the decision to leave. I started packing the usual essentials—documents, laptop, passport, cash. But once I realized this might truly be the end of the house, the contents of my backpack changed.
Without hesitation, I reached for what felt most irreplaceable: my great-grandmother’s handwritten notes, my father’s dissertation, old family photos, and drawings I’d made as a child. I packed quietly, almost weightlessly, and drove east through the smoky dusk, toward the unknown.
That night, in a small motel room in Nevada, curled up on a thin mattress with my laptop open, I wrote to a friend. I told her how beautiful the world looked in that moment, and how unbearably sad. I understood then that the apocalypse does not arrive with a bang. It is not a clean rupture but a slow, irreversible descent. It is a quiet unraveling we inhabit long before we learn how to name it.
And strangely, this realization wasn’t entirely despairing. It stirred something in me—an unexpected clarity, a will to live otherwise. If we’re already surviving the end of something, then every remaining moment becomes more precious. Loving the people around us, doing the work we care about, feeding the stray cats, growing squash in erratic weather, fighting injustice even when it seems futile—these became, and remain, the only things that matter.
Reading Choi Eunmi’s novel Maju made me relive that experience. Written in Korea in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maju centers on Nari, a thirty-something woman who runs a small candle workshop. When one of her regular customers tests positive, Nari’s shop faces the threat of closure. Soon after, she suffers a panic attack and is diagnosed with latent tuberculosis—a moment that triggers the resurfacing of long-buried memories, including those about Manjo Ajumma, the woman who cared for her as a child.
What follows is not a grand reckoning but a quiet, interior dissolution. As the pandemic severs social ties and disrupts daily rhythms, Nari is forced to confront not only her own fractured self but also the unresolved tensions in her relationship with Sumi, the very customer who may have exposed her to Covid-19. The two women, suspended in an emotional limbo, eventually travel together to an apple orchard called “Ttansan”—a space that becomes a metaphorical landscape for memory, grief, and the possibility of reconciliation.
Maju unfolds like a soft murmur, a novel of delicate gestures and interior shifts. Yet it resonates with astonishing force, especially in a world still reeling from loss and disorientation. Choi’s writing doesn’t aim to diagnose the pandemic; instead, it lingers in its aftermath and emotional debris. The novel traces how fear, anger, and memory settle into our bodies, like ash fluttering quietly to the ground.
Reading Maju, I was reminded again that survival isn’t just about escaping a fire or pandemic. It’s about how we live afterward—what we choose to carry forward, and whom we choose to face. In Korean, the word “maju” means “to face,” but it also carries nuances of encounter and confrontation. The novel’s title gestures toward these multiple registers: facing the past, facing others, facing oneself. Like Nari, we’re all trying to make sense of what has been lost. The pandemic, like the wildfire, forced many of us to flee familiar terrains—literal and emotional. But perhaps, like her, we also have the chance to return. Not to what was, but to a renewed understanding of what matters.
And so I find myself asking again: What am I holding onto? What would I pack if I had to leave again? Who would I want to face before it was too late? In a time when everything feels fragile, Maju offers not solace, but solidarity. It reminds us that even amid collapse, we can still look one another in the eye. We can still speak. We can still choose to care. And sometimes, that’s enough to begin again.