“I just couldn’t stay still.” This is how novelist Jo Se-hee explained why he wrote The Dwarf Who Shot a Small Ball into the Air. Amid the rapid industrialization of the 1970s, he used fiction to painfully expose the structural contradictions of capitalist society, the resulting wealth gap, and the suffering of the marginalized. His portrayal of the lives of evicted residents was at once an accurate depiction of reality and a poetic language that offered consolation to us—and sharp warnings to them.
And today, there are other “us” and “them.” Since 10:23 p.m. on December 3, 2024, when martial law was suddenly declared, words and writings have poured out from all directions toward “them.” Yet “they,” consistently ignoring and dismissing them, seem to understand little—if anything—of what these words mean. Perhaps all they need is not grand slogans or complex reasoning, but just a single phrase, a single letter. Using the very first words and letters we learned—guided by the bare minimum faith that they’ll understand, at least this much.