Am I looking for Love in the Big City?

 

Today I’m talking about Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park. It would be nice if I had a cute way of how I found out about this book, but it was literally just one of those books that popped up in a recommended section. It’s nothing special, but hey, here we are.

The blurb says that Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering night time world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they suppress their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and freezer-chilled Marlboro Reds. I’ll be 100% honest, that tells me literally nothing about this book. Like, I didn’t know what any of the conflict or stakes could have been, but it’s gay, and I’m always down to read something gay, especially something gay that might let me learn something about parts of another culture. I will, however, say that even though the blurb told me nothing, I assumed it would be some kind of slice of life kind of thing where things sort of just happen.

Chapter one has our bestie, Young, at a postgraduate event and a book he’s written has just come out. A bunch of his peers ask him these, not quite invasive, questions, but questions that are just annoying. And then you get a little account of how Young and Jaehee met, Young was making out with this random guy, because he used to have this rule of he’d do anything anyone who bought him a drink asked of him because it meant that he’d exist to someone. A wild concept that tells you a lot about the kind of person he was.

In chapter two Jaehee ends up getting pregnant, but she doesn’t know who the father is. She ends up going to a clinic to get the baby-be-gone and when she realises the doctor is a garbage man who shouldn’t be a doctor, she literally screams at him and proceeds to steal a model of a uterus from the office. And honestly? As she should. Like, you get to see the conversation that the doctor has with her, and Mr Doctor? I did already say he shouldn’t be a doctor, but rat behaviour, Mary, and not even like good, slay-mode rat. I mean like grody get a hobby rat. Anyway, by the end of chapter two, Jaehee has seemingly grown up and has a stable boyfriend and Young sort of is in a relationship with someone that yelled at him in public. By the end of the first “part” of the book, you see Young realise that his time with the Jaehee that he says he knows is over.

A big thing in this book was that even though he and Jaehee became friends due to the both of them being outcasts, the fact couldn’t be avoided that even though he is a gay man, she was a straight woman, and so she, for lack of better phrasing, “fit in” to society better than he did. You see this in the fact that she ends up in a “traditional” relationship to the point she ends up becoming a completely different person to who she is with Young. Then you put this next to Young himself who can’t actually be himself in public, and the fact there are people publicly making jokes at the expense of gay people in front of him.

Since this is one of those “things just happen” kinds of books, you learn more about why Young is the way that he is as the book goes on. Early on you get shown some of the things that he does, and he also tells you about some of the things that happen, then a little further in you get insight into how things were with his mum when he was younger, and some of the things he does early on, they end up making sense. Along that vein, I’m not 100% sure how much I can really talk about this book. Normally I’d talk about things like pacing, whether things made sense, or complain about things I didn’t like. But since this is literally just a book where someone lives his life and takes us on the journey of some of the things that he goes through, it’s kind of hard to do that.

There is this chunk of the book where Young gets into, I can only really word it as, a situationship with this guy who’s 12 years older than he is, and, for me, it was such a good representation of the kind of relationship that it was. The only thing that gets focused on in this section of the book is this situationship, with little bits of his mother injected in between in while she goes through treatment for her cancer. The whole thing sort of feels like as she gets better, things with this other man get worse, almost like he is a form of cancer himself. I say that because you see the way the two men talk to each other and what things are like when they spend time together, and it’s not great.

This book is about love. It took me longer than I’d care to admit to realise that, but I’m glad that I did, because it meant that I was able to retroactively appreciate the earlier bits of the book, and actually understand and appreciate what happened later in the book, instead of just reading them and being like, “Well, that’s something that happened”. Now, when I say it’s about love, I mean love just in general, or the different kinds of love that Young felt throughout his life, or parts of his life. With Jaehee, with his mother, with that situationship and his relationship with another man, Gyu-ho. Each of the four of these, while some overlap with one another, are all predominantly contained in each of the four parts of the book where you see where Young is in his life and what’s going on with him.

Ultimately, I feel like had I not realised that this book was about love more in concept than anything else, then I probably would have finished the book a little disappointed. I will fully admit that this is the most “things just happen” book I’ve probably ever read. Usually with the other things just happen books, there’s something going on, plot wise, but, again, things just happen in this book, and you just read about those things. I don’t think there was a single drop of plot in this book. Sometimes characters would come and go between the four parts, but there wasn’t really any overarching story going on. I realise that’s something that could definitely put someone off reading this book, or leave someone disappointed if they were expecting something else. I will say, personally, from the blurb, I was expecting something a little different, especially since the blurb did really only mention Young and Jaehee, like, it never mentioned any of the other parts of the book.

This was one of those books where I’ve read other books that I’ve enjoyed more, but there have also been other I’ve enjoyed less. I feel like I should maybe come back to this book in a couple of years, now that I know it’s just exploring love, and re-read it. I reckon then it’ll be one I can appreciate more than I did on this first read. This is one of those books that, for me, as of right now, it was sort just there. It was a perfectly fine book. It wasn’t bad and it did nothing offensive, I just wasn’t, and let it be known I’m saying personally, but I just wasn’t personally blown away by it.

Okay, bye!