u/redbluebooks

Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-young is a very sad novel, right from the jump. It tells the story of Mun Yujeong, a woman who tried to commit suicide three times, and Jeong Yunsu, a convict who has been sentenced to death row after killing two women and a teenage girl in a burglary. While hospitalized after her latest suicide attempt, Yujeong receives an offer from her aunt Monica, a pious nun, to join her in visiting prisoners and keeping them company before their executions. When Yujeong accepts, she starts meeting Yunsu every Thursday. Although she is repulsed by the brutality of his crimes, she feels a deep kinship with him and comes to sympathize with his pain.

Though the book's premise seems maudlin, what keeps it from veering into overwrought melodrama is the humanity expressed in Yujeong and Yunsu's characters. Yujeong and Yunsu are both deeply unhappy people who hate their societies; Yujeong is an outcast in her family and hates her mother, and Yunsu despises Korean society for failing him and his brother Eunsu at every turn. Yujeong and Yunsu's backgrounds could not be more different--Yujeong is a former pop star from a wealthy family and Yunsu is a prisoner who grew up in poverty--but their shared sense of pain from being mistreated and let down by the families who were supposed to protect them is what connects them.

The book alternates between chapters of Yujeong's narration and “Blue Notes” of Yunsu's discussion of his backstory in his prison diary, jumping back and forth between the present and the past. The “Blue Notes” are often short, but effective in getting across Yunsu's terse, tortured voice as he talks about his miserable past: growing up with an abusive father and being forced to look after a blind younger brother, being abandoned twice by their mother, being blamed for multiple thefts and sent to juvenile hall, and eventually losing his brother. What prevents the “Blue Notes” from just being info-dumping is that Yunsu does not go into too much detail about his past, only explaining the worst parts to get across just how horrible his life was.

The supporting cast is slightly less fleshed out than Yujeong and Yunsu, but effective in their roles. Yujeong's Aunt Monica is saintly and good, being the mother figure to Yujeong that her actual mother failed to be. Officer Yi, the prison guard who oversees Yujeong and Yunsu's meetings, is sympathetic to the two but constrained by the limits of his job. Yujeong's family consists of three older brothers and her mother, but the only brother who receives characterization is her oldest brother Yusik, who is both protective of her and frustrated with her behavior. Yunsu's own supporting cast is only shown in the Blue Notes: his hellishly abusive father, his negligent mother, his tragically blind little brother, and the numerous people--adults and children alike--who abused and punched down on him and his brother.

The novel can best be described as one long condemnation of the death penalty. In one slightly on-the-nose part, Yujeong's uncle goes on a long-winded spiel about how no one is born evil, everyone is the product of their circumstances, and violence is passed down from generation to generation. It reads a bit too much like Gong beating the reader over the head with her point, but the rest of the story is thankfully a little less obvious about it.

In his Blue Notes, Yunsu never blames his upbringing as the reason for his crimes or dodges responsibility for them. He expresses remorse when the mother of the housekeeper he killed meets with him to try to forgive him, claiming that seeing her was worse than dying. He sees himself as a monster, but he gradually becomes a happier person because of Yujeong and Monica’s bonds with him. Because of this, he ultimately writes a letter to his accomplice to forgive him for making him take the fall for the worst of his crimes.

Overall, I recommend the novel highly for anyone interested in Korean literature. It is definitely a read for which you need to keep tissues nearby, and its message is guaranteed to stay with you after reading. I first read it while suffering from a particularly bad bout of depression, and it was weirdly healing for me.