Home Party 007
Little House in the Forest 045
Good Neighbor 097
Foreign body sensation 143
Lemon Cake 189
I said hello 217
Like Raindrops 257

Commentary | Shin Hyeong-cheol (literary critic)
Treat your neighbor as your money 295

Author's Note 315

It provides a completely different experience in terms of emotion, perception, and thinking.
Kim Ae-ran's shining present

If the protagonist of "I Said Hello" is space, then we, who follow the story, are visitors invited to an unfamiliar space alongside the characters in the novel.
Just as the characters' senses become sharper as they set foot in new places, so too do we, with Kim Ae-ran's novels, experience our five senses opening wider than ever before, seeing things we had never seen before and hearing things we had never heard before.
For example, when Lee Yeon in "Home Party" is invited to the home of Representative Oh, a "social mainstream" who has drawn a completely different life trajectory from her own, and carefully walks into her house, when she instinctively notices how the furniture and interior placed throughout the house create a "narrative luster," and when she is conscious of the fine crack drawn between herself and Representative Oh at every moment, we cannot help but think about what is hidden behind the eyes, expressions, and conversations exchanged between Representative Oh and her acquaintances, following Lee Yeon, who is sensitive to the information surrounding her.


Kim Ae-ran's power of observation, which peers deep into the hidden side of things that are not revealed on the surface, also shines in "Little House in the Forest."
The 'I' in 'Little House in the Forest' is currently traveling abroad with her husband.
The reason I was able to go on a month-long trip was because of the excuse of going on a honeymoon that I had been putting off for a while and the fact that I had recently quit my job, but “the biggest factor was the price” (p. 51).
While I was satisfied with the low local prices and low accommodation costs in the travel destination I had left for, I felt uncomfortable for that very reason.
After realizing that the woman who manages the accommodations every day is about the same age as himself, he begins to feel “a bit overwhelmed by the blatant class differences I encountered in a foreign country” (p. 66).
So, because of the fact that “while it is good that prices are low and goods are cheap, the fact that the labor to make them is cheap is still awkward” (same side).
How to tip a woman and what to call her are so intertwined with these very perceptions that what might be a simple and easy problem for some becomes a huge problem for me that mobilizes my entire way of life.


The intense emotional turmoil felt by the character in the awareness that he and his opponents are class-separated is revealed once again in a complex manner in the following short story, "Good Neighbor."
There are two problems that I, a reading instructor, am currently facing.
One is that Siwoo, a student he teaches, is about to move.
Another thing is that he also has to move.
The difference is that Siwoo's family is moving to a larger space by purchasing 'my own home', while 'I' have to find a new home in a situation where real estate prices have skyrocketed in the past few years.
'I' have felt pride and satisfaction while teaching Siwoo, but when Siwoo's mother asks if I can continue teaching Siwoo after moving, I find it difficult to answer.


In this situation, the question that comes to us sharply, cutting through the middle of the novel, is this.
"What does it really mean to be a good neighbor?" Kim Ae-ran explores the possibility, or impossibility, of being good neighbors to one another amidst the real-world conditions that make it difficult to be a "good neighbor."
When words like “community, neighbor, solidarity” (p. 125) are honestly spoken by the characters in the novel, we are made to feel anew how these taken-for-granted and familiar values ​​have been broken down in recent years, and what has accelerated this.


We ask for peace and well-being for our weak ones.
Greetings of our time

Characters who are keenly aware of the differences between themselves and others also appear in other novels.
In "The Sense of Alienation," Ki-tae, a bank employee, cannot hold back a conversation with his juniors and offers them a word of "advice" as an older generation member about how they have benefited from something different from him, but soon regrets it, and Ki-jin in "Lemon Cake" considers the short time he spends with his mother, who came to Seoul for a hospital checkup, as "a feeling of doing a big homework assignment," but as he thinks of his mother returning home alone, he feels "regret and regret, annoyance and relief, pity and guilt" (p. 209) all at the same time in the "self-evident that my today and your today are different" (p. 214).

As they grow older, their environment changes, and their immediate concerns change, the characters often feel a sense of alienation in their relationships with others, and they feel frustrated by the feeling that something undigested remains inside them.
But that sense of difference doesn't just flow in a negative direction.
Kim Ae-ran also pays attention to the beautiful moments that those differences create.
The index of "Like a Raindrop" is in a situation where it feels like everything has been lost and the end has come.
Jisoo, who hired a painter to neatly finish her 'last' without causing trouble to anyone, instead finds some comfort in her and feels the possibility of a 'beginning' emerging, very faintly.
That might have been because she, the painter, didn't really know Jisoo's situation, or because she didn't pretend to know.

The process of reaching the realm of understanding through ignorance also occurs in "I Said Hello."
Eun-mi, who broke up with her lover a long time ago and recently lost her mother, is learning English through video calls because “studying a foreign language gives me the illusion that I still have some possibilities and opportunities left” (p. 226).
Of course, Robert, a native English teacher, doesn't know about Eunmi's circumstances.
Likewise, Eunmi doesn't know what kind of loss Robert has suffered.
When two people like that muster up the courage to reveal their situations to each other little by little, as if playing the Twenty Questions game, and then take hints from them and walk toward each other, we see how not many words and enough time, but few words and limited time, illuminate each other's hearts.
And as the title 'I Said Hello' implies, it is also a process of moving from misunderstanding to understanding.
In the past, Eun-mi was listening to a pop song with her lover when she misheard part of the lyrics as 'hello'.
The lover corrects Eun-mi's mistake by telling her the correct lyrics, but as time passes, he apologizes for his actions that day.
So, about overlooking the possibility that “our lives could not help but be so wrong” (p. 253).


In this way, the characters are able to close off a period of their lives by embracing the illusions and misunderstandings of the past.
According to the dictionary, ‘hello’ “contains both the meaning of ‘nice to meet you’ and ‘goodbye’” (p. 222), that is, it is a word used at the moment of meeting and parting, but according to Kim Ae-ran, ‘hello’ becomes a word necessary not only for a relationship but also for opening and closing a period of time.
And it is a word that quietly nods toward someone without correcting their mistakes or misunderstandings, and it is also a word that wishes for the other person's peace through it.
Then we can say this:
Kim Ae-ran's deep and mature sense of the times shines through in every chapter of "I Said Hello," a book written by and for her contemporaries.


I am publishing my fifth collection of novels.
In the meantime, I have seen people, scenery, seasons, and values ​​change as the seasons change.

In the process, I made a surprised expression like a character in a novel who had “never experienced a breakup before,” and apologized to the recipient in a distant place that they would never hear.
I think that all this time I have been writing about loss without knowing what loss is, and about absence without knowing what absence is.

Going forward, I will continue to draw life without knowing what life is, and death without knowing what death is. But perhaps I will learn anew that sometimes, there are things that can only be understood when viewed through the lens of that "not knowing."
Because life always comes to us in the form of belated realizations.

_From the author's note