New York, Prince Edward Island, Atlanta, Havana…
My story rewritten in their city

“Meeting the real world in a book is what literature is about.
“It is a process of confirming the greatness, goodness, and romance of humanity.”

There were friends in books who watched over me when I was a child.
They had different hair colors than me, wore dresses with puffed sleeves, and chattered incessantly as they rode in carriages to the 'Green Gables', or went on adventures with fairies to Neverland and fought pirates.
Sometimes, they fought through war and hunger to win their lives, and at murder scenes, they solved cases with cool judgment and reasoning skills.
"What would the places where the friends in the book live be like? If only I could meet them, if only I could go where they are!"

"The City of Me and Them" is an essay that compiles into a book the journey of Kwak A-ram, a book traveler who lives on the border between books and the real world, during a one-year sabbatical year to prove that the world in books, which existed only in imagination, is real.
Based in New York, we traveled through the American South, starting with Prince Edward Island, Canada, the setting of Anne of Green Gables, visiting the cities in Gone with the Wind, Concord, Massachusetts, where Little Women was written, and exploring the Mississippi River to find traces of Tom Sawyer.
We also explore Orlando Disney World, reminiscing about the 'Disney masterpiece', and visit St. Martin in the West Indies, recalling Agatha Christie's 'Caribbean Mysteries'.
The author set out on a journey to see with his own eyes the background of the literary works he loved and to personally experience the land.


“The process of confirming that the world I had drawn in 2D actually exists in 3D was precious to me.
“The fact that the world in books is real means that literature is not just fiction, and that the greatness, goodness, and romance of humanity that literature speaks of are real. This means that the comfort I have received from books so far is not just a superficial sugar coating.”_Page 9

The book that taught me that July 4th is America's Independence Day and that there are fireworks on that day was "A Little Prince" by Francis Hodgson Burnett, which I read in the second grade.
The book depicts a scene where Cedric, an American boy who is a descendant of a prestigious British earldom but does not yet know it, talks about Independence Day with Mr. Hobbs, the owner of the local general store.
As I was reading the book, I was so curious about what the Independence Day fireworks were like as a nine-year-old child, and now, as a thirty-nine-year-old, I can finally show the Independence Day fireworks in New York, the very place where Cedric lived… I was thrilled and excited.
--- p.6

There are two kinds of people in the world.
People who believe that the places in the story are real, and people who think that the story is fiction and that the background is also fiction.
I was the former, and like Schliemann, who believed that Troy in the story was real, I always longed for places in novels and resolved to visit some of them.
And among them, Prince Edward Island, the setting of Anne of Green Gables, was the place I had pictured in my mind for the longest time.
--- p.21

I first read "Evangeline" when I was about seven years old.
No, it would be more accurate to say 'I heard' rather than 'I read'.
Every night before bed, my mother read books to my brother and I, and one of those books was "Evangeline."
My mother read the book to me while I was reading it to her, so some passages from the book still ring in my ears vividly because she read them out loud.
--- p.61

This story, about a devout young man named Goodman Brown who is plunged into a swamp of doubt after seeing a vision of his beautiful wife, Faith, being invited to a witching night, deals with the fragility of faith and the problem of doubt.
The setting of the novel, which was not easy for college students to understand, was Salem.
Salem is also Hawthorne's hometown.
The guilt of his great-grandfather, who served as a witch judge in Salem, the center of witch hunts, is the driving force behind Hawthorne's literature.
His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, which contains skepticism and questions about Puritan fundamentalism, was born from such soil.
--- p.74

As in the novel, the sisters were desperately poor, but they were not ashamed of their poverty.
The spiritual pillar of the family was the sisters' mother.
The mother's wealthy family initially helped her daughters, but the sisters' father spent all the money on building a school.
When her parents, unable to stand by and watch, asked, “Is your husband starving his wife and children?”, the mother, indignant that her husband had been insulted, is said to have never asked her parents for a single penny after that.
The fact that "Little Women" is sometimes categorized as a branch of American feminist literature is likely due to the strong female image portrayed by the mother of the four sisters in the novel, who are modeled after the author's mother.
--- p.94

Whenever I hear the name New Haven, The Great Gatsby always comes to mind.
It is not Gatsby but the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway, that comes to mind, as Nick reveals early in the novel that he graduated from "a school in New Haven," namely Yale University, in 1915.

So, 80% of the reason I wanted to go to New Haven was because of The Great Gatsby.
When I traveled the eastern United States by train, I often encountered place names I had encountered in novels, and I often thought about what it would be like to take the train from Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal on a nice day, get off at any of the cities in the novel whose name caught my eye, and wander around all day before returning to New York.
New Haven was one of them.
--- p.101

I came home, turned on my Kindle, and reread "The Last Leaf."
As I began to read the first paragraph, my heart began to race with excitement mixed with joy.
I could tell right away that the neighborhood west of Washington Square he was describing was Greenwich Village, which I had visited that day.
A neighborhood with a maze of winding streets like MacDougall Street, Bedford Street, and Grove Street, which are rare in Manhattan's checkerboard-shaped district.
I've passed by this neighborhood countless times because it's home to my school (New York University), and I love the old, atmospheric buildings, so it's my favorite neighborhood in New York.
I was glad that O. Henry described that neighborhood.
--- pp.137-139

I've always wanted to visit the American South, where Atlanta, the setting of "Gone with the Wind," is located.
It was one of the top five travel destinations I had decided to visit while studying in the US.
I liked Scarlett.
I liked that she was more confident and proactive than any other female protagonist I've read.
He was not good, he was not obedient, he was not bound by rules, and above all, he was not dependent on men.
I also liked that the novel ended with Rhett leaving her third husband and the man she loved most, Rhett Butler, rather than 'and they lived happily ever after.'
Scarlett was, what could I say, a role model for women who felt suffocated by the various norms society imposes on them just because they are women.
--- p.150

As a child in South Korea in the 1980s, I, like my peers, grew up baptized in Disney.
I was more familiar with books than videos.
The 60-volume "Disney Illustrated Masterpieces" published by Gyemongsa was a popular collection when I was in kindergarten.

When I was young, my mother told me stories like 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White', and I listened to those stories on tape many times, but it was Disney that welcomed me as I moved from the world of oral tradition to the world of writing.
--- p.215

The reason I developed a fantasy about the 'slowly flowing Mississippi River' was because I read Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' when I was in elementary school.
Where the mischievous Tom Sawyer runs wild, and where the unfortunate but brave boy Huck sets out on exciting adventures on a raft.
The trip to Hannibal, where Mark Twain spent his childhood, was like a trip to Prince Edward Island to find Anne of Green Gables, but also like a trip to meet a childhood friend.
If Anne was the best friend she had cherished in her heart for a long time, Tom Sawyer was like the mischievous but harmless boyfriend you would find in any elementary school classroom.
--- p.252

Are humans truly invincible? I asked myself this question, recalling the old man who, after exhausting his efforts to catch a giant marlin, now had to fight sharks that coveted the marlin.
When I was a middle school student and first read the novel, when a test question asked about the novel's theme, I circled the answer that said, "The struggle between humans and nature."
Now I know.
That the old man is struggling not with nature but with himself.
Growing old is a sad thing, and as we grow older, we want to prove our reason for being.

--- pp.296-297