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language: Korean (English tr. Gene Png)
country: South Korea
year: 2021
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, horror
dates read: 26.10.25-30.10.25
But I want to make this clear. I hope that when you feel close to me, when you see me as your best friend, or when you want to spend forever with me, it’s not because of how human I seem, but because you like me, as I am. You and I are different. We shouldn’t expect to see ourselves in the other. That’s the only way we can refrain from hurting each other.
Cheon Seon-ran’s The Midnight Shift, translated by Gene Png, is excellent, though with one significant caveat which will become obvious in just a moment.
the novel follows three women: Suyeon, a police detective who suspects that a series of apparent suicides at a long-term care home may not be suicides after all; Nanju, a nurse who works the night shift at the hospital while trying to appease or evade her dead father’s creditors; and, in a series of flashbacks extending from late 1982 to 1983, Violette, a Korean girl adopted by a French couple who meets and becomes entangled with a mysterious girl named Lily.
the caveat about this novel is, of course, that Suyeon is a cop, and the novel takes certain narratives about policing at face value, like the idea that cops are there to “protect” the public. the caveat to this caveat is that by the end of the novel, when Suyeon’s partner is giving her a classic Thin Blue Line speech and Suyeon is nodding vaguely along, it’s clear that her understanding of what “We’re just living in a world that is wider and darker than everyone else’s” means and what must be done in order to protect people from that darkness is radically different from what Chantae’s is.
this book covers a lot of ground, from the ambiguity of international adoption to elder abuse and abandonment to the alienation produced by homophobia to the crushing weight of debt and capitalism. at its heart is the thesis that loneliness kills. the vampires are real, but the vampires are also obviously a metaphor for the ways social exclusion and economic marginalization produce death, sooner or later.
the bulk of the novel is organized into sort of triptychs: a chapter from Suyeon’s perspective, one from Nanju’s, and then a flashback chapter from Violette’s. Suyeon is a closeted lesbian who struggled with suicidal ideation as a teenager, implicitly because of her sexuality; as an adult, she is “more stable” but still haunted by the violent death of her coworker-friend-maybe girlfriend Eungyeong not long before the beginning of the novel. more generally, Suyeon is haunted by her inability to fight off loneliness — her own or others’. she is driven not only by her fear for her adopted grandmother, a resident of the home, but also by her frustration with her colleagues and society at large that have deemed these elderly people — mainly with dementia, and almost all effectively abandoned by their families — disposable.
without spoiling things, Nanju is, in her capacity as a nurse, directly complicit in this neglect and abandonment. one of the strengths of the novel is that it explains Nanju without excusing Nanju: she is a victim, neglected by her family and then unknowingly exploited by her parents, who spent years using her as a guarantor for her father’s rapidly accumulating debts. unable to go to medical school (though her parents were happy to bend over backwards to support younger brother), she fell back on nursing but has found herself growing jaded and cruel, something she recognizes and finds troubling but doesn’t know how to change.
Violette is haunted much more literally: the strange girl she meets is, of course, a vampire. the Violette flashbacks serve both to introduce some of the vampire world-building and as a thematic complement to Suyeon and Nanju: where Suyeon struggles with the grief of lost love and Nanju is trapped in a bitter, abusive no-longer-love, Violette is in the exhilarating — and tempestuous — process of falling in love, and the contrast between her experience and Suyeon and Nanju’s (and future Violette’s, for that matter) deepends both temporal strands.
and Violette’s flashbacks are not without their own tension and ambivalence, because in addition to her relationship with Lily they also explore her relationship with her parents, a white French couple. the specter of international adoption looms over these sections, both contextually — that is, for me as a reader, in light of recent reports on so-called “orphans” adopted from South Korea — and textually, in that the novel explores her own complex feelings about this: her deep love for her parents, her awareness even before they told her she was adopted of the Difference between her and them, her increasing awareness in her childhood of her racial difference from her schoolmates, her disinterest in — and to some extent distaste for — her mother’s attempts to expose her to bits and pieces of Korean culture. her awareness that her parents feel some guilt for adopting her. the novel does not, for the most part, sit with this at length, but it runs through the Violette sections.
it also points the reader strongly to the gap between Violette in 1982-1983 and Violette in ca. 2020, living in Korea, speaking Korean, and translating between French and Korean professionally — the proceeds of which she donates to an orphanage, where one of her friends (an older lesbian who once saved Suyeon’s life when she was considering suicide) teaches German to children who are going to be adopted to Germany. the cycle continues. South Korea’s political-economic position as simultaneously a “developed”, Global North state and a neocolonial outpost subject to relentless capitalist exploitation runs throughout the novel.
Png’s translation is very good, with only a few apparent slips here and there. Cheon’s prose is gripping and brisk — I think it would be very easy to read this book in an afternoon. I also think it could pair really interestingly with Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, both for obvious reasons and for a reason I haven’t touched on, which you will have to read both books to find out.
moods: dark, emotional, grimy, mysterious, reflective