문학과 지성사

Time travels across alternate universes to remember and restore
the world for disappeared women.

Hwang Mogua is the author of Moment Arcade, the winner of the Grand Prize for Short Stories and Novellas at the 2019 Korea Science Fiction Awards. Her debut novel, The World We Will Meet Again, is inspired by the disturbing year in South Korea’s recent history when the female birth rate plummeted due to the malicious rumor that girls born in 1990, “the year of white horses,” will be aggressive. All the aborted girls of 1990 are born and grow up to be adults in Hwang’s fictional world, which suddenly becomes warped and twisted one day. Amid the strange phenomenon where the women around her are being erased, Chae Jinri struggles between alternate universes to return to the world as she knew it.

Less a thrilling adventure than a chilling demand for reflection made to Korean society that deliberately and irrevocably obliterated a portion of its female population, The World We Will Meet Again is not about abortion but a story of women whom our community has vanished. By invoking an incident that used to be remembered as a mere happening caused by an anachronistic myth, the novel’s alternate universes ask us how different things are in the present and how we can change the world where we are. This book is an ode to women born in 1990, who have now survived to their thirties yet are still enduring the everyday misogyny and sexist discrimination in employment, payment, and criminal justice—to women who have lived under the overwhelming influence of survivor’s guilt, as well as those who had suffered and agonized under societal pressure to produce male heirs to their families. For all of us who have survived oppression, The World We Will Meet Again offers consolation and empowerment.