Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea by Jesook Song (review)

The focus of the ethnography of Jesook Song's Living on Your Own is a set of thirtyish young women residing in Seoul and Pusan with whom Song conducted research in 2005–7. They were unmarried by choice for a variety of reasons, and thus identified with the new category pihon yŏsŏng, which Song translates as "women unassociated with marriage," rather than the more conventional mihon yŏsŏng, women not yet married. They tended to be underemployed, unstably employed, or poorly paid in some combination, and thus had had little opportunity to amass personal monetary capital. Despite this, they sought, against the considerable difficulties posed by South Korean social expectations and its system of rental housing, to live independently of their families. Furthermore, Song notes that some 90 percent of her participants were former student activists, a background that she associates with a particular generational experience prevalent at the moment of her research (5). This may be so, but this last biographical coordinate of Song's interlocutors helps underscore a conceptual strategy of Living on Your Own that some readers, not least undergraduate readers, will need underscored: no, this is not a random sample of South Korean women, even of a certain age; yes, they are very specific people, but they are people whose situation and experiences epitomize or crystallize with unusual acuity a roster of contemporary social, ideological, and economic dynamics in South Korea and, to a degree, other world contexts. These dynamics include normative familialism and natalism, as expressed in the Korean expectation to marry as well as in legal and informal strictures that reinforce it; youth unemployment; financialization; and a post-1980s structure of feeling, a broad social disappointment that Song captures in the phrase post-revolutionary affect.

The first chapter centers on the path taken by several of Song's informants to independent residence and their negotiation of its difficulties. In contrast with single young men, for whom living on their own is regarded as demonstrative of their readiness to marry (35), single young women are enjoined by South Korea's inheritance of Confucian and Christian moralities to reside with their parents until marriage. For pihon yŏsŏng who would abstain entirely from the institution, this poses an especial dilemma, and Song notes that for those not already inclined to move out of their family homes it is "family pressure to marry more than anything else" that frequently drives them to the decision (22).

The interview data reproduced in this chapter hinge on strategies for moving out of the family home adopted by young women and on the ongoing practical dilemmas of independent residence. Some women from the countryside find moving to the city for university study a convenient occasion to make a fuller break; others plead the demands of job or career; still others do so without excuse. Whatever the case, however, they confront the financial difficulties of urban residence in South Korea, and in particular the common requirement of a large sum of up-front cash to rent an apartment, a demand that forces some into continued financial reliance on their parents (24). Meanwhile, they commonly face continued surveillance of their social and sexual lives by neighbors, coworkers, and peers, to which moralistic scrutiny are added practical concerns about safety.

Chapter 2 explores the financial difficulties in accessing urban housing that emerged as a crucial issue in the previous section. In the course of the chapter, Song unfolds perhaps the most complete ethnographic discussion of housing and personal finance in South Korea since Laura Nelson's work,¹ and it should be said that this chapter would be the easiest section of Living on Your Own to extract and teach on its own, toward a wide variety of classroom purposes. While factors of urbanization and population density contribute...