Love In The Big City by Sang Young Park

Love in the Big City follows our narrator through five distinct vignettes. Each one opines on what it means to love and be loved. Almost functioning as a collection of short stories, Sang Young Park explores the relationships that have shaped our narrator’s life. The tone moves through the shallowness and lightheartedness of youth into the depth of real-world adult issues. But with the hardships and tragedies of adulthood, we also begin to form a firmer grasp on what’s actually important in life.

“If obsession isn’t love, I have never loved.”

Sang Young Park

We begin with the chaotic, freewheeling love of youthful friendship. “The world was just not ready for the boundless energy of poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds”. We meet Jaehee, a hedonistic yet sweet and caring party girl. After that, we explore how these two lost souls grasp onto each other. While this relationship is never built to last, it’s nonetheless poignant in our narrator’s life. “Jaehee, who had taught me that every season is its own beautiful moment — that Jaehee didn’t live here anymore.”

Mother and Son

The narrator’s relationship with his mother is a little more fraught. “I was old enough to know that my mother did not exist solely to hinder my existence but was a person in her own right who had fought hard to make her way through life. She just happened to be unlucky.

In other words, the fact that our relationship had been so terrible was as natural as cancer or fungus or the rotation of our planet or sunspots.” He cares for his mother in (at the very least) a literal sense. But there is some distance, some dangerous ruptures in the foundation of the pair’s relationship. We see how the first relationship in our lives (the maternal one) has implications for all that’s to come. 

Love and Romantic Relationships

But perhaps the most impactful relationships in our narrator’s life are the romantic ones. We see him contrastingly with a controlling, dangerously principled older lover and what may be the love of his life. “I used to feel like I’d been given the whole world when I held him. Like I was holding the whole universe.” However, Sang Young Park still retains a healthy scepticism when looking at big romance. “We both had low self-esteem, regularly felt suicidal compulsions, were bullied as kids, and pretentiously enjoyed arty films and books while hating basic crap like Haruki Murakami, Hong Sangsoo, French literature, and Audis, all of which made us end up thinking we were something special as a pair.”

The city setting is expertly crafted, with the reader fully entrenched in that sense of claustrophobia and deafening background noise. We all know the old cliche of being surrounded by people, which only amplifies loneliness, but Sang Young Park depicts it perfectly.

He also makes a self-referential comment on the pointlessness of writing. The creation of literature out of memory only puts more distance between yourself and the real thing. But, flawed as the artistic depiction is, what is the alternative way to pay homage to love?

“I’ve tried to show the relationship we had and the time we spent as complete as they were, but the more I try, the further I get from him and the emotions I had back then. My efforts become something fainter and more distanced from the truth.”

Sang Young Park