What do we work for? Lessons from the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

What do we work for? For many people, the immediate answer is survival – paying for food and bills while supporting family. Yet work also carries expectations of success, stability, and happiness. I still felt that tension after reading “Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop” by South Korean author Hwang Bo-reum.

Originally published in Korean and translated into English by Shanna Tan, the novel follows Yeongju, a woman who has lived much of the life she was expected to want. She went to university, married, and built a respectable career. Instead of finding fulfillment, however, she became exhausted and unhappy. She eventually left her career and marriage and opened the Hyunam-dong Bookshop in a quiet neighborhood in Seoul (Hwang, 2023).

There she meets people who are also trying to figure out where they are going, including Minjun, a young man frustrated with his employment prospects who becomes the shop’s barista. Customers, writers, and friends gradually turn the bookshop into something more than a place where books are sold.

What makes Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop one of my favorites is its simplicity. Even the language of the translation is simple. There are no huge conflicts, shocking revelations, villains, or stressful climaxes. People read, drink coffee, talk, work, and worry about their lives. It is the kind of quiet, slice-of-life story in which ordinary people, dealing with exhaustion and disappointment, find comfort in an equally ordinary place.

It also makes running an independent bookshop look suspiciously attractive – Yeongju wakes up relatively late, opens the shop, reads when there are few customers, organizes book clubs, and invites authors. The pace is slow enough that I occasionally find myself thinking, “Could I also do this?”

Of course, I wondered whether Hyunam-dong could exist in Iloilo. We once had Palabasa Libro, an independent bookshop in Mandurriao, but it has since closed with reasons undisclosed. Manila’s Solidaridad Bookshop, founded by National Artist F. Sionil José, also faced an uncertain future when his family put it up for sale in 2025. It was eventually bought by a Batangas congressman, with the intention of keeping the shop operating and preserving José’s literary legacy (Villanueva, 2025).

Their stories complicate the idyllic picture of Hyunam-dong. Loving books and making a living from selling them are two different things. Rent, electricity, salaries, suppliers, and taxes still have to be paid. Even a dream job has an economy behind it. And I think that that is the whole idea because underneath all the books and coffee, Hyunam-dong is very much a novel about work.

Work keeps returning in the characters’ conversations – between Minjun and Yeongju, Seungwoo and Mincheol, Jungsuh, Yeongju and Jimi, and Minjun and his mother. Yeongju herself continually reconsiders what place work should occupy in a person’s life. Several characters seem burdened by the idea of the “decent” job—the kind of employment that signals that you have successfully become an adult.

I would hesitate to call this simply a Korean view of work. A novel cannot represent an entire country. Still, the anxiety has a recognizable social context. Byun (2025), a Korean researcher, for instance, found that school-to-work transitions among younger South Korean cohorts have become longer, less stable, and less linear (Mendeley, 2025).

The Philippine experience feels familiar but somewhat different. For many Filipinos, work has a more immediate purpose – survival. We work to pay bills, buy food, educate children, help parents, and sometimes support other relatives. Asking whether a job makes us happy can seem secondary when the more urgent issue is whether it pays enough.

This sparks an interesting question. Who should have the privilege of choosing meaningful work? Leaving an exhausting career to open a bookshop sounds liberating, but such a choice requires a degree of financial freedom. A worker living from paycheck to paycheck may know that a job is making life miserable and still have no realistic option to leave. The freedom to pursue happiness through work is not distributed equally. Recent research among Filipino employees similarly found that longer workweeks can increase job demands, interfere with recovery, and disrupt work-life balance (Bonifacio et al., 2025).

The message of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is not about quitting tomorrow to follow your passions. Instead, it offers a gentle reminder that some find fulfillment by doing what they love, while others become skilled and discover joy in their work. The novel, rather, raises the question of whether our job titles, salaries, productivity, or social status should define our worth. It is a thoughtful perspective that invites us to reflect on what truly matters. We need work to survive, and we may also want work that gives us dignity and purpose. But somewhere between earning enough and meeting everyone else’s expectations, we should still ask what all that work is for.

After all, what good is making a living if we forget to make a life?

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Michael Caesar C. Tubal teaches language, literature, and pedagogy in tertiary education. During his free time, if he is not teaching, reading, or writing, he watches past episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race or joins the book clubs in Iloilo City.