You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
In this exclusive essay for Litro, bestselling Korean novelist Kim Ho-Yeon, author of The Second Chance Convenience Store, reflects on the lived realities behind his fiction: homelessness, memory, and the quiet radicalism of human empathy. As the West continues to grapple with housing inequality and social fragmentation, Kim’s perspective offers a timely and moving reminder that second chances often begin with a single, ordinary act of care.
When I was a child, I lived near Seoul Station. On my way to and from the school, my friends would often joke about the homeless people around the station, saying things like, “Hey, isn’t that your dad over there?” To us, the homeless were figures of ridicule—people to avoid. But even then, I found myself wondering, ‘Why do they live on the streets? What brought them here?’ Perhaps it was my curiosity of a future writer beginning to stir within me.
Many companies collapsed in South Korea in 1997 due to the IMF financial crisis, and many people lost their jobs. I’ve heard that the number of homeless individuals also increased exponentially during that time. Ordinary heads of households became unemployed, lost the will to live, and ended up homeless. In many cases, entire families fell apart and were scattered, which also led to homelessness. My own family’s finances also became strained during that period, and I had to work part-time jobs to support myself and pay for my university tuition.
In South Korea, many homeless people were not vagrants or social misfits from the beginning, but rather individuals who once lived as ordinary members of society. They became homeless after falling behind in the competition or experiencing the collapse of their families, leading them to let go of life in a single moment. That’s why the backgrounds of homeless individuals are often diverse, and I’ve even heard that some were once highly skilled professionals. This aspect caught my attention, and I wanted to write a story about a character who, having lost his memory, lives as a homeless person detached from the world, but gradually returns to society and rediscovers himself. This idea connected with the ideas of The Second Chance Convenience Store, and eventually expanded into the story of a former homeless man being hired as a night part-time worker at a convenience store.
I think this setting was possible because homeless people in Korea are not scary or frightening, even though they are a step removed from society. I believe this perception made it possible to create such a narrative. In fact, during book launch interviews in Italy and Spain, local journalists expressed surprise, saying that in their countries, the homeless are often viewed as violent and are never allowed into homes or businesses. They even told me that the premise of my book felt almost like a fantasy. However, in South Korea, the homeless are still seen as objects of sympathy, and there’s a peculiar sense of empathy—perhaps because we all know we could end up in that position ourselves (I thought I was the only one who felt this way, but I think the reason my novel with a homeless protagonist became a million seller is because Korean readers resonated with this idea).
Homelessness is not an individual problem, but it’s a societal problem. There are many weak people in the world, and we should look at the plight of the homeless. A just society is not something special. A just society is a society where the powerful take care of the weak, such as the homeless. In my novel, Mrs. Yeom gives a hand of goodwill to Dokgo, a homeless man who hasn’t given up on life, and takes care of him. That hand of goodwill was a second chance at life, and he works at Mrs. Yeom’s convenience store to get through the cold winter and welcome a new spring. I think I wrote this novel with that kind of society in mind, a society where we share the sunshine of spring with our neighbors.
I hope readers in the UK will read the character of Dokgo in this story through the lens of how you perceive the homeless or the marginalized in your own society. In this work, I have woven together a variety of human characters—from the homeless to ordinary office workers, part-time employees, and shop owners—to reflect the diversity within a shared community. I hope that their stories and struggles will resonate with British readers as well. As a line from one of my favorite British films, About a Boy, says: “Every man is an island. And I stand by that. But clearly, some men are part of island chains.” Like that quote, this story gently whispers the message that humans are connected, and that living in communication and connection with one another is the only path toward a better life.
By Kim Ho-Yeon, author of The Second Chance Convenience Store
