Kai is a 30-year-old man living in Seoul, South Korea. After being dumped by his long-time partner, he struggles with moving on and learning to find happiness in a life filled with unhappiness. Some of his friends are also having trouble finding answers to problems in their own lives. Kai, Han, Jung, Min, and others are all going through their own existential crisis and want to find the answer to the idea of how to be happy. But they are all fictional characters made up by Dr. Ery Shin, an assistant professor at The University of Southern Mississippi.
Shin was motivated by her examination of people when creating the characters of Kai and his friends in her debut novel, “Spring on the Peninsula.”
“Everyone I met seemed to be profound,” she said. “I don’t want to say unhappy, but everyone seemed really tired and not just physically, I mean, psychologically.”
Even after getting what they wanted, Shin noticed how some people still felt demoralized and burnt out, including herself. She wondered why no matter where she looked everyone seemed unhappy, which made her question the idea of happiness. Her quest to understand sparked the start of her novel and the creation of Kai’s character.
Over the course of her story, Shin wrote about various characters, each one with their own problems trying to find something that would give their life fulfillment. Drafting those stories helped her paint a picture of this collective discontent and gave her a glimpse into human dilemmas and how they deal with time, aging, and finding the meaning of life.
“One of the poems in my mind, as I was writing the book, which inspired me was Kim So-wol and his poem, Azaleas,” Shin said. “And so, this Korean poem was always floating around in the back of my head as I was writing certain scenes of this book.”
Shin was born in Iowa. But for the first ten years of her life, she grew up in Manhattan before moving to Seoul. She would spend most of the year in Korea and her summers in New York. Her time in Seoul was a tremendous help in shaping the foundation for her novel, as that is where the book takes place. The culture of Seoul can be found in every part of the book, from the characters to the language.
“When I grew up, I had a kind of really beautiful international upbringing,” Shin said. “So that was a huge part of what informed the shape, the tenor, and the atmosphere of this story.”
Seoul played a crucial role in Shin’s book and her life. She spent her time in Korea, immersing herself in the culture. And everything that she learned there was brought into her novel. She used the authentic locale to set the scene, writing of places and using language that is different from anywhere else in the world.
“I think of going to temples and monasteries around Korea,” Shin said. “I still remember the long hikes up to some of them. They are as vivid to me today as they were then.”
Shin took to writing at an early age, though her passion for teaching came much later. She fell in love with teaching in graduate school, when she realized that she preferred the social environment of being on a school campus that allowed her creativity to flourish, compared to the solitude of working alone at home as a career writer.
It is thanks to USM’s dedication to the arts that Shin chose to make Hattiesburg her permanent home. She not only loves what she teaches but enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate students.
“Having big lecture halls and also really small and intimate seminars; you can’t take that for granted in many academic jobs today,” Shin said. “So, the job here, the conditions here, especially in this thriving Arts Community, has been very special for me.”
Shin, a recent panelist at the annual Mississippi Book Festival and the author of “Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years,” looks forward to being able to write more fiction and criticism. And she will continue to publish future works of literature.
“I have ideas for new novels, and I have ideas for new scholarly books,” Shin said. “and to hit the ground running with that and develop those. That, I think, is going to be the next hill.”