Saving Literature

“It’s okay to be a Literature major.” Hyunsuk had said this to his students too many times.

It had been only two years since he became an associate professor. Hyunsuk’s family in Korea thought he had an easy life. He wanted to prove that becoming a professor today was just as difficult as getting a frame delivered from YouTube.

Before Saint Joseph’s, Hyunsuk had spent eight years analyzing the comedic features of contemporary Korean novels. He especially liked dystopian humor from his home country. His first course, Dystopia Within Korean Novels, was an attempt to explain why Korean writers gravitated toward the bleakness of their social and political environment.

He could fill an arena with the people who doubted his effort to become a useful researcher, teacher, and writer. “Do you really think reading fiction is the way to get the most out of your life?” Even his beloved uncle had said this when Hyunsuk shared his plans to get a Ph.D. in Asian Literatures.

Yet here he was, earning a professorial paycheck, standing as a doctor of Korean Literature, lecturing K-pop fans about the messy history of his motherland—all in English.

Many students in his department walked into his office with faces of eternal grief. Some of them looked like they had just lost a parent. They rarely talked about their appreciation for the works of Han Kang, Jung Yoo-jung, or Baek Su-rin. Most of them, even the first-years, wanted to know if their degree would be worth anything in the future. They had probably seen pie charts from the GPT proving “English majors on average make 50 percent less than Economics majors.”

“I honestly don’t know how to prove the usefulness of the degree,” Hyunsuk told them. “I myself considered going to law school ten years ago.” He still did the math, wondering how his life would have changed if he had followed his dad’s advice and gone to the cheapest law school in town.

But he would never say—maybe he wasn’t allowed to—that studying Literature was the stupidest decision one could make. Hyunsuk knew one thing for sure: stories save people’s lives, and puking out your thoughts through reading and writing can pull you out of some dark, dark shit.

There was a student from China named Chu. She walked into Hyunsuk’s office, her face puffy like she’d been crying for two hours. She smelled like clean bedsheets and hand sanitizer.

“What’s up, Chu?” he asked.

Her parents wanted her to switch majors.

“What do they want you to study?”

“They want me to become a lawyer,” she said.

“You can one hundred percent apply to law school with a degree in Literature,” Hyunsuk said.

“They want me to study History or Anthropology,” she replied. “They say those would look much better on my application.”

That stung. Hyunsuk never realized his department was at the bottom of the academic food chain. His face turned red because he really had nothing to tell her. He almost said, Your parents have a fucking point. Leave me alone and listen to your mommy and daddy.

Chu left his office, and Hyunsuk suddenly realized the need to arm himself with the knowledge to defend the study of literature.

He headed straight to the library. He now had a sacred duty. His God awaited him.