[What About This Book] Writers Enter the Workplace... "Making a Living" Becomes a Literary Question

Livelihood and Portraits of Working People Released Side by Side
Expressions of Labor Drawn from Ordinary Jobs

Rice comes first. If you follow the question of why people work all the way to the end, you inevitably arrive at the bowl of rice. My rice, my family's rice, someone else's rice. Someone prepares meals for 1,700 people, someone straps on a delivery bag and crosses the city, and someone else checks the safety of airplanes or cares for troubled minds and weakened bodies. Before work is a grand pursuit of self-realization, it is first and foremost a matter of rice. The term “livelihood” may sound old-fashioned and rough, but it contains the way a person endures the world.

The recently published books Livelihood and Portraits of Working People are both about the faces behind this struggle for daily bread. Neither book simply confesses the author’s own professional world; instead, the authors went to various workplaces to listen and document other people's stories. The protagonists are not celebrities. They are cafeteria workers, delivery workers, caregivers, cleaning workers, dental technicians, paramedics, aircraft maintenance inspectors, certified labor attorneys, and social welfare civil servants. These are the people typically called “ordinary,” but in reality, they are the ones who keep the world moving every single day.

In Livelihood by Eonyu, the directness begins with the title itself. Livelihood: the work we do in order to live. It is the work that sustains our lives, the rice earned with our bodies. Over a year and a half, Eonyu met with 17 workers: cafeteria workers, young farmers, delivery workers, tattoo artists, actors, singers, YouTubers, caregivers, cleaning workers, labor lawyers, families of industrial accident victims, Korean language teachers, and psychological counselors. The book categorizes them as “those who feed,” “those who build,” and “those who bring together.” Rather than a job classification, these are closer to directions in life.

In this book, rice is not just a motif. It is the method of the interview and the ethics of the relationship. Eonyu listens while sharing the favorite food of each interviewee. The dining table is not simply a reporting table—it is a space to briefly share each other’s lives. A cafeteria worker says, “I come to earn money, but I work out of responsibility.” A delivery worker calls their job “very honest labor.” A caregiver says that tending to an elderly person's discomfort is also “the work that keeps me fed.” These words do not romanticize labor. Instead, they reveal just how persistent—and therefore how moving—work can be.

The people in Livelihood are often weary, but they do not simply collapse. Through their work, they feed, care for, move, comfort, and fight for others. Eonyu does not portray them as pitiful, nor does she describe them solely in the language of victimhood. What she captures is the dignified expression of the worker. They work to earn money, but their faces cannot be explained by money alone. Pride and resignation, anger and humor, exhaustion and dignity are all present at once.

Portraits of Working People takes a slightly different path from the same starting point. This book is a nonfiction anthology, selecting 30 profession interviews serialized in Hankyoreh by 14 “Wage Realism” novelists. “Wage Realism” is a literary group that started with the idea of realistically portraying the struggles of ordinary people to make a living. This time, rather than creating fictional characters, the novelists met real working people, stepping outside their rooms of imagination and into the reality of the workplace.

The "Portraits of Working People" feature a dental technician, a Chinese noodle restaurant chef, a research investigator, a high-altitude rope welder, a 119 Safety Center paramedic, an aircraft maintenance inspector, a clinical psychology expert, an immunology nurse, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and an OTT curator. The photo shows a 119 Safety Center paramedic. Photo by Fire Agency

The book is divided into four sections: “To Make,” “To Connect,” “To Protect,” and “To Care.” Featured are a dental technician, Chinese noodle restaurant chef, olive oil producer, cinematographer, radio producer, realtor, research investigator, high-altitude rope welder, 119 safety center paramedic, aircraft maintenance inspector, clinical psychologist, immunology nurse, obstetrician-gynecologist, and OTT curator. This list itself reads like a social map—a chart of professions we pass by every day without really knowing.

The strength of this book lies in its details. The dental technician says, “You can never measure the sense inside the mouth in numbers.” The cinematographer notes that they are the person physically closest to the actor. The paramedic says there are not good or bad cases to resolve—there are simply cases that must be solved. In this context, a job is not merely a title; it is the sensation left in the fingertips, the judgments made again and again, and the order known only to those who have endured for a long time. The novelists do not miss these details. Just as a good novel reveals character through subtle gestures rather than immediate exposition, this book shows professions not as abstract nouns but as habits of the body.

Both books put “ordinary people” at the center. However, in the presence of these works, the term “ordinary” loses some of its power. What does it really mean to be ordinary? If it means lacking a high salary, a professional title, or a gold medal—then perhaps these people are ordinary. But measured by human dignity, workers’ rights, care, and responsibility, no one is ordinary. The person who cooks rice, washes someone else, inspects an airplane, protects workers’ rights, or teaches children language is not a background figure in society. Without them, the day immediately falters.

There are differences. Portraits of Working People broadly explores the details of various professions, while Livelihood delves deeply into the lives of workers. The former is shaped by the diverse styles and perspectives of multiple novelists, making the book polyphonic—some pieces read like interviews, others like essays, and others like short stories. In contrast, Livelihood is a book where a single interviewer, Eonyu, listens and waits patiently. The questions are gentle, the sentences linger. The words are not hastily summarized until the speaker’s life story is fully intertwined with their own words.

Reading both books together broadens the meaning of “work.” In Portraits of Working People, work is the name of skill and responsibility. Some work is maintained by sensations that cannot be quantified, while other work is sustained by repeated safety checks in places unseen by others. In Livelihood, work is the name of survival and relationships. Work that began as a way to make a living eventually becomes about caring for others, supporting the community, and fighting against an unjust world.

The important thing is that neither book turns work into a story of success. There are no self-help platitudes like “Do what you love.” Instead, there are jobs that are loved but difficult to continue, jobs that cannot be quit even if unloved, and jobs that must not stop even if no one notices. Some work continues on the goodwill of workers alone, and in unsafe or unfair systems, individual responsibility fills the gaps left by the structure. This is the very point both books quietly ask about: “Why does society keep demanding goodwill from those who do the essential work?”

Centered around a bowl of rice, the time of working people such as cafeteria workers, delivery workers, aircraft mechanics, care workers, cleaning staff, and emergency responders is connected. "Livelihood" and "Portraits of Workers" revive the faces of labor that we have relied on every day but have rarely looked at closely.

What does it mean for literature to enter the workplace? It’s not just about gathering job information. Literature has always sought to see people. Now, writers are looking again—but this time, in the workplace. What do people endure, rather than what do they love? What do they repeat, rather than what do they dream? What responsibilities do they never set down, rather than what failures have they experienced? Sometimes, a person’s true face is revealed more clearly through their livelihood than through their preferences.

In this sense, Livelihood and Portraits of Working People are both collections of professional interviews and cross-sectional views of Korean society. What was invisible head-on comes into view from the side: the rice on a cafeteria tray, the weight of a delivery bag, the curve of a tooth, an aircraft maintenance record, a day in a nursing home, the body of a paramedic responding to a call. In these details lies the way Korean society is sustained today—less in grand slogans and more in the accuracy of the field.

The impressions left by both books are similar. We have let too much labor remain invisible. We see the clean floor but not the person who cleaned it; we receive delivered food but quickly forget the person who brought it. Hospitals, schools, apartments, subways, restaurants, and platforms all operate daily, but the faces of those who work within them are often erased. These two books call forth those erased faces again—naming them, listening to their voices, and recording the sensations of their hands and the time of their bodies.

While “livelihood” may sound shabby, in truth it is the most accurate word. Earning rice, cooking rice, sharing rice, and safeguarding another’s source of rice. The world of labor depicted in Livelihood and Portraits of Working People exists within this. What the authors have drawn from the workplace is not job information but faces—the faces we rely on every day but have long failed to truly see. After seeing them, even the bowl of rice before us looks a little different than before.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.