Misaeng and the Two-Year Line — Epoche B1
Yoon Tae-ho, Misaeng The title is a baduk word. A group of stones that has made itself safe on the board is wansaeng, complete life. A group that stands on the board but could still be killed is misaeng — incomplete life, not yet alive. Yoon Tae-ho's comic, serialised online from 2012 and then collected in nine volumes, hands that word to a person. Jang Geu-rae has spent his childhood training to become a professional baduk player. He fails the qualification, and at twenty-six, with nothing on his CV but a school equivalency exam, he is placed through a connection at One International, a Seoul trading company — as a contract worker, on a two-year contract. The game never leaves the page: he reads the office as a board, corner by corner, and the chapters carry its diagrams. What the book understands better than any lecture on Korean working life is the clock. Under the fixed-term law, an employee kept on past two years must be made permanent. That protection has a shadow, and the shadow is the plot: contracts are written to end just before the line. However well Jang Geu-rae plays, his desk has a date on it, and everyone in the office can read it. Some readers — I was one, for fifty pages — find him too quiet and want him to flip a table. But that is reading him as a regular employee. A stone that is not yet alive does not get to play boldly; it plays to survive the next move. When the television version aired in 2014, newspapers took "misaeng" up as everyday shorthand for contract workers. A comic taught the country a word for an arrangement it already had — and the word had been waiting inside a board game. References Kim, J. (2022). Work is Not Your Fault. Mirae Books.