LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
[ENGLISH] Snowglobe scrap
by Colin Marshall
May 29, 2025
Author Bio 작가 소개
Soyoung Park
In the West, the book-marketing label “young adult” has evolved into a genre of fiction in its own right, now often simply referred to as “YA.” As its target demographic has become increasingly refined, so too has its typical protagonist, reflecting that readership’s idealized self-conception. One major YA subgenre stars a young woman of unremarkable origins but strong, somewhat unconventional, and largely concealed ambitions. Through no particular action (or even inclination) of her own, she’s all of a sudden thrust into the spotlight, and, in coming to grips with this new reality—which entails wealth, celebrity, and some sort of high-stakes competition—she can rely on nothing but her internal resources and a few sympathetic fellow outsiders or quasi-outsiders encountered along the way. Though not without its appeal, this newfound adulation and esteem turns out to conceal more sinister machinations, usually orchestrated by a character our reluctant heroine once naïvely believed she could trust.
This is very much the case with Jeon Chobahm, the teenage protagonist of Soyoung Park’s Snowglobe. Chobahm lives in a dystopia—a kind of setting that, while not strictly necessary to YA, has become ever more common, especially in the expansive wake of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. Chobahm has been born and raised in what’s called “the open world,” the impoverished frozen expanse covering much of Earth after a series of wars and climate disasters, and dreams of one day moving to the titular paradise, a climate-controlled dome populated almost entirely by reality-television performers. She aims to do so not by becoming an actress—a common and, for most, hopeless desire—but by going to film school and studying to be a director, one of the auteurs behind the shows that entertain the open-worlders who spend their days generating electricity by walking on what amount to giant hamster wheels. One day, Chobahm’s life in the frigid wastes is interrupted by an offer from Snowglobe: would she consider deferring her film-school dream to replace Goh Haeri, “the world’s sweetheart,” for just one year? Since birth, Goh Haeri has starred in Goh Around, a popular Truman Show-style program documenting her innocent young life. (Its title, at one point also translated as Goh For It, raises questions about whether there was a struggle with a pun that sounded more elegant in Korean.) The teenage Haeri has committed suicide—a seriously inconvenient turn for this lighthearted production. At least that’s how the show’s director, an ice queen named Cha Seol, flippantly explains it to Chobahm, who happens to not only share Haeri’s birthday but her appearance as well. After a little makeup, a wig, and a new wardrobe—plus a few hints at savage plot twists to come—Chobahm has been removed from her old life in the open world and installed in Haeri’s place on television, not just as a reality star, but also as what’s called a “weathercaster,” charged with regularly drawing the conditions to be generated by Snowglobe’s artificial-climate systems the following day.
This sudden personal and professional transformation puts Chobahm into the wholly alien orbit of the Yibonns. For all intents and purposes a royal family, they control not just Snowglobe, but also the Yibonn Media Group, producer of all the entertainment broadcast to the open world. This should be enough to give any reader the beginning of a sense of satire of modern South Korea, the parallels between the various Yibonn holdings and the all-encompassing nature of the major Korean family-owned chaebol (or conglomerates) being too obvious to ignore. So, too, the divide between Seoul and the rest of the country—or for that matter, the parts of Gangnam where the chaebol-connected live and the rest of Seoul—comes to mind when considering the stark contrast between the relative luxury of Snowglobe and the near-moonscape of the open world. None of this may sound particularly nuanced, but then, YA has never been a particularly nuanced form, neither in its Western version, nor in its Korean one: “K-YA,” as it seems likely to be labeled should more of its novels make it into English.
Soyoung Park is Korean, but whether she’s set Snowglobe in Korea is a more open question than it may seem at first. On one hand, the cultural background often seems unambiguous: every major character has a Korean name, and in her narration Chobahm makes reference to such Korean things as the card game go-stop, a meal of kimbap, and—in the case of one highly un-sober figure introduced late in the novel—numerous bottles of soju. (More darkly, the theme of a celebrity’s suicide was already relevant in Korea when the book came out in 2020, and has only become more so since.) But among the current and former Snowglobe-resident celebrities who figure secondarily into the story are several conspicuously, almost extravagantly foreign names: Priya Maravan, Tyrr Schwarkel, Cooper Raffaeli. How they ended up in a domed, post-apocalyptic caricature of twenty-first-century South Korean society goes unexplained, at least in this volume, but it may be addressed in part two of the Snowglobe duology, a notice of whose scheduled publication in the spring of 2025 is announced immediately after the main text of this first installment.
That no book stands alone is another tenet of YA, whose most successful franchises expand into not just multi-volume sagas published over years or even decades, but also other media, including major motion pictures and television series. In fact, Snowglobe’s expository conversations, wham-bam action scenes, and underscored ironies read as if composed for expedient transition to the screen; even its profanity, in Joungmin Lee Comfort’s translation, sounds pre-emptively watered down for network-drama adaptation. A visual medium could do well by Park’s vision of a both broadly futuristic and technologically stunted dystopia, where characters use teleportation mirrors but also VHS tapes and rotary phones. The question of whether the outwardly complacent but privately dissatisfied young Yibonn scion eventually awakens to our heroine’s spirited charms is left unresolved in this first book, but many readers will end it feeling confident about the answer.
Colin Marshall
Author, No Summarizing Korea (Across, 2024)
Writer and broadcaster on cities and culture
Writer 필자 소개
Colin Marshall
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