At Dusk

Change is a complex issue for any story to tackle, be it change in urbanization and infrastructure, change in socioeconomic status, change in health or life, or change in ourselves.

At Dusk had a very slow start, and initially I believed that it would be a story criticizing urbanization and the abandonment of rural life. The male lead is an architect who travels back to his hometown and comments on how it has changed since his youth— but of course, as an architect, many of his comments reflect the new parsing of land, of new buildings and streets, and the “revitalization projects” that must have happened over the years.

In the second half, things picked up, and it was clear that this would not be a story about urbanization. The architect’s foil is a young playwright who has been consistently struggling to make ends meet by working late shifts and odd jobs, and who is constantly scolded for her foolishness by an ex-coworker who doesn’t want to see her be taken advantage of. She doesn’t live comfortably in a nice home with a steady job, and she doesn’t seem to have many friends or other social connections.

Of course, both have their respective struggles. We learn more about the architect’s difficult past living in a slum in Seoul, where territory squabbles for the right to shine shoes and miscellaneous fights among young boys often broke out. We understand that he knows poverty, but that he pushed himself in school to be able to attend university, study abroad, and find a career in architecture, which is how he came to live in relative comfort. But at the same time, in trying to “crawl out of the hole of poverty,” he leaves behind the people who have to remain there. On the outside, he seems to exhibit more pride in his current, enviable life, but it’s clear he feels some degree of shame for having left. Time and change is what it takes for him to recognize and reassess this. “For a long time, I’d been thinking only that I was lucky enough to have escaped a squalid, shabby hillside slum. As if everyone who’d made it through that era were doing fine now. As if none of us had fallen through the cracks.”

By the end of At Dusk, it becomes clear that this story is not about redevelopment and urbanization, though those do lend weight to how the architect views the beginning of his life in poverty. Loss becomes a more overarching theme— the loss of past bonds, as we grow and climb to new stages (sometimes without others); the loss of life, cut short by illness or unhappiness; the loss of familiarity, as things around us change with the passing of time. Hwang navigates this loss gracefully— sure, the characters are distinctly impacted and must grieve— but in the end the sense of “this is how it happened and this is how we must live with it” seems to persist. If this story were any shorter or any longer, I don’t think that sense would’ve had as much impact as it did. Receiving only a glimpse of each character’s life is enough to understand their differences and the ways in which they navigate their socioeconomic statuses, losses, and pasts.

I enjoyed Hwang’s masterful storytelling, though some parts (like a band of boys trying to run around and shine shoes, in a very Oliver Twist-esque manner) didn’t necessarily feel like they fit. Overall, though At Dusk wasn’t a story about urbanization like I had thought, its subtle commentary on loss and change was so much more.