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A review by achillreads
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park
5.0
It was a refreshing and relatable read. Sangyoung Park wrotes in a way that feels like a conversation at a terrace that starts at some ungodly hour like 3am between you and your close friend and end as both of you watch the sunrise by the end. A tender, funny yet melancholic feeling.
The narrator tells the story of his many loves and how loving in the big city has turned his life. These loves are mainly romantic but not always as the book opens with his best friend of many years, Jaehee.
We go through all the hurts of being queer in a place that doesn't really want you as you are with the narrator. He is almost middle-aged, single, gay and a writer. He is happy for others but wants a sense of happiness alike to the others for himself, too. It's all very familiar to the queer eyes that read.
He wants to love and be loved but ends up with hacks in his heart instead. Most of the men he's been with see him as a dirty secret or turn on him the moment they can't get what they want. Like that's all fine, his best friend betrays him for a guy she loves, in the name of "love," one might say. He is carrying the burden of existence while trying to get by.
It's the same with not understanding how bad your relationship is with the person you are with you at the time and pushing through cause that's what you think you deserve. That's how it is for you, you think, despite all the wrongs. Park shows this expertly with how the narrator deals with his older lover and how he sees through it now. With age, we might get better at seeing through what's happening, but when you are young and in need of love, you find yourself sitting down with a man who thinks two men eating pasta together is a declaration of homosexuality despite not caring about such in bed. Tragicomical.
As queer people, we go through awful things but sometimes just think that it's what it is and that it's normal, but then come to see how not okay it is once someone else is there with us. Instead of defending ourselves in the moment, we laugh instead.
It's like that with friends and lovers, and no different with blood related family.
His relationship with his mom struck a cord in that. He writes about a mom and a son for a competition that he wins through, but all his mom says is about how sad that made her and how she was a bad mom. No appreciation of his accomplishment, but just a woe is me cry. Even in her deathbed, she sees him as a project. She tries to cut his selfhood throughout her life. Trying to make the perfect child. Then, of course, he strays away from her slowly.
Love in the Big City is of how lonely it is to love and not know when or how someone will love you despite yourself. It's a beautiful exploration of how loneliness intertwines with queerness and how it all mixes into the human experience as one grows into themself.
It easily became a favourite for me, and I can't wait to read more from Sangyoung Park.
The narrator tells the story of his many loves and how loving in the big city has turned his life. These loves are mainly romantic but not always as the book opens with his best friend of many years, Jaehee.
We go through all the hurts of being queer in a place that doesn't really want you as you are with the narrator. He is almost middle-aged, single, gay and a writer. He is happy for others but wants a sense of happiness alike to the others for himself, too. It's all very familiar to the queer eyes that read.
He wants to love and be loved but ends up with hacks in his heart instead. Most of the men he's been with see him as a dirty secret or turn on him the moment they can't get what they want. Like that's all fine, his best friend betrays him for a guy she loves, in the name of "love," one might say. He is carrying the burden of existence while trying to get by.
It's the same with not understanding how bad your relationship is with the person you are with you at the time and pushing through cause that's what you think you deserve. That's how it is for you, you think, despite all the wrongs. Park shows this expertly with how the narrator deals with his older lover and how he sees through it now. With age, we might get better at seeing through what's happening, but when you are young and in need of love, you find yourself sitting down with a man who thinks two men eating pasta together is a declaration of homosexuality despite not caring about such in bed. Tragicomical.
As queer people, we go through awful things but sometimes just think that it's what it is and that it's normal, but then come to see how not okay it is once someone else is there with us. Instead of defending ourselves in the moment, we laugh instead.
It's like that with friends and lovers, and no different with blood related family.
His relationship with his mom struck a cord in that. He writes about a mom and a son for a competition that he wins through, but all his mom says is about how sad that made her and how she was a bad mom. No appreciation of his accomplishment, but just a woe is me cry. Even in her deathbed, she sees him as a project. She tries to cut his selfhood throughout her life. Trying to make the perfect child. Then, of course, he strays away from her slowly.
Love in the Big City is of how lonely it is to love and not know when or how someone will love you despite yourself. It's a beautiful exploration of how loneliness intertwines with queerness and how it all mixes into the human experience as one grows into themself.
It easily became a favourite for me, and I can't wait to read more from Sangyoung Park.