ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 11 — (Miso Jin: Writing Toward the Stories Korean Education Does Not Make Room For)

Woosung
2 days ago
6 min read

Miso Jin is a student at Seongnam Foreign Language High School in South Korea, where she majors in English and studies German as a second language. She is spending this year preparing for the CSAT, Korea's notoriously demanding college entrance exam. In whatever time is left over, she is writing short fiction, running a literary club, and publishing books on Amazon.

In South Korea's test-focused system, work like this goes largely unrecognized. It does not count toward a college application, and for some, pursuing it at all is seen as a distraction from what students are supposed to be doing. However, despite all these constraints, Miso is continuing to pursue her passion for writing.

Her Korean High School:

Seongnam Foreign Language High School (성남외고)

Logo of Seongnam Foreign Language High School, Namuwiki

In Korea, some high schools are specialized. One such specialized schools, called "특목고", is Miso's school, organized around language tracks. Seongnam Foreign Language High School offers four main languages: English, German, Chinese, and Japanese. Miso is in the English major track, with German as a supporting subject.

Her German, she says with some humor, is currently at toddler level. But her English is anything but. She has never lived abroad, though she has visited cousins in English-speaking countries twice, for about a month each time. For a student who learned English entirely within Korea, her fluency in the conversation was striking.

The pressure she is under is real. Not only do average students have less than two hours of free time a day, they are also chronically sleep deprived, with the national average falling at five hours or less. The CSAT(수능), the college entrance exam in Korea, determines university placement, and in Korea, university placement is treated by many families as the central purpose of a student's entire school career.

"You're like ten years old and you go to different kinds of lessons every day. Only test scores matter in your school life for some people..." — says Miso.

Miso does not romanticize the system. She describes it as one that pushes students toward better rankings, not toward the things they actually want to build. But she also has not let it stop her from building anyway.

The Club She Started

Collection of original productions of Miso's club members, published on Amazon

Last year, Miso co-founded a literary club at her school. The Korean name does not translate cleanly, but the closest English version is the Literary and Social Issues Club. The premise is simple and ambitious: club members choose a real social problem, research it deeply, and then write a short story about it. Those stories are collected into an anthology and published through Amazon's self-publishing platform.

The club currently has five members, including Miso. They focus on a wide variety of topics and social issues, such as Toxic social media culture, global warming, terrorism, depression, and the mental health pressures that Korean students face. The most recent focus has been on student mental health, an issue Miso treats with care because of how sensitive it is within Korean culture.

The collection of books the club published is already live on Amazon. She suggests searching her name, Miso Jin, to find it.

"It ain't that long. And maybe for actual English speakers it might not be that good, but we did our best as Korean students who are majoring in English and Japanese."

Why It Started

The origin of the club is one of the more memorable things Miso shared in the conversation. In her first year of high school, she wrote a short story for an English class assignment. She expanded it afterward and shared the longer version with her teacher, who liked it enough to use it as a study text for incoming first-year students.

The response surprised her. The new students read her story, wrote their own stories based on hers, and created fan art inspired by it.

"This is the power that literature has when you share it with other people. I was like, okay, if I could do this at a school level, what could we do if you expand it in a bigger way?"

That question became the club.

Why Fiction, Not Essays

When asked about the purpose of choosing Fiction instead of non-fiction, a popular medium to depict social issues, Miso's reply was deliberate:

"Essays focus on the broad society part of it, and how the whole thing is cause and effect, the whole fixed equation. But if you want to approach in a matter of more personal ways, I think fiction really hits home. You can approach people in a more emotional way that you just connect them..."

Miso's school already requires students to write analytical essays on social problems regularly. She respects that format, but she does not think it does everything.

One story from the club's journal that she could not stop thinking about was written by a friend, about what she called "blank dysphoria," an exploration of the feeling Korean students who have lived abroad carry when they return, caught between languages and identities. The friend invented a special fantasy language within the story to convey something that does not have a clean name in Korean or English. The story was too personal for the published anthology, so it stayed in the club's private journal. But Miso described it as one of the best things she has read.

Another book she published, "The Underworld Concert" (not the club journal), available on Amazon Books

Mental Health and What Korea Is Not Saying Out Loud

Struggling South Korean Student, Korea Bizwire — Struggling South Korean Student, *Korea Bizwire*

South Korea has among the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and student mental health is a persistent crisis. Miso spoke about this not as a distant statistic but as something she witnesses:

"They try to say suicide rates is bad and we shouldn't talk about it. Your mental depression is something you should hide as a disease. I think that's what stresses out people the most."

She believes the issue is compounded by silence. Schools have counseling resources, she says, but students do not know they exist, and the cultural pressure to fit in and not show weakness keeps many from using them even when they do.

Her view is that the first step is not a new program or more funding; It is openness. Telling students clearly that these resources exist. Making it normal to use them. Lastly, treating mental health as a genuine health to be tended regularly.

The club's current project is trying to do something small in that direction through fiction, telling stories about students who are struggling in ways that make readers feel less alone.

Her Advice and What Is Next

Miso wants to study English literature at university, though she may end up declaring German as her major if it gives her access to higher-ranked schools. She is aware of the irony. She is also aware that language and humanities are widely viewed in Korea as impractical career choices, especially as AI reshapes the professional landscape. Her teachers have told her students in language tracks have dark futures ahead.

She disagrees.

"I think it still matters in our lives, in our society. So I think we should put more value into it."

For the club, the next goal is a second anthology. She wants the writing to keep getting better and the reach to grow.

For students who want to start something similar, her implicit advice is already in the story she told: start with one piece of writing. Share it. See what comes back.

The book she recommends to every high schooler before graduation is "Pieces of You" by Tablo, the Korean musician and rapper. It is written in English. It pulled her out of a period when she did not want to write anything, and got her back to the page.