“I would see thousands of people streaming from their officetels to Gangnam station, all very young, very self-possessed, very confident. I was imagining how everyone living in these officetels is very far from home.”

‘In my favorite fiction about us, I would see you and some bell within me would toll—the way an elephant will walk over the bones of its own kind, know it instantly, and fall down and mourn. Instead, I looked away. What struck me was not like lightning or love, and so I wept.’