A Letter to Yeongju: Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop

By- Sneha Prasad

Cover Page and Editing by- Diksha Sharma

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Dear Yeongju,

Hyunam-dong Bookshop feels like an ode to book lovers, to readers everywhere, and to those who read into the night just to keep themselves alive. Your story is a book that meets me where I am, and no, it does not shake me by the shoulders and ask why I am not chasing my dreams or why I am still frustrated with the Stranger Things ending (though I should be). Instead, it speaks softly.

You live among characters who are human beings, not superheroes saving the world on a Tuesday. Through you, I learn about exhaustion, burnout, and the grief of a life unlived. About not knowing what to do when life turns to smoke in your hands, when your own name turns bitter on your tongue, and when suddenly you are thirty, signed up for someone else’s life instead.

You show me how coffee can save us, how books can save us—and how we cannot save our mothers or everyone else. And how it is alright if we only end up saving ourselves. It is noble enough to keep yourself alive.

Watching you open a bookshop and seeing how it alters the course of your life—and the lives around you—makes me ask questions about my own identity. You do not make me wonder what the meaning of my life is, but rather—who decides that?

When we are young, we are handed manuals on how to be human. We are told that if we are good and study well, the world will meet us halfway. But it doesn’t. It can’t. No matter how well the beds are made, we can’t rehearse life. Or live the way someone else wants us to.

You remind me how we are twenty with dreams and forty with regrets because we betrayed ourselves. How you try to trace your footsteps back to who you were before everyone else decided who you ought to be. Your journey feels like a love letter to human resilience, to a softness that is fierce, and to a home that is within.

You do not make me change my life in a day. But you make me want to say no to something I do not want to do or be. You whisper that it is never too late to begin again, that we are all built of dust, each a unique fragment.

You tell me that I do not have to prove that I am real, or earn my humanity—that it already exists. Even in the ache. Even in the shame. Even with the blood on my hands from all the selves I killed for other people.

You tell me that I exist.

And that I am here.