This journal-like essay draws on personal experience of the Korean apartment. It attempts to read the apartment from the inside. It begins with the rooms I know—the master bedroom, the kitchen, the utility room, the study, the living room—and asks what each one was actually for. Not for comfort or privacy, though it offered both, but for the reproduction of a particular form of life: the nuclear family as the basic unit of the developmental state. To read the apartment this way is not to reduce personal memory to abstraction. It is to recognise that the most intimate arrangements of daily life - where we sleep, how we eat, what we watch - are also political arrangements, shaped by forces that long precede us and will outlast us.
This journal-like essay draws on personal experience of the Korean apartment. It attempts to read the apartment from the inside. It begins with the rooms I know—the master bedroom, the kitchen, the utility room, the study, the living room—and asks what each one was actually for. Not for comfort or privacy, though it offered both, but for the reproduction of a particular form of life: the nuclear family as the basic unit of the developmental state. To read the apartment this way is not to reduce personal memory to abstraction. It is to recognise that the most intimate arrangements of daily life - where we sleep, how we eat, what we watch - are also political arrangements, shaped by forces that long precede us and will outlast us.