In Counterattacks at Thirty, Won-pyung Sohn turns her gaze to South Korea’s white-collar trenches, offering a comedy of quiet desperation

She looked “like she had just crawled out of a coffin”. Not a casualty of some grand tragedy but another employee, living paycheck to paycheck, shuffling through the gloom of Diamant Academy; ambition and joie de vivre slowly siphoned out by institutionalised exploitation.

In Counterattacks at Thirty, Won-pyung Sohn turns her gaze to South Korea’s white-collar trenches, offering a comedy of quiet desperation in which rebellion rarely rises above the level of a prank. The narrator, Kim Jihye, at 30 has only been able to find a job as an “extended intern” whose workday consists of “photocopying bundles of material, stacking chairs and running errands.” While the advertisement promised a permanent job should the intern be found competent after three months, Jihye has been an intern for nine months. She has perfected the art of doing “barely enough to get by”, a survival strategy in an office where overperformance earns only exploitation.

Into this finely balanced detachment walks Lee Gyuok, a relentlessly upbeat newcomer who dusts water-cooler cords unasked and speaks with the conviction of an amateur revolutionary. “I want to start a revolution,” Gyuok declares. “I don’t care if they call me immature… I want to start a movement that can’t be squashed or suppressed. Something fun. Like a prank.” The movement’s modest manifesto is to make “mean and unethical people ‘feel uncomfortable’ and ‘ashamed.’” What follows are low-stakes acts of sabotage such as graffiti on the office wall, an egg lobbed at a politician, a barbed note about personal hygiene left on a superior’s desk.

The title’s irony is intentional. As translator Sean Lin Halbert explains, these “counterattacks” are “not a full-blown protest ‘in the square’… but a mere feather on the lopsided scales of (in)justice.” These are people who know that “history tells us that radical revolutions always fail”, that the system can outlast outrage. What they are testing is whether disruption, however slight, can still feel like agency.

Sohn’s satire is steeped in the particularities of the ubiquitous toxic work culture where “leaving work on time is leaving work early”, hierarchy eclipses competence and the liberal arts have been stripped of idealism to become “just another commodity”. Jihye’s boss, Team Leader Yun, embodies the weary pragmatism of survival. Asked why she does not stand up to Director Kim, who casually asks her to change her hairstyle and lipstick colour to look better, she says: “Someday you’ll understand… Maybe after you get married and have two kids.” For her part, Jihye stages private mutinies such as fabricating a boyfriend to escape lunch with colleagues or perfecting the irritated expression that earns her fewer errands.

Sohn refuses to romanticise rebellion. Her characters are not waiting for a spark that will topple the system, they are learning to live in its shade, carving out slivers of autonomy where they can. The humour is feather-light, the injustices plain as a quarterly report and the victories, if they can be called that, exist at human scale. In this way, Counterattacks at Thirty is less about winning than about the refusal, however slight, to lose entirely.