People take a break along Cheonggyecheon in central Seoul on Aug. 18, as the heat returns after several relatively mild days, prompting heat wave advisories to be issued again for parts of the capital.NEWS1
Yang Sung-hee
The author is a cultural columnist.
"That night’s heat was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I thought it might ease after 1 a.m., but at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. it remained just as stifling. There was not a breath of wind. I slipped on my shoes and went beneath the tree in the yard. Not a single leaf stirred. I tilted my head, hoping to catch some movement. The leaves floated there like dead minnows. Had the tree died of the heat, too? Suffocating and dumbfounded, I shook a branch. It moved. I felt somewhat relieved and decided to endure. However hot it was, when its season came, a new wind would settle in this tree."
— Jeong Ji-yong, "Ji-yong Literary Reader" (1948)
Can Earth really be this hot? The thought that this may be the hottest summer you have ever experienced, yet the coolest of those still ahead, makes the planet’s SOS chilling. Still, the heat seems to have eased somewhat in the mornings and evenings. A cool breeze now often arrives before dawn.
Poet Jeong Ji-yong published the short essay in the September 1948 issue of the monthly magazine "Jogwang." Weather records for Seoul, where he lived, show that the average August high was 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) lower than this year’s. A record heat wave followed in 1939. Yet even the summer of 1938 apparently felt unprecedented to Jeong.
Every word of the passage seems to radiate suffocating heat. But its final sentence brings a faint smile and the sensation of a cool breeze. Hence this column’s title, “The Coolest Story.”
That sent me searching for another old piece about oppressive heat. In 1874, late-Joseon scholar Park Gyu-su wrote a letter to his friend Shin Yu-an, later included in Park’s collected writings, “Hwanjaejip” (1911). Again, the ending made me smile.
“Though Ipchu has passed, rain pours as if buckets were being overturned, and the heat feels as if people were being steamed inside a scorching earthenware steamer. Not even the slightest cool breeze has come. I have never known weather like this. People grow older by passing through cold and heat once each year. But if every summer were like this one, even today’s 70-year-olds would probably have found it difficult to live past 35.”
The parallel is that both writers describe extreme heat as something beyond memory, yet both find relief in imagining its end. Their humor does not deny the discomfort. It makes endurance possible, reminding us that seasons, however punishing, turn.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
