Self-Defense Club (호신술 클럽)

Self-Defense Club is a Korean feel-good trauma-healing novel about Choi Jeongdo, a former national-team taekwondo hopeful who now runs a failing dojang in Mapo. After a viral video turns him into “the man in the dobok who protects without asking,” he starts an adult self-defense class. The class becomes a small found-family of wounded people learning not only how to strike, block and fall, but how to survive shame, fear, exploitation and guilt. The premise has warmth and commercial appeal, but the novel is also extremely formulaic, sentimental and emotionally manipulative in the way it assigns each character one obvious wound and then gives them one obvious therapeutic breakthrough.

Jeongdo is thirty-three, handsome, tall, athletic and broke. He inherited or continued the taekwondo school that once belonged to his father. He had once been a brilliant athlete, good enough to wear the Korean flag and dream of the Olympics, but a landing injury ended that dream and left him with an ordinary neighborhood dojang instead. At first the school did well, partly because parents liked the idea of a former national-level athlete teaching their children. But COVID, scandals in children’s sports facilities, and changing parental tastes hollowed out the business. Parents now prefer jump-rope academies, “premium” children’s exercise programs in English, or anything that seems more practical than old-school martial arts.

Jeongdo is under financial pressure. His business loan is near default, the rent is slipping, the deposit is being eaten away, and the building owner, though fond of him because she knew his father, cannot protect him forever. The dojang is not just a business. It is his house, his childhood, his father’s life, his dead sister’s memory, and the only place where he still knows who he is.