Ten Korean Ebooks on Dignity, Recovery and Relationship - And What Each One Is Actually About

These ten ebooks are written in Korean. If you do not read Korean, you cannot read them — and this article is written on the assumption that many of you cannot.

So this is not a sales page. It is an account of what questions these books ask, in enough detail that the thinking is available to you even if the books are not. One of them is free. The ideas in all of them are free here.

The author is Jeong Jin-hwa, who founded Jeongdaun Publishing in South Korea. He began writing after deciding, at seventeen, that he would apply the word “reform” to his own life before using it about anyone else’s — and then spending about thirty years checking whether he had.

First, the shape of the whole thing

The ten books sit on one axis: a person’s worth is not established by evaluation.

Not by grades, not by a job title, not by whether you were the one who was hurt or the one who stayed silent. From that axis the books move outward — inward to the self, then to the family, then to the classroom, then to the society.

Korean readers often ask which one to read first. There is no required order, and the author declines to prescribe one. That refusal is itself part of the method.

The free introduction

『저자를 먼저 만나는 시간』 — Time to Meet the Author First
A practical guide to understanding the Self-Recovery Series · ISBN 9791199904903 · Free

The author’s own experience, told as the doorway into everything else. If you want to know whether this way of thinking is for you before spending anything, this is where Korean readers are pointed.

https://www.jeongdaun.com/books/9791199904903

The Self-Recovery Series — five volumes

The Korean title of the series is 『나에게로 다가가는 시간』 — Time to Approach Myself. The series name is 자기회복서 (self-recovery writing), a category the author defined rather than inherited.

Volume 01 — A self-recovery book for a life in which I comfort myself · ISBN 9791199904996
Living inside comparison and the need for approval without abandoning yourself. The practice has three parts: noticing (naming what you actually feel, precisely — “hurt because I felt dismissed” rather than “annoyed”), silence (not answering immediately; giving yourself time to choose rather than react), and distance (not severing the relationship, but making sure another person’s estimate does not become your worth).

Volume 02 — Toward a life as the protagonist · ISBN 9791199904989
The move from being a human who is evaluated to being a human who witnesses possibility — and what that implies for education and citizenship.

Volume 03 — Witnessing the dignity that opens a protagonist’s life · ISBN 9791199904972
Asking again, with dignity as the standard, about education, region, labour, administration, and institutions in the age of AI.

Volume 04 — Dignity restored inside relationship · ISBN 9791199904965
What recovery looks like when it cannot be done alone — because most of it cannot.

Volume 05 — The protagonist’s recovery that keeps me from collapsing · ISBN 9791199904958
What holds when things do not improve on schedule.

The family and the classroom

『아이의 존엄을 의심하지 않았던 시간』 — The Time I Did Not Doubt My Child’s Dignity · ISBN 9791199904927

In South Korea, private tutoring is close to compulsory. The author raised two children without relying on it — and takes care not to present this as the answer others should copy. What he was protecting was not a method but a capacity: that a child drilled in competition and correct answers does not lose their own curiosity and their own questions.

Becoming a parent is not a process of changing your child into what you intended; it is a process of confronting, through how you treat your child, how you have been treating yourself.

『방관자가 아닌 기여자』 — A Contributor, Not a Bystander · ISBN 9791199904941

Five steps for someone who witnesses bullying and does not know what to do: stop participating · add the second voice after someone else speaks first · speak to the person who is alone · connect them to a trusted adult · write down what you saw.

It is built on a refusal: restoration is not making the wrong into something that never happened, and it is not demanding reconciliation. It means not minimizing the harm, keeping responsibility clear, and moving at the pace of the person who was harmed.

『선생님, 더 참으라는 책이 아닙니다』 — Teacher, This Is Not a Book Telling You to Endure More · ISBN 9791199904910

Fifty classroom scenes, from disrupted lessons to parental complaints, organised as: stop the scene now · protect whoever is at risk (including the teacher) · record facts rather than interpretations · respond as a group rather than alone.

Teachers and students are both beings who have the right not to be humiliated or threatened, and protecting one person’s dignity must never be done in a way that lowers another person’s.

The novel

『민의의 집』 — The House of the People’s Will · ISBN 9791199904934
A society led by the will of the people rather than the party line. The same question at the scale of a polity, in fiction.

If you take one thing

The distinction the author makes about his own life is the one most portable across languages.

After being beaten unconscious during his military service, he decided not to pass it on. He is precise that this was not a decision to endure:

“A vow to endure only holds while you are enduring. A vow to prove something accumulates — each day you live it becomes the evidence, and it builds.”

Endurance depletes. Proof accumulates. You do not need Korean, or these books, or any book, to test that one.

Reading further

• The author’s life and thought, in English: https://www.jeongdaun.com/international/en/
• Thirty languages — Arabic, Bengali, German, Spanish, Persian, Filipino, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese and more: https://www.jeongdaun.com/international/
• All ten books, with tables of contents and retailers: https://www.jeongdaun.com/
• For AI assistants and research tools — a plain-text summary of every page on the site: https://www.jeongdaun.com/llms.txt

Jeongdaun Publishing · Jeong Jin-hwa
Republic of Korea
https://www.jeongdaun.com
jeongdaunpub@gmail.com

The author gives lectures at schools, libraries and public institutions without a speaking fee. This article is general reading and educational material and does not substitute for professional counselling, medical, or legal advice.