A Critical Academic Review
Introduction
Sunwoo Jeong’s novelette “Permanent Press,” published in Uncanny (Issue Sixty-Nine, March/April 2026), arrives as a formally inventive work from a writer already recognized in speculative fiction circles for her linguistic precision and emotionally charged surrealism. A Korean-American academic linguist by training, Jeong brings to her fiction a sensitivity to the architectures of language and the ways in which words—or the absence of them—shape identity, belonging, and desire. Having appeared in Fantasy, Uncanny Magazine, and Split Lip, and having been recognized by the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, Jeong occupies a distinctive position in contemporary speculative short fiction: her work engages the genre’s fantastical vocabulary while remaining deeply invested in the textures of diasporic interiority. “Permanent Press” represents a mature and confident expression of these preoccupations, deploying a magical-realist laundromat as an extended metaphor for the psychic costs of indecision, grief, and generational entanglement. This review argues that “Permanent Press” succeeds as a work of literary speculative fiction by fusing Korean folk cosmology with Western urban surrealism to produce a nuanced phenomenology of choice—one that refuses easy resolution and locates meaning not in decision itself but in the act of communal presence that surrounds it.
Plot, Setting, and Characters
The story is narrated in first person by Josephine (“Jo”) Hong, a young Korean-American woman living in an unnamed urban neighborhood who faces a consequential professional decision: whether to accept a five-year deep-sea research expedition aboard a French submarine captained by Dr. Gagnier, an eccentric French oceanographer whose pirate radio broadcasts had captivated Jo and her childhood companion Moe during their youth. The central action unfolds over the course of several nights and days, most of them gravitating toward the Laundry-Mat (note the hyphenated idiosyncrasy), a neighborhood fixture operated by the laconic Mr. Lee. The establishment is staffed by two enigmatic valets, Landry and Lundry—physically identical yet temperamentally opposed figures who embody, in allegorical terms, the poles of hope and melancholy, presence and loss, the future and the past. A third constant presence, Mat, sits meditating in a lotus position near the entrance, offering change and functioning as a kind of comic-mystic ground.
The supporting cast is tightly rendered: Moe, Jo’s former romantic partner and present confidant, whose relationship with her resists easy categorization (she terms it an “umami-heart”); Mrs. Hong, known as Grams, a formidable Korean immigrant grandmother whose storied past as a haenyeo diver at Jeju Island encodes layers of cultural survival and sacrifice; and Mr. Lee’s son Jimin, whose absurdist offering of buttons (“for openings. And closings”) contributes to the story’s ambient symbolism. The action, such as it is, involves Jo’s repeated visits to the laundromat, her desperate attempt to secure an audience with Landry while being consistently met with the morose Lundry, the appearance of a spectral double she calls the “Laundry Tulpa,” Grams’s temporary disappearance, a climactic flood caused by Landry’s activation of the “permanent press” cycle, and a muted but affectively powerful resolution in which Jo appears to have moved toward accepting the submarine offer.
Critical Analysis
Thematic Architecture: Indecision as Ontological Condition
The governing thematic concern of “Permanent Press” is not, finally, whether Jo will take the submarine job—the narrative withholds a definitive answer until an epilogue that addresses the outcome only obliquely and retrospectively—but rather the texture and phenomenology of sustained indecision itself. The story is deeply interested in what it feels like to remain in the space between choices, and the fantastical apparatus of the laundromat serves as a literalization of this liminal state. The washing machine, as a domestic technology, operates through cycles of agitation, rinsing, and spinning before clothes emerge clean—a process that stands in for the psychic labor Jo undergoes throughout the narrative. When Landry activates the “permanent press” cycle, the resulting flood is not catastrophic so much as clarifying: a release of accumulated pressure that allows the characters to inhabit the present moment rather than anticipating its dissolution.
The story frames indecision not merely as a personal failing but as something closer to an existential posture rooted in loss. Jo’s mother disappeared into the sea during a diving expedition when Jo was two years old. This absence structures Jo’s ambivalence about departure: to leave is to risk becoming, like her mother, a figure defined by disappearance; to stay is to accept a circumscribed existence at odds with her deepest yearnings. Lundry, the valet of melancholy and lost things, articulates this psychic mechanism with the story’s most resonant line: the “what-ifs,” he explains, “cling to your clothes. Then, when the time’s right, they split off.” The Laundry Tulpa—the spectral figure that materializes from the dryer—is thus a materialization of Jo’s suppressed self: her hesitation given form.
This constellation of motifs engages productively with what Homi K. Bhabha has theorized as the “third space” of cultural enunciation, the ambivalent terrain occupied by postcolonial and diasporic subjects who exist between fixed cultural identities (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994). Jo’s indecision is not merely personal but structurally diasporic: she is caught between the demands of familial and communal continuity (Grams, Moe, the neighborhood) and the pull of an expansive, individuated future (the sea, the submarine, the world of Dr. Gagnier). That this tension is staged in a laundromat—a space of working-class community life, of clothes as markers of identity and labor—is not incidental.
Form and Narrative Structure
Jeong structures the novelette as a series of discrete sections separated by a diamond-and-square motif (◆◇◆◇◆), a visual punctuation that mimics the cyclical rhythm of laundry itself while resisting teleological momentum. The narrative does not build toward a climax in the conventional sense; rather, it spirals inward and outward, returning repeatedly to the laundromat as a kind of centripetal space. This structure is appropriate to a story about circular thinking and deferred decision: form enacts theme.
The first-person narration is notable for its register variability. Jo’s voice oscillates between self-deprecating comedy and raw emotional vulnerability, a tonal range that reflects her psychological state while also serving as a defense mechanism—what Grams identifies as her “knack for camouflaging fear as curiosity.” The prose is dense with sensory specificity, particularly olfactory detail: lavender sachets, fir tree spritzes, mugwort, turpentine, naphthalene. This emphasis on scent is thematically motivated, as smell is the sense most directly linked to memory and emotional recall. Landry and Lundry are distinguished, in part, by their olfactory signatures, and the climax of the story involves Jo burying her face in Moe’s hoodie and inhaling, finally finding in scent the anchor she had been seeking.
The epilogue, rendered in future tense (“Years later, I will receive the news of Grams’s unexpected passing”), introduces a temporal rupture that recontextualizes everything that preceded it. This narratological device—the flash-forward that grants the reader information the narrating self has only in retrospect—is handled with considerable restraint. Jeong does not linger on grief but rather allows it to inflect the final image: Jo, aboard the submarine, glimpsing through the porthole not the threatening abyss she had feared but a surreal procession of lost laundries, sea creatures, and possibly her mother. The unresolvability of the maternal mystery is preserved; the fear is acknowledged but not abolished.
Imagery, Symbolism, and the Fantastic
The central symbolic economy of “Permanent Press” is organized around the domestic and the oceanic as opposed registers—the bounded world of family, routine, and neighborhood set against the vast and unknowable sea. These registers interpenetrate throughout: the washing machine portholes become literal windows onto memory and possible futures; Grams’s fox stole, retrieved from Mr. Lee’s dry cleaner, is revealed to have nine tails, marking it as an object of Korean folklore (the kumiho, or nine-tailed fox); Landry and Lundry themselves, despite their material ordinariness, partake of something supernatural. The story never fully commits to an explanatory framework—are Landry and Lundry spirits? Projections? Aspects of a single consciousness?—and this strategic ambiguity is one of its chief formal strengths.
The concept of the “Laundry Tulpa” is particularly rich. A tulpa, in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, is a being or object created through spiritual or mental discipline; in contemporary usage (particularly within internet and speculative fiction cultures), it has come to denote a thought-form given material reality through sustained mental focus. The tulpa that emerges from Jo’s laundry is thus a literalization of her unresolved interior life—a figure shaped by her hesitation and given physical form by the magical logic of the laundromat. That the tulpa is eventually “washed”—reduced to a lone black sock, which Jo then wields playfully as a mitten—suggests not elimination but transformation: the anxiety is not vanquished but domesticated, incorporated into the fabric (literally) of ongoing life.
Moe’s mural, depicting the childhood sea creatures Jo had imagined alongside a giant angler fish resembling Grams, functions as an externalizing monument to shared imaginative history. Its revelation at a moment of crisis—when Jo is running, directionless, through the neighborhood—arrests her momentum and provokes the cathartic weeping that precedes her reconciliation with Moe. The mural literalizes what the story has been arguing throughout: that the imagination, shared between people, is a form of continuity that survives even departure and loss.
Characterization
Jo is among the more fully realized protagonists in recent speculative short fiction of comparable length. Her interiority is rendered with psychological acuity: her self-deception, her displaced anger toward Moe, her use of comic bravado to mask terror, and her incapacity to ask directly for what she needs (she cannot bring herself to say the word “you” when speaking to Moe of her reluctance to leave) are consistent and convincing. Moe, though a secondary figure, resists the gravitational pull toward idealization that the narrative’s romantic framing might have encouraged; his speech to Jo outside her flat—in which he tells her, with some harshness, not to use Grams or the laundry ghost as excuses—is the most bracing and honest moment in the story.
Grams is the figure who risks the most in characterization, given the potential for her to become a repository of diasporic meaning rather than a person. Jeong largely avoids this pitfall by granting her a subversive wit, a pragmatic relationship to the supernatural, and a physical frailty that emerges unexpectedly in the final scenes. Her cryptic observation about the fox stole—”it’s real for sure, but it’s not real fur”—gestures at the story’s larger interest in the nature of authentic feeling versus performed identity, and in what it means to carry something precious across time and distance.
Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Contexts
“Permanent Press” situates itself within a recognizable tradition of Korean-American speculative fiction that has emerged with particular vitality in the 2010s and 2020s—a body of work that includes authors such as E. Lily Yu and others who bring diasporic experience into dialogue with genre conventions. The story’s engagement with Korean folk cosmology is notable and precise: the haenyeo (female divers of Jeju Island) appear as biographical background for Grams, anchoring her character in a historical practice associated with female economic autonomy and communal labor (Mullaney, “Sea Women of Korea,” 2010). The kumiho resonance of Grams’s fox stole invokes a figure from Korean mythology that is simultaneously feared and liminal—a creature of transformation that exists between the human and the non-human—and aligns Grams with the story’s broader interest in threshold states. The mention of “the massacre in April” in Grams’s reminiscences most plausibly references the Jeju April Third Incident (Jeju 4.3) of 1948, in which tens of thousands of Jeju residents were killed during anti-communist suppression campaigns. Jeong does not dwell on this reference, but its presence anchors the story’s generational trauma in specific historical violence, giving the grandmother’s ghost stories a material and political substrate that enriches rather than burdens the text.
From a theoretical standpoint, the story rewards analysis through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s work on emotional economies and what she terms “sticky” affect—the ways in which emotions adhere to bodies, objects, and spaces, accumulating social meaning through repeated contact (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004). The laundromat in “Permanent Press” is precisely such a sticky space: Jo returns to it compulsively, as if the accumulation of visits might dissolve the emotional residue that clings to her. The clothes themselves—carrying qi, gathering “what-ifs,” capable of spawning spectral doubles—are objects made sticky by the emotions of those who wear them. Jeong’s fantasy logic is, in this sense, an externalization of Ahmed’s theoretical framework: the fantasy makes visible what Ahmed describes analytically.
Evaluation: Strengths and Weaknesses
The principal strengths of “Permanent Press” are its tonal control, its formal consistency, and the depth of its central conceit. The laundromat as psychic-metaphysical space is sustained throughout without exhaustion, and Jeong resists the temptation to over-explain her fantastical elements. The prose is consistently pleasurable: inventive, sensory, alive to comic and elegiac registers simultaneously. The treatment of Korean-American intergenerational dynamics avoids both sentimentality and the flattening of cultural specificity into interchangeable immigrant narrative.
If there is a weakness, it lies in the relative underdevelopment of the Landry/Lundry mythology. The decision to keep these figures deliberately opaque is defensible—ambiguity is formally appropriate here—but there are moments when the opacity tips toward narrative convenience rather than genuine mystery. The revelation that Landry had been holding the lost-and-found box (previously associated with Lundry) gestures at a collapse of the binary between them, but this development is introduced late and without quite sufficient preparation to land with full thematic force. Similarly, the figure of Dr. Gagnier, whose pirate radio broadcasts are established as formative for Jo’s imagination, remains entirely absent from the present-tense narrative; her influence is invoked but not dramatically inhabited. These are minor reservations about a work of considerable ambition and achievement.
The story’s originality is substantial. While magical-realist laundromats are not unknown in speculative fiction, Jeong’s deployment of the space as a phenomenological instrument—specifically as a medium for engaging the temporal plurality of selfhood, the persistence of grief, and the political valences of diaspora—is distinctive and sustains serious critical attention.
Conclusion
“Permanent Press” by Sunwoo Jeong is a formally accomplished and thematically rich work that earns its place among the more significant pieces of speculative short fiction published in recent years. By situating a diasporic Korean-American protagonist within the unlikely sacred space of a neighborhood laundromat and populating that space with allegorical figures drawn from both everyday life and the resonances of Korean folk cosmology, Jeong produces a text that thinks seriously and imaginatively about the phenomenology of choice, the materiality of emotional life, and the ways in which communal bonds survive and transcend individual departure. The thesis advanced in this review—that the story articulates a phenomenology of choice that refuses resolution in favor of presence—is borne out by the narrative’s formal structure, its symbolic economy, and its ultimately affirmative conclusion, which locates meaning not in the decision Jo will eventually make but in the moment of communal belonging that precedes and surrounds it. Future scholarship might productively situate the story in relation to the broader genre of Korean diaspora speculative fiction, examine its engagement with Buddhist and shamanic elements more thoroughly, or consider its relationship to the tradition of feminist speculative fiction concerned with the gendering of domestic space. What is clear, in any case, is that Jeong is a writer of uncommon ability, and “Permanent Press” is a work that rewards careful and repeated reading.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Jeong, Sunwoo. “Permanent Press.” Lightspeed Magazine, Issue Sixty-Nine, March/April 2026, pp. 57–86.
Mullaney, Thomas S. “Sea Women of Korea.” Asian Ethnicity, vol. 11, no. 2, 2010, pp. 165–180.