When Adam Opens his Eyes is a year-in-the-life novel, a South Korean high school graduate figuring out what to make of his life. A girlfriend nicknames him ‘Adam’, and it is an appropriate designation for the (relative) innocent who tentatively sets out into the real world. Set in the late 1980s, there is a backdrop of significant events, too: the 1987 presidential election — a important step in the democratization of the political process in Korea — and then the 1988 Olympics, held in Seoul.
