'We rent you a family' — what does the perfect family look like today? [Book Review]

The question arrived without warning: would family be there at the end? The thought of dying alone — the predictable fate of a stubborn old person living by themselves — was unbearable. A wish to close out life on one's own terms, at home, gave way to a more practical need: someone to greet the kind visitors who might come, someone to offer them warm conversation. That deeply personal reckoning with old age and death ultimately led to a decision — to create a company that lends people exactly who they need.

The result was "Perfect Family," a fictional-company art project that visual artist Park Hye-su has run since 2019, offering fake family members for hire. It is not a real company — the name makes that clear. What Park wanted was to use the project to expose the flaws of the patriarchal family system and search for ways to improve it. Yet people who wished it were real began showing up at the door of this unmistakably fake enterprise.

What kind of "fake" did the customers who came over eight years actually want? Park's book "Perfect Family Co., Ltd." gathers the varied stories and heartfelt wishes of those who passed through the project, weaving them together with the artist's pointed questions about norms and systems that remain tethered to a standardized notion of family while failing to keep pace with reality.

Shortly after the project launched, a request arrived: someone was looking for a "good daughter" stand-in. The applicant said she was "neither a good daughter nor had any intention or capacity to become one," and was searching for someone to pass along greetings to her siblings and parents on her behalf, visit occasionally, and cheerfully endure their harsh words in her place. To decide whether to accept the case, the author staged a lecture as a pretext to draw on the wisdom of a group audience.

At the session, two camps squared off: those who argued that hiring a stand-in was preferable to performing the role of a good daughter, and those who insisted the applicant herself should make more effort toward a better relationship with her family. Is compromise and sacrifice simply the price of belonging to a family? Can family roles become a shackle on the individual? The "good daughter stand-in" story ultimately forces a look at the structural oppression that the family unit can produce.

The author identifies the family as the very place in Korean society that justifies sacrifice through an unequal structure — and then makes people feel guilty the moment they try to escape it. That structure encompasses the maternal love and self-sacrifice treated as a mother's default setting, the filial piety that is implicitly demanded, and the discrimination faced by daughters who are expected to intuit their parents' emotions without being asked.

"Within the social convention that families must be harmonious, the absolute belief that a household must never fall apart, and the excuse that someone's sacrifice is inevitable, people are constantly coerced into giving themselves up," the author writes.

The most common request, it turned out, was not for a fake family member at all but for a stand-in for oneself. Many people asked for a "fake me" to go to work in their place; others requested a version of themselves capable of focusing entirely on their own needs. The author describes these as stories that make you think about "how much of ourselves we spend on things that don't really matter."

"Perfect Family Co., Ltd." ultimately sharpens into a critique of a system that fails to reflect today's reality, in which single-person households are the norm. In South Korea, the family remains the smallest unit of welfare, and the government still does not recognize diverse family forms beyond blood ties and marriage. The story of one artist who chose adoption simply to become family with a friend brings that reality into stark relief.

The author sees the emergence of business models like "Perfect Family" as inevitable given the government's inaction, driven by a growing desire to form new kinds of families. "In Korean society, whether or not you have a family is a factor that determines how trustworthy people think you are," she writes, adding that "the 'fake family rental business' is bound to be a promising industry of the future — one that could become reality at any time, as long as family-centered culture remains unchanged."

"Perfect Family Co., Ltd." by Park Hye-su / Dolbegae