Paper Villages

Song Yerim has spent twelve years erasing places. As senior draftsman at the State Cartography Bureau, she removes inconvenient hamlets from official maps and asks no questions—a discipline learned the year her father died in custody. Then a directive orders her to delete six villages and four thousand people from a river valley, and inside the file she finds her father's handwriting: a warning that the dam will fail. Four thousand lives, one sheet of paper, and a truth nobody wants drawn.