Children's Novels about Korea by Linda Sue Park

Last spring, when I was informed that my school's English department had hundreds of dollars' worth of extra funding to purchase classroom materials, I decided to spend my share of the money on books. I was hoping to use some of the books as educational tools in my classroom, or at least to lend them to students for extracurricular reading.

Now, I realize that that was a foolish hope, since few of my students are at a high enough level of English to read entire novels, even children's novels, and even if they all could or wanted to, they simply don't have time. They have to study all day and can't read for pleasure, unless it's short-form webcomics or books in Korean that they can get through quickly, between periods.

So, all those wonderful books I bought are being read by nobody except me. 아쉽다! That is, ashipda, or "too bad"... because two that I finished recently would be of great interest to my students, I think. They are both written by Linda Sue Park, a Korean-American author whose work mostly focuses on Korean history and culture.

The first book of hers that I read is called When My Name Was Keoko. It is about a young girl whose family endures the harsh treatment of Koreans by the Japanese because of the occupation during World War II. Actually, the family's story is told from two perspectives, by the girl, Sun-hee (whose Korean name is changed to the Japanese "Keoko" per official mandates at the time), and her brother, Tae-yul, who enlists for the army because he wants to fly planes.

I really enjoyed the novel because it was a personal look at a period in history I know very little about. Of course, I've heard so much about how the occupation was a time of cruel treatment toward the Korean people and irreparable damage to Korean culture -- in fact, centuries of on-and-off oppression have left many Koreans with a bitter vendetta against Japan. But when the facts are told through the eyes of two young children, they become manifested in a way that a history book cannot capture. The book was gripping, dramatic, and inspiring, and I'm sure my students would like it, too.

The second book is called A Single Shard. This book won the Newbery Medal for children's literature in 2002. I had no idea! It appears to have been the book that really made Park's career.

This novel follows the adventures of an oprhan boy named Tree-Ear (I'm guessing that's 목이/木耳?) who dreams of becoming a master potter and learns at the feet of an irritable man who specializes in famous Korean celadon. This is also historical fiction, as it is set in 12th century Korea, which looked nothing at all like Korea today. I mean, this was during the Goryeo dynasty. The capital of Korea was Songdo/Kaesong (in modern-day North Korea), not Seoul. There were no roads, let alone cars, and the society depicted is really just many small mud-hut villages separated by seemingly impassable mountain ranges. How Korea has changed!

I feel pretty neutral about this book; it wasn't bad, but not nearly as interesting as Keoko, because it moves at a slower pace and is further removed from me historically. Still, it was elegant in its simplicity and unique as a carefully-crafted window into an overlooked period and culture.

However, there was one tiny anacrhonism in it that really bugged me: Korea's national dish, kimchi, didn't have red pepper flakes in it until the late 16th century (thanks, incidentally, to the first wave of Japanese invasions...). But when Tree-Ear discovers kimchi in his meal, it has those characteristic red flakes. I don't know why it bothered me so much that there should be such a trivial error, but I guess I'm just... attached to kimchi, after eating it almost once a day for two years!

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So, I got these books, and many others that could be classified as Asian-American lit, just so that my students could read them and see a bit more representation than they're used to form American media. Unfortunately, they'll only gather dust on the library shelves if I don't actively incorporate it into my class somehow.

Actually, when I was talking to some English teachers today, they mentioned that they knew about When My Name is Keoko, so I guess in the past decade, Park's novels have been introduced to English education circles in Korea. I'm very happy about that!

On another note, some of the other books I bought are Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, which really is for children, so I found it too simple for my liking, and a few graphic novels, such as Gene Luen Yang's Level Up and American Born Chinese, as well as Derk Kirk Kim's Same Difference. These I certainly also bought for my own benefit -- i.e., I wanted to read them myself -- but I also thought that because they are graphic novels, my students would find them easier to read. Well, one of my third-years tried American Born Chinese, but the slang in it was beyond him. Oh well, at least he enjoyed the pictures.

What are your favorite English-language books that feature minority and/or foreign cultures?

North Korean Literature from Words Without Borders

Juche Tower in Pyongyang

Something pushed me to set aside my work for a minute and Google "Arduous March" this afternoon. I wanted to find out if "March" referred to the month or the movement. The first search result was Wikipedia's article on the North Korean famine of 1994-1998. As it turns out, that march lasted much longer than a month.

The second result was an excerpt from an autobiography written by one Ji Hyun-ah that described her family's experiences with "the shadow of hardship" and the lengths to which they had to go to feed themselves as hundreds of thousands of North Koreans starved to death.

The excerpt was from a literary magazine called Words Without Borders, and I had a look around its website. Before I knew it, my entire afternoon had been sucked into reading piece after piece of literature in translation from around the world. I couldn't believe that I hadn't known about Words Without Borders before now.

In particular, I wanted to read more works by North Korean defectors (keep in mind that the only literature to come out of North Korea is propaganda). To my surprise, an entire issue last year was devoted to this very group. In May 2013, seven defectors' prose and poetry were published, and I quickly read them all. Here are some standouts:

A Blackened Land by Kim Yeon-seul tells a story of anger heartbreak with hard drug use as its culprit and the despotic Kim regime as its architect. It is accusatory and starkly bitter, almost enough to taste. Last fall I criticized the media for its sensationalist coverage of North Korea's rampant drug use; reading this firsthand account has surely altered the lens through which I look at the issue. Also of note: Kim Yeon-seul is from Chongjin, the hometown of the six defectors profiled in Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, which I am reading currently.

The Poet Who Asked for Forgiveness analyzes the poetry of Kim Chul, following its evolution as the government punished his failure to conform his art to party ideology with separation from his family and forced labor. The strict regulations over the substance of art reminds me of how Shostakovich composed magnificent symphonies during World War II but was creatively controlled by Stalin the whole time. But the communist prohibition of artistic freedom isn't just a smudge in the history of culture; it's still happening in North Korea, where every song on the radio and every movie in theaters grinds the gears of the juggernaut propaganda machine.

Another poem, "Pillow" by Jang Jin-sun, narrates a harrowing and heartbreaking scene in a Pyongyang marketplace. It reads very quickly, but it's easy to see the difference in theme in style -- even in translation -- between the work of a North Korean state poet and that of a North Korean state poet who has defected to South Korea, whose memories of life there are already ten years in the past.

I Want to Call Her Mother Again is tragic. It also offers a peek inside the hanawon where defectors go to adjust to life in South Korea. If you read only one thing to try to understand the experiences of North Korean refugees, this should be it.

Although North Korea was spotlit last year, literature from elsewhere on the peninsula has popped up more recently. The most recent "graphic lit" issue of Words Without Borders includes I Am a Communist, a translated excerpt from a graphic novel detailing a man's difficult life choices in the tumultuous years before the border between the Communist North and the not-so-Democratic South was sealed.

A few years earlier, there was a feature on a translated North Korean comic book (meaning that it was geared toward kids) titled "The Secret of Frequency A". In it, doe-eyed North Korean child geniuses help unravel a conspiracy theory that involves evil American and Japanese scientists killing all the animals in Africa with fatal acoustic signals.

And the final two pieces that I read which stayed with me powerfully were The Chef's Nail, a work of short fiction about a woman from Seoul who rode line 2 of the subway in circles all day -- powerful and mindbending -- and a short comic about mother tongues in Taiwan called Tongue-tied which resonated with me personally.

I'm thrilled to have stumbled upon something new, interesting, and of such high quality, but I'm vacillating over whether or not to subscribe to the magazine, because my Reader is already swamped with hundreds of articles, blog posts, and random junk that I'll never get around to... Nevertheless, I exhort you to check out Words Without Borders, especially if you're into literature in translation or literature of marginalized peoples, and especially especially check out the North Korea issue if you want a large and immediate dose of... tsuris? Litost? Pathos? Conviction.