Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life. With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Literature & Fiction

Park, Wan-suh

Literary

Columbia University Press

This eclectic, moving and richly enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature.\nJourneying through Korea's dramatic recent past, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era to the devastating war between north and south and the rapid, disorienting urbanization of later decades, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories captures a hundred years of vivid storytelling.\nHere are peddlers and donkeys travelling across moonlit fields; artists drinking and debating in the tea-houses of 1920s Seoul; soldiers fighting for survival; exiles from the war who can never go home again; and lonely men and women searching for connection in the dizzying modern city. The collection features stories by some of Korea's greatest writers, including Pak Wanso, O Chonghui and Cho Chongnae, as well as many brilliant contemporary voices, such as P'yon Hyeyong, Han Yujoo and Kim Aeran. Curated by Bruce Fulton, this is a volume that will surprise, unsettle and delight.

The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories: Bruce Fulton

Oh Jung-hee

Hwang, Sunwon

Hye-young, Pyun

Han Yujoo

Yi, Sang

Pak Wanso

Kim Aeran

Cho Chongnae

Jo Jung-rae

Jung Young Moon

P'yŏn Hyeyŏng

Kim Taeyong

Chu Yosŏp

Contemporary

Penguin Classics

In this collection by a canonical figure in Korean literature, meditations upon life in old age come to the fore -- at its best, accompanied by great beauty and compassion; at its worst by a cynicism that nonetheless turns a bitter smile upon the changing world.

Lonesome You (Library of Korean Literature, 09)

Dalkey Archive Press

Part of the Modern Korean Short Stories Series, the short story "Weathered Blossom" illustrates elders in love, but also discerns the substance of love, and distance between reality and feeling of love. The lady believes that love is beautiful only with lust, as it is the only way to be blinded. Thus she realizes elders in love can not be anything but a charming facade then humbly accepts reality. However, to say her lustless love is not beautiful is incorrect, as she humbly accepts the limitation of age and reality. -Lee Nam-ho, Literary Critic and Professor at Korea University

Weathered Blossom (Modern Korean Short Stories)

Hollym International Corporation

A look inside the hidden world of Korean women by one of that country's best-known feminist writers.

Sketch of the Fading Sun

White Pine Pr

The Naked Tree: A Novel (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 83)

A coming-of-age novel set during the Korean War, by Pak Wan-Suh, one of Korea's leading contemporary writers. The award-winning author of more than twenty novels, and numerous short stories and essays, Park often deals with the themes of Korean War tragedies, middle-class values, and women's issues. The novel is rich with scenes of cultural clashes, racial prejudice, and the kinds of misunderstandings that many American soldiers and Koreans experienced during the war years.

Cornell East Asia Series

tofuReading a prose written by a novelist may be limited to readers who follow the writer, but it gives me a sense of pleasure that seems to peek into the private life of a writer. The pleasure is also the relief to know that the novelists who have seen high only are eating, drinking, sleeping and thinking like us (think of innocent men as women thought that they were eating dew), It is also a different expression of awe to their pondering shining even in free prose form.   Although it is a prose book that came out in five years since "man playing man", the artists thoughts about the life that have been matured and have been attached to life are still sharp. Tofu is not all the same tofu in the title tofu. Ordinary people eat mostly tofu when they go to prison, but Chun Doo-hwan does not eat tofu while he comes out as a jewel. Many people who gave him to eat "tofu" were still in prison while he was still in prison, and the residents even put up a welcome placard. But the artist s gaze is not the former president or the democratic fighter. There was a young man who had no background (no star) tofu which he had eaten since he got out of prison. Just by being able to realize the dark back of our society through tofu, the value of this prose is enough. I do not think that all the topics covered by the book are heavily weighted on the title of the book, but there are some articles such as "Look at my inner selfishness", but rather the miscellaneous social phenomena seen in old ages eyes, The writings about her life are like the stories of writers and artists who have closely watched by writers such as Kim Yoon-sik and Park Soo-keun. In an interview, novelist Kim Hoon said, "The writings that pass through life can impress people." It is never easy to show what kind of wisdom is in old age, but the writings that comfort readers shine.

Tofu (Korean edition)

Windowless

Hommy (Korean Edition)

Opening Ceremony

empty room (Korean Edition)

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