Ann YK Choi made a splash on the literary scene a decade ago with her debut novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, a coming of age story of a young Korean-Canadian who grew up in her family’s convenience store in 1980s Toronto. This book was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, among many accolades. With her new novel, All Things Under the Moon, Choi effortlessly switches genres from contemporary to historical fiction.
Korea
A new book offers what many readers will find surprising insights into the circulation of texts in the Cold War among three neighbouring countries at odds with one another: North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
In Kyung-Ran Jo’s Blowfish, two people flirt with death in their own traumatic ways, only to find themselves slowly entangled in one another. Translated from the original Korean by Chi-Young Kim, the novel unfolds through alternating perspectives and flits between Seoul and Tokyo. Blowfish privileges atmosphere over plot, unfolding as a moody and cinematic meditation on the slow ascent from the depths of depression.
For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done.
It’s customary to begin writing on North Korea by acknowledging how difficult it is to get reliable information from such a secretive and tightly-controlled regime in such a highly politicized context. Though an undoubtedly repressive regime, in an information vacuum misinformation can spread, such as the easily-disproved but persistent misconception that all North Korean citizens must sport the same distinctive hairstyle as their leader Kim Jong-un.
Initially evoking the sterile chill of a dystopian sci-fi tale, with horse-riding jockey robots and humans replaced by automation, Cheon Seonran’s A Thousand Blues quickly reveals itself as something far richer: a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s uneasy coexistence with technology, as well as the contradictions of a society that both creates and undermines its own systems of care.
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship—if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994.
South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD countries, South Korea is ranked at number 5 for working hours, and at number 33 for worker productivity. The anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs, would have had a field day studying Korean office workers and their creative strategies for seeming busy.
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
Peppa Pig gets around. Having survived accusations of giving American kids British accents, Peppa Pig has now visited Korea, on paper anyway (she’s been there on TV and video for many years). Peppa Goes to Seoul, a publication of Penguin Random House’s Korean operation, was released in the latter part of last year in a still-rare rare example of a multinational publisher localising a product for Asia.
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