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.
Korea
Kyungha, a woman living in contemporary Seoul, is burdened by the emotional toll of her past. Deeply empathetic, Kyungha experiences panic attacks and symptoms of anxiety and depression stemming from a harrowing book she wrote about a massacre in a South Korean city. When her friend Inseon suffers an accident, she asks Kyungha to travel to Jeju, an island of Korea’s south coast, to feed her pet bird which will die soon if not tended to. Arriving on Jeju in the midst of a massive blizzard, Kyungha races against the elements to reach the bird, but finds herself in a figurative space where dreams, nightmares and memories collide. phenomena in celebrity practices, cultures, politics, fandom, and economies.
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for US troops to arrive, which started almost three years of US military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for decades.
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story of how the Chinese writing system was adopted—and adapted—in Japan as well as Korea and Vietnam.
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in New York City.
Miyoung has left her home in Japanese-occupied Korea to join her older sister in Kyoto to study. As what would be World War 2 begins to loom, and anti-Korean sentiment rises, Miyoung is caught between the need to pass as Japanese and a romance with an activist.
One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence in 1948 in the zone of US military occupation one month before the establishment in September that year of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) in the Soviet zone.
For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards. Lee also served as South Korea’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2004. Less known is that Lee began his career as a writer, penning novellas and short stories for literary magazines.
In a dystopia-lite future, singles in Korea opt for pseudo-marriages under the mysterious Wedding & Life (W&L for short), an exclusive and expensive matchmaking company that hosts the VIP branch of “New Marriages” (NM). In an NM, W&L clients could pay for a new spouse—either a field wife or field husband (FW or FH)—for a stipulated period. With an influx of abbreviations for each department and a list of company-exclusive terminology, the world of Kim Ryeo-ryeong’s novel The Trunk—recently released as a drama series on Netflix—is corporate and clinical, where emotion is pushed to the edges of the page.
Millennials: The word conjures the tired cliches of internet ragebait: avocado toast and participation trophies. For a long time, millennials were a stereotype of feckless, tech-addicted youth, yet the oldest of us are now in our early 40s. But what of millennials in North Korea? Here, stereotypes of a coddled generation do not apply, and reliable information is not easily accessed. How has North Korea reacted to the information age, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, and the millennial development of its neighbor to the south? These are the questions that Suk-young Kim, author of numerous books on the cultures of North and South Korea, sets out to answer in her most recent book.
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