The New Koreans

The New Koreans
Author: Michael Breen
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250065054

"Just a few decades ago, the Koreans were an impoverished, agricultural people. In one generation they moved from the fields to Silicon Valley. The nature and values of the Korean people provide the background for a more detailed examination of the complex history of the country, in particular its division and its emergence as an economic superpower. Who are these people? And where does their future lie?"--

In Order to Live

In Order to Live
Author: Yeonmi Park
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0698409361

“I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.” - Yeonmi Park "One of the most harrowing stories I have ever heard - and one of the most inspiring." - The Bookseller “Park's remarkable and inspiring story shines a light on a country whose inhabitants live in misery beyond comprehension. Park's important memoir showcases the strength of the human spirit and one young woman's incredible determination to never be hungry again.” —Publishers Weekly In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom. Park confronts her past with a startling resilience. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country. Park’s testimony is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

Friend

Friend
Author: Paek Nam-nyong
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0231551401

Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists’ past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge’s own marital troubles. A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea’s most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea
Author: Erik Mobrand
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2019-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0295745487

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Exploring South Korea’s political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.

The Interpreter

The Interpreter
Author: Suki Kim
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429923784

A striking first novel about the dark side of the American Dream Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system. Young, attractive, and achingly alone, she makes a startling and ominous discovery during one court case that forever alters her family's history. Five years prior, her parents--hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children's gain--were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their fruit and vegetable stand. Or so Suzy believed. But the glint of a new lead entices Suzy into the dangerous Korean underworld, and ultimately reveals the mystery of her parents' homicide. An auspicious debut about the myth of the model Asian citizen, The Interpreter traverses the distance between old worlds and new, poverty and privilege, language and understanding.

Korea after the Crash

Korea after the Crash
Author: Brian Bridges
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134595034

Brian Bridges examines the impact on South Korea of the financial crisis of 1997. Covering events up to and including the recent parliamentary elections in South Korea, the book considers the socio-economic and political implications of the financial crisis. It is invaluable reading for students of modern Korea.

How I Became a North Korean

How I Became a North Korean
Author: Krys Lee
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571276229

Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi, on the other hand, has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border.families. Danny is a Chinese-American teenager of Korean descent whose parents left China when he was nine; his quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast among his peers, and he yearns for the China of his youth.These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea--Danny to visit his mother, who is working as a missionary there; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adopted family. The novel transports the reader to one of the most complex and threatening environments in the world, and explores how humanity persists even in the most dire of circumstances.