In this series we present you the 5 popular memoirs from South Korea. If you want to learn about Korean History or you want to set up a business in Korea or you need to relocate to Korea, these memoirs will give you insights which a guide book cannot. These books are about real people, real experiences and the real Korea.
To Kill a Tiger: A Memoir of Korea
by Jid Lee
To Kill a Tiger is the winner of Bronze Award at ForeWord Book of the Year Awards.
Against the backdrop of modern Korea’s violent and tumultuous history, To Kill A Tiger relates not only one woman’s story, but also an ancient people’s journey into the modern, globalized world.
Drawing on Korean legend and myth, as well as an Asian woman’s unique perspective on the United States, Lee has written a searing portrait of a woman and a society in the midst of violent change. Lee weaves her compelling personal narrative with a collective and accessible history of modern Korea, from Japanese colonialism to war- era comfort women, from the genocide of the Korean War to the government persecution and silence of Cold War-era pogroms. The ritual of storytelling, which the author shares with the women of her family, serves as a window into a five-generation family saga, and it is through storytelling that Lee comes to appreciate the sacrifices of her ancestors and her own now American place in her family and society.
In To Kill a Tiger Lee provides a revelatory look at war and modernization in her native country, a story of personal growth, and a tribute to the culture that formed her.
My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store
by Ben Ryder Howe
This warm and funny tale of an earnest preppy editor finding himself trapped behind the counter of a Brooklyn convenience store is about family, culture and identity in an age of discombobulation.
It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws’ Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton’s Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store’s tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.
Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea
by Jane Jeong Trenka
The powerful second memoir by the author of the widely acclaimed The Language of Blood
made in Korea > cheap goods > cheap labor > cheap womb > cheap adoption > cheap immigration > cheap immigrant > cheap yellow daughter > honorary white > almost but not quite
Whenever she speaks to a stranger in her native Korea, Jane Jeong Trenka is forced to explain what she is. Japanese? Chinese? The answer—that she was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in the United States—is a source of grief, pride, and confusion.
Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous setbacks, Trenka resolves to learn the language and ways of her unfamiliar birth country.
Still Life With Rice
by Helie Lee
In this radiant memoir of her grandmother’s life, Helie Lee probes a history and a culture that are both seductively exotic and strangely familiar. And with wit and verve she claims her own Korean identity, illuminating the intricate experiences of Asian-American women. Born in 1912 – “the year of the rat” – to aristocratic parents, Hongyong Baek came of age in a unified but socially repressive Korea, where she learned the roles that had been prescribed for her: obedient daughter, demure wife, efficient household manager. Ripped from her home first during the Japanese occupation and again during the bloody civil war that divided her country, Hongyong fought to save her family by drawing from her own talents and values. Over the years she provided for her husband and children by running a successful restaurant, building a profitable opium business, and eventually becoming adept at the healing art of Chiryo. When she was pressured to leave her country, she moved with her family to California, where she reestablished her Chiryo practice. Writing in her grandmother’s voice, Helie Lee depicts the concerns and conflicts that shaped one family’s search for home. Evocative and keenly felt, Still Life with Rice interprets issues that touch all of us: the complex nature of family relations, the impact of social upheaval on an individual, and the rapidly changing lives of women in this century.
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea
JaHyun Kim Haboush
Lady Hyegyong’s memoirs, which recount the chilling murder of her husband by his father, is one of the best known and most popular classics of Korean literature. From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, which depicts a court life whose drama and pathos is of Shakespearean proportions. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this first complete English translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply intelligent and articulate woman.
JaHyun Kim Haboush’s accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and of how the genre of autobiography fared in premodern times.
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