Three Questions About Western Historiography and Korea

Another excerpt from Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea, and two three questions: Given the speed of change in modern Korea, it takes some mental effort to recall the conditions of diet, health, housing, education, and living standards that prevailed in Korea at the time of liberation. In the 1930s, for example, life expectancy was thirty-six years for men and thirty-eight years for women. Women were treated like chattel by their own relatives. They had little autonomy or even identity of their own. They were known as so-and-so’s mother or daughter or wife and their given names were so seldom …

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The Fascinating Victoria Yankovsky

UPDATE (26 Feb. 2017): Some fascinating commentary, and even a new photo, can be found in the comments section below. Don’t miss it! ORIGINAL POST: So, since we got back from Korea, I’ve been struggling to get back to work on my novel(s), but I have managed to do some editing and send out a piece that I wrote earlier this year. I’ve also started editing another into shape, and have been knocking together bits and pieces that will become stories at some point. One of the more dark and harrowing stories concerns one Viktoria Yankovsky—well, not real Victoria Yankovsky, …

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Donald Clark’s Living Dangerously in Korea

I’ve mentioned Donald Clark’s book Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950 a few times lately (and it will certainly come up again), but I haven’t really summed up my thoughts on the book, something I’m trying to do a little more since falling out of the habit last year. Here are my thoughts… 

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Korean Fiction, For Free… (In a Limited Range of Editions)

While I think Charles Montgomery at Korean Literature in Translation overstates things a little bit by calling it a “triumph,” it’s worth noting that LTI Korea has released a set of twenty early modern Korean texts for free. (That is, early 20th century texts: “early modern” begins much later in Korean lit than English lit, where it’s used to talk about Shakespeare.) The reason I think it’s an overstatement to call this a triumph has nothing to do with the translations–of which I’ve only read a little so far, though what I’ve seen looks good–but with the media in which …

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Links You Should Check Out

Today, I was reminded of why I stopped doing these link roundups: they’re time-consuming to produce. I’ll probably switch to just tweeting or linking on Facebook, like almost everyone else I know, and this is probably the last post like this I’ll do. But anyway: Typhoon Haiyan: We were lucky: it was much-diminished when it hit Vietnam, and on top of that, it landed nowhere near us. Folks in the Philippines were nowhere near so lucky, and pretty desperately need our help. Climate change is apparently making storms (and other extreme weather events) worse, so events like Haiyan are likely …

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