I just saw the movie I’ve been waiting years to see: a biopic about the infamous Crown Prince known as Sado Seja. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR89DcvmAtY My reaction?
Sado (2015)
Tag: Korean history
A Short History of the Donghak Peasant Revolution by Soonchul Shin and Jinyoung Lee
Note: I’ve appended an update to the end of this post, with information provided to me on Facebook. Read on for more. Original Post: I’ve been reading up on Korean history—not just out of interest in filling in some blanks in my historical knowledge, but also, I’ll confess, because of an ongoing writing project, and because the library at work has a ton of materials to which I previously had no access—and the results have been interesting… for the most part, anyway. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. There’s hits and misses, and the book I’ll be discussing today is …
Yuan Shih-k’ai by Jerome Chen
Ah, hostile biography. Today I’ll be discussing what I’ve picked up reading a book about Yuan Shih-k’ai (now just Yuan Shikai), the first President of post-revolutionary China. He’s one of those figures I’d never even heard of, and when I stumbled upon Jerome Chen’s eponymously titled biography of the man, I decided to read it mostly out of curiosity regarding his role in Seoul in the turbulent 1880s. I’d assumed his involvement there was the main reason the book was in the library’s holdings at all, to be honest, but it turns out he’s actually more like China’s equivalent of Syngman Rhee, except that just before his downfall, …
The Status of Fiction in Traditional Northeast Asian Literary Culture
A while back, I mentioned how, in 1632, the commoners around Shaoxing (in China) had planned to cosplay the characters from the famous wuxia novel The Outlaws of the Marsh, hoping to appease the gods into making it rain so a famine could be avoided, and some of the local literati had gotten involved, donated some cloth and lots of money, and turned the thing into a massive Harajuku-meets-Vegas stage production extravaganza. Ah, late Ming China! Ah, Zhang Dai! This mini-anecdote leaves me slightly skeptical about parts of the introduction of Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Rok, titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year (a Korean text roughly …
The Mudang’s Dance (Reprint)
So, a few years ago, I was invited to write a piece for Arc Magazine. The result was “The Mudang’s Dance,” a piece on how accelerated modernization and social change seems to have given Korean society an interestingly different relationship with the future (and the past) from what dominates in the English-speaking world. The piece was only available in Arc 1.2… until now. It’s been reprinted in the premiere issue of Compass Cultura, a new travel webzine. See it here. (Note, it’s been a few years… which means my view has evolved somewhat since then; my view of Korea is always shifting and changing as new …