The New Asian City
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- Category: Literary
The Korea Society and the Van Alen Institute present a panel discussion on The New Asian City: Three Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form, a history of urban development in Asia. Drawing on a wide range of literature, film, and policy, Professor Jini Kim Watson reveals how the hyper-urbanization of the Pacific Rim reflects the psychic and political dramas of its colonized past and globalized present. Author Jini Kim Watson (NYU), Andrei Harwell (Yale School of Architecture), Samuel Jamier (Japan Society’s film curator), and Jinhee Park and John Hong (both of the Harvard Graduate School of Design) will discuss how culture, politics, and history influence the rapidly changing urban environments of East Asian metropolises.The discussion will be organized by the five themes identified in Jinhee Park’s and John Hong’s upcoming book, Convergent Flux.
Hearts of Pine
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- Category: Literary
In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "comfort women" system—those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military—lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. Joshua Pilzer’s Hearts of Pine provides a window into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of ten years, the author worked with these elderly women: smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, and trying to understand and document their worlds of song.
Literary Cafe: Passages
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- Category: Literary
Award-winning author Young-ha Kim examines the journey away from Communism through the stories of North Korean defectors he interviewed while researching his latest novel, Your Republic is Calling You. The evening will also include a screening of Mikhail Zheleznikov’s For Home Viewing, a short film that depicts the final days of the Cold War through the life changes of the Russian filmmaker.
Tuesday, February 15
6:30PM
Book Cafe: In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876-1888
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- Category: Literary
Please join us for an intimate round-table discussion with Dr. Wayne Patterson on his new book, In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876-1888. According to Dr. Patterson, “when discussing Korea's "Chinese Decade," defined as the dozen years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul. Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea's newly-formed Maritime Customs Service. Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, this book uncovers some heretofore unknown aspects of this attempted takeover by China.”
Admission complimentary. Seating is very limited.
Your Republic Is Calling You
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- Category: Literary
The Korea Society welcomes beloved Korean author Young-ha Kim as we celebrate the publication of his fourth novel, Your Republic Is Calling You, in English translation. Kim has participated in the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, won all three of the prestigious Korean literary prizes in a single year (2004), has had major motion pictures based on his work, and is one of the first modern Korean writers to be translated by a major American publishing house.
Emotionally taut and psychologically astute, Your Republic Is Calling You reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the ways in which people sometimes never really know the ones they love. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, family man Gi-yeong is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years. Suddenly, he receives a mysterious email—a possible directive from the home office to come in from the cold.
Spanning the course of one day, the novel confronts moral questions on the small and large scale, and addresses the political and cultural transformations that have shaped Korea since the 1980s.
Tuesday, October 12
6:30PM Reading and Reception
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