Posts by Shadow Guide

Books on Korean Subjects – A Selected Recommended List

Posted by Shadow Guide on Sep 15, 2009 in On Events & Presentations , On Korean Books & Culture | 2 comments

This year I once again spent a week of August at a Korean culture camp, Camp Sejong in New Jersey (more about camp in a later blog), as the Creative Writing teacher.

Soul Food

Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 27, 2009 in On Korean Books & Culture | 3 comments

Reunion

Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 26, 2009 in Author's Korean Connections, On Korean Books & Culture, On Race & Culture | Comments Off on Reunion

Forty years ago this summer, between my junior and senior years of high school, our family and our Korean colleagues embarked on an extraordinary adventure.

Carpenters and cooks, nurses and nurses’ aides, and visiting doctors and volunteers, both Korean and foreign, together built a community health project directed by my father on Kojedo, a remote rural island off the southern coast. The model we developed there influenced the design of South Korea’s rural health care delivery system. The boldness and difficulty of what we attempted forged deep and abiding relationships, like those of war buddies.

I spent the year after high school and a year and a half after college as a volunteer with the project. My social peers were the nurses’ aides, island girls who were trained to deliver basic public health care to the subsistence-level farmers and fishermen of their villages.

In addition to creating posters for health education, my assistant Kun-sun and I ran the Mu-ji-gae Tabang (Rainbow Tearoom), where the aides gathered on their breaks for a snack of instant coffee and homemade cookies.

Last week, thirty-two years since I left Kojedo, I returned (with my daughter, Yunhee, and her fiance, Josh) for three days of reunions with former staff members, including many of the nurses’ aides. What a joy it was to see their faces again, unchanged despite our transformation from unmarried girls into middle-aged mothers, wives and professional women.

The island itself has been trans-formed by the presence of two of the world’s largest shipyards. Unpaved roads and walking paths among villages with straw- and tile-roofed houses have been replaced with a network of highways connecting busy towns and cities with clusters of high-rise apartments. The peninsula site of our project has returned to nature and is preserved as a city park, with a monument to my father and a soaring bridge connecting to the island across the channel.

But the island still has fresh air and ocean breezes; gorgeous vistas along a shoreline of steep hills, inlets and bays; fresh seafood cooked in spicy broths; and lovely people speaking the island dialect, warmly welcoming us home.

Between Worlds

Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 26, 2009 in On Race & Culture, On Transracial Adoption | Comments Off on Between Worlds

Back in Maine, I’m in the process of returning to my life here. People who were raised in two countries and two cultures spend their lives in a between state.

But jet lag offers a rare chance to experience it consciously. The sun may be high in the sky, but your body tells you it’s nighttime. In that short-lived haze, images and sensations from both places swirl in the mind simultaneously.

Last week I revisited the sites of some of the most evocative scenes of my childhood. When I was nine, our family moved from Seoul to Taegu where my father worked at Dong San Hospital. After a year in a large Western-style house up on the walled mission compound, we moved off the hill into a Korean home on a city street.

Every time I climbed the stone steps in the alleyway to play with my missionary friends, I crossed a threshold between two sharply contrasting worlds:

I wanted a world I couldn’t have.

Tiny elfin homes of moss and bark

and twigs, with acorn shells for dishes.

Under great trees I played

making fairy princess dolls from the blossoms

of pomegranate and hibiscus bushes;

while down at the bottom of the hill

a beggar boy squatted with his can at the gate,

or a mother sat holding her sleeping baby in her arms,

the child’s matted hair the color of despair.

And in the stone streets small thickset ponies

with flies about their heads

pulled cartloads much too heavy;

they staggered and starved and died, whipped

by owners not cruel

but just as poor and desperate as the ponies.

In the walled garden above I ran about

with the other feather-haired children

beneath a canopy of flowering cherries

whose petals drifted

to form a carpet of palest pink dotting the green grass.

Then I walked home down an alley

of granite block steps

where urine and food scraps ran along the gutter

and tin-roofed shacks clinging

to the hillside were homes

and the granite steps were the children’s

playground.

Last week, I returned to Taegu to discover that, forty-five years later, our Korean home is now a parking lot, but the alley steps are still there! At the top of the hill, several of the old Western houses are intact, converted into museums showcasing the history of missionary work.

It was eery to walk the ground, like a stage set of the play of my childhood (everything seemed to have been reconstructed at 2/3 scale). Tall buildings, the emblem of South Korea’s extraordinary industrialization, surround what used to be the compound. The economic inequities that created a chasm between the two worlds of my childhood are gone.

Now I have a new set of worlds to navigate and make meaning of – the past and the present.

A Global Community

Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 25, 2009 in Author's Korean Connections, On Korean Books & Culture | 1 comment

For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) . The organization supports writers and illustrators, both published and aspiring, through a website, a bimonthly newsletter (for which I write a column, “The Illustrator’s Perspective”), and local, regional, and national conferences, plus many other services.

SCBWI is essential in connecting children’s book creators – to methods for improving our work; to information about publishing; to agents, editors, publishers, reviewers and others in the market; and best of all, to each other.

For me, those connections got broader last week. In anticipation of my presentations at Seoul Foreign School, teacher and writer Christina Farley (far right in photo) invited me to meet with members of the newly-formed Korea chapter of SCBWI. We gathered over a delicious Korean meal: Christy, her husband and I, and two other writers – Leta (far left) and Jenny (second from left), who formed and directs the Korea chapter.

What’s more delightful to a group of writers than spending an evening talking craft and marketing? The hours sped by as we shared. The chapter only formed in January, but its members are active: networking all over Asia and the world (they had some great connections for me), savvy about children’s book publishing, and most importantly, serious about writing.

The chapter presented me with a wonderful gift – a display of traditional Korean kites (SCBWI’s logo image is a kite).