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.
In preparation for camp, I compiled a list of recommended books that camp kids and their families could order. I’ll be presenting it here in five parts over the next few days, from picture books to adult literature.
I chose highly recommended books which were still in print and easily available, limited the entire list to no more than 50 books, and focused on books that weren’t as widely known (other books by Linda Sue Park, for instance, rather than her best-known, Newbery Award-winning
A Single Shard, which is often read in schools). There are a few that I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading, but all that I included have strong reviews.
I’d love to hear comments and other recommendations.
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Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 27, 2009 in On Korean Books & Culture | 3 comments
Since we arrived in Seoul in 1960, I’ve been drawn to the folk art of Korea with its bold design, brilliant colors, fantastical creatures, and whimsical humor. I filled up on such images this trip.
Dragons, angels and dog-like hae-tae at Buddhist temples; cranes, turtles, deer and other long-life symbols on embroidered screens and clothing; the um-yang (yin-yang) symbol on gates – all delight the eye and feed the soul.
Perhaps the symbolic meaning that these images convey, even subconsciously, explains the power of their charm.
One of my best finds was a book, Korean Patterns, with photographs by Jae-sik Suh, from a wonderful bookstore, Seoul Selections, which carries a wide selection of English-language books about Korea. Looking at the pictures in it makes me happy. It will provide an ongoing source of nourishment until the next time I return to Korea.
Photographs by Joshua Keough
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Posted by Shadow Guide on Jun 10, 2009 in On Korean Books & Culture | Comments Off on From Seoul
At the invitation of my high school, Seoul Foreign School, I’m in South Korea for 11 days. It’s been nine years since I was last here, and once again I’m astonished at the changes in the city that was once familiar to me.
Seoul is more urbanized than ever and I’m struck this time by how international it’s become. It’s not just the frequent glimpses of Western chains – Starbucks, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s – but the predominance of Western influences in trendy coffee houses, cosmetic shops and restaurants – chic, upscale, and sophisticated.
In a clean, brightly-lit subway car, the young passengers are in t-shirts and distressed jeans, ballet slipper flats and athletic shoes, tunic tops over leggings, with white cords of Ipods dangling from ears and fingers busily texting on “hand phones.” If not for the all-Korean faces in this crowd, I could be in a U.S. city or in many other urban centers the world over.
Globalization is erasing the particularity of Korea. It makes the sightings of truly Korean details – yellow melons and crisp apples sold off the backs of trucks, street vendor stalls with trays of ricecakes or steaming vats of noodles, walls enclosing tiled-roof homes – all the more precious.
Our children are growing up in a world that is ever more connected. Differences of time, custom and tradition are bypassed with internet hookups and instant messaging. But in a global culture defined by the chatter of media and technology in the common language of commercialization, where is true substance to be found?
Our souls still need the poetry and beauty of ancient, particular ways of living.
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Posted by Shadow Guide on May 24, 2009 in On Diverse & Global Books, On Korean Books & Culture | Comments Off on Featuring Difference
In April, Margy Burns Knight and I spend six days in Philadelphia-area schools, presenting on the five books she wrote and I illustrated: the two Talking Walls titles; Who Belongs Here: An American Story; Welcoming Babies; and Africa Is Not A Country. As all these books concern the diversity of human experience – in culture, language, race, religion, etc. – Margy and I use every opportunity to address the topic of difference in a positive light.
We often begin our talks with information about ourselves as children. Some students in these Philadelphia suburban schools can see themselves in Margy’s story of being raised in nearby Villanova and, by her description, “never going anywhere except school, church, the library and the grocery store.” Her extensive international experience didn’t happen until she was an adult.
Other students can identify with my story of living in the U.S. until age seven, when our family moved to South Korea and I began to learn two languages and two cultures. They or their parents may have been born in another country and moved to the U.S.
In some classes, we open with the slide I use here on my blog, of me celebrating my eighth birthday in Seoul with Korean friends. I start speaking in Korean, telling a little about my childhood experience.
Then, still speaking Korean, I say, “If you can understand what I’m saying, please come to the front of the room.” Seated students watch mystified as a few of their classmates stand and move forward to join me. Sometimes one or several of the students interpret, telling their classmates what I’d said in Korean.
We count from one to five in Korean, then ask for volunteers who can count to five in any language other than English. Proud students stand to demonstrate their skill in Farsi, Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish, Hindi and many other languages.
Teachers often tell us what a special moment this is for their non-majority, bilingual students, many of whom started out in ESOL classes. For once, their difference puts them in the center rather than on the fringe. For a moment, their bicultural and bilingual upbringing is recognized as something special and valuable.
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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.