Student bookshelf by Aurelia Paul: Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Aurelia Paul is a senior year student at Boston University, studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her fortnightly column, Student bookshelf, she shares responses to texts she's reading in her classes.

Here she discusses Who Ate Up All the Shinga? An Autobiographical Novel by Park Wan-suh.

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer from Korea. She was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then came the Japanese Occupation, complicating her day-to-day life, and her beliefs.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga? Examines the ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before, during, and after the Japanese Occupation. The novel is notable for Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter.

So, over to Aurelia...

Q & A: Michael Breen

A long-term resident of Seoul, Michael Breen is a British journalist who first went to Korea as a freelance reporter, contributing to a range of international publications. His wife is Korean, and he speaks the language, although he engages the help of translators and interpreters when necessary. He has just published The New Koreans: The Business, History And People Of South Korea. The book began as an update to an earlier one, The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies. This was written in the late 1990s, and Michael found so much had changed that his intended update turned into a new book. 

Who are the South Koreans, and where does their future lie?  The New Koreans explores the nature and the values of the Korean people against the background of a detailed examination of the complex history of the Korean Peninsula, in particular its division, and South Korea’s emergence as an economic power.

Given this is your second book on the subject, are you worried tracking the contemporary history of South Korea will come to dominate your writing life?

I’m not done with Korea, but I’m done with this topic of the general study of it. A quick update to the new book would be manageable, but a major strategic shift on the part of the Koreans – like, say, re-unification – would need another whole new book and I’m not sure I’m up for that.