Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke that Changed My Life, by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Enhancing an already enthralling beginning about the surprising facts of a young woman’s stroke at age 33, the writing in this book is what continues to beguile and capture, elevating the work to a mesmerizing memoir of a condition and a long recovery that changed her life, and the lives of many others as well. The author’s sense of detail and her reference to her journals of those days, combined with impressive research that only adds to the narrative, makes the memoir a sensitive portrayal of the condition of stroke and its result of making the brain and its memories a jumble. She writes of her experience not merely as a metaphor for her own psychological condition where the stroke made a dividing line of before and after, but also as a journey of exploration and compassionate understanding of the fraught emotional delicacies contained in that before and after, specifically the loss of her marriage, integrating her childhood history of violence, a core change in personality, of becoming a mother, discovering her body in health, and finding love anew. The book is organized like memory—fragments of scenes that appear and reappear, information and deep reflection salient to those fragments, and overall a sense of artfulness in the manipulation of time as an apt way to organize a story that threw the narrator herself out of linear time. It is an honest, heartfelt and brave book, an absorbing read not just about the condition of stroke, but about identity and finding self-love.

Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited, by Anaïs Bordier and Samantha Futerman

A friend of a Korean adoptee finds a photo on Facebook of a girl who could be her double. Indeed, they begin to talk to each other from California and France, and soon learn there are too many similarities in their adoption stories for their same looks to be mere coincidence. The journey of these two young ladies, one an actress, the other a fashion design student, and their families is a stirring portrayal of lost twins found again through sheer chance and perseverance. Also a well-made documentary. 

Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite, by Suki Kim

Suki Kim went undercover as a Christian missionary among Christian missionaries who went undercover to North Korea under the guise of educators to young men of that nation's privileged elite. Admittedly an atheist, her double subterfuge is compounded by the oppressive regime under which she became a professor of ESL. I devoured this book in one morning both for its stellar writing and for a story that grips from the get-go and doesn't let go. The rarity of her experience, and the slow burn of its impact on her character and her life are intimately portrayed, and her love for the youth she instructed shines through with to augment the conviction of her purpose in going there. It is a book of rare courage, in which betrayal is necessarily a part of its existence, but one that feels justified by the exposure of the complexity of what it must be like for even the cream of the crop to live in this cloistered land.

Turn to the East, by Caroline Singer and C. Le Roy Baldridge

As a piece of "living history," this fascinating large-format volume brings together the narrative of Caroline Singer and artwork of her husband, Roy Baldridge, of their year (likely 1924-25) in the Far East, including Japan, Korea and China. What makes this work fascinating is the sensitivity of these Westerners about what they experience and how it compares to other Western and political prejudices. From the Foreword: "So here…rendered in two different media, brought together because they are complementary, the imprint of the East on two different personalities. 

"It is no easy task, this rendering. Only the dull rush heedlessly into print with 'impressions of the Orient." To those with more sensitive perceptions, the East is too overwhelming for easy articulateness. It intimidates. The first few hours in Peking not only confuse, they frighten. Color is too vivid, motion in too unfamiliar a rhythm, mass too imposing, the content of the life about one too alien for translation into term intelligible to the Western mind. Another barrier also intervenes: the prejudices of foreign residents. To escape the influence of either their over-enthusiasm or maladjustment is difficult for one thrown suddenly into an alien culture."

But the two manage, despite all that. She overcomes her culture to strip and change in front of a crowd of welcoming swimmers (men and women) to Japanese men's underwear (the only garments that would fit her), enjoying the swim, only to realize the white garments are transparent in the water. But by then, she recognizes that no one cares, and so she lets it go and enjoys the company and the swim, to the horror of her husband. His illustrations are without prejudice, sensitive to the reality he portrays and skilled in his artistry to show it as real.

For Korea, they take note of the modernization that Japan brought with colonization, but also note that it was unwelcome, and she tells one particular story that exemplifies the effect of such change—hard white highways built by the Japanese, excellent railways, and in particular one steel bridge:

"Last night from the steel bridge a Korean girl threw herself into the river. Her body was found by fishermen at dawn.

"Not much over sixteen, she had been wed to a youth of her own age, wed in the traditional manner by arrangement between families. Such a marriage being almost inviolable, a divorce would be the affair not of individuals, but of clans. From the first, the girl was gentle, knowing a wife's duty. But the young man was of a newer mold, a rebel against tradition, against old-fashioned authority. He wished to choose a wife for himself. [He went] to the local authorities, the new rulers whose power is naturally greater than that of a subject's father…[and appealed] in the name of the law as new as the bridge, and as alien. What he demanded was granted—a modern divorce.

"She who had been a bride was now neither a wife nor yet a maid free to reenter her father's house, eligible again for marriage. No respected Korean family would accept her as daughter-in-law. Scorned publicly by her husband, she was disgraced, and her shame became the shame of her bewildered relatives. In her father's house she was, as in her husband's, unwelcome.

"Wearing fresh white linens from her bridal chest, she ran, last night, to meet death. Through stinking streets, past barred gates of unfriendly houses, past barred gates of the mission's gardens, she ran, a whimpering thing in white, while we lay between decent sheets, dreaming. This is the story I got this morning from the missionary's wife, whose cook had it from the gatekeeper, he having listened to the group of peddlers.

"Today I will not go down to the river."

I Married a Korean by Agnes Davis Kim

My family knew Agnes Davis Kim as "Auntie Agnes," though she wasn't a blood relative. My Korean parents knew her, perhaps from Korea, perhaps afterwards as immigrants in America, but her book was always on our shelves, and we would visit Auntie Agnes and Uncle David on their farm in the Catskills every summer when I was young. I saw a calf being birthed on their farm, circled cow pies, drove in the herd, woke early to watch the milking machines, had my first (awful) taste of raw milk straight from the cow (blue strings in it), and smelled chitterlings cooking for the first time ever when I sneaked into the worker's quarters. I slept on a cot in the living room with my 5 other siblings, and roamed the fields and woods during unforgettable farm summers. I finally read her book, and though I remember seeing her lovely and informative illustrations, it is only now that I can appreciate what she went through to have accomplished an interracial marriage in that time. The American community in Korea was against it, aghast, really, and she faced them all and insisted on the choice of love. She adapted her life with pioneer-woman strength to the more close-to-the-earth kind of life of Korean women of the day, and created many modern conveniences within her own home (especially the kitchen) in order to run a smooth household. Among them: a method of creating hot running water, learning how to perserve and keep food through the winter the Korea way, learning how to be subservient in appearances for her husband's sake, and creating and running a successful women's clinic in the midst of Japanese colonial oppression. I had never known she was medically trained, nor had I known the kind of racism she had experienced for her choice to marry. It is an informative and interesting book that portrays these kinds of personal struggles, as well as the inventive solutions she applied to overcome them. Her love of both her husband, his family, and the Korean people is palpable, and honorable, and her illustrations bring to life in detail the challenges of her life in Korea. The image isn't the book cover (a navy blue cloth binding) but is the frontispiece, one of Mrs. Kim’s illustrations presented throughout the book.

Remembering Korea 1950: A Boy Soldier's Story by H. K. Shin

This slim volume, a gem, tells Shin's story of his boyhood and his experience in the Korean War as a sixteen-year-old ROK soldier. While many books written in English cover the action and politics of the war, especially from the American point of view, few tell in such a personal way about the individual Korean experience of this war on families, on refugees, on the young men in battle. Laced with important historical hindsight about the movement of the war, the narrative has the ring of truth of the young man who witnessed many aspects of this confusing war and reconstruction, and who managed to survive in order to continue his education. It is both informative and charming, as the narrator's voice is one of self-deprecation and gentle humor.

My Korean Deli, by Ben Ryder Howe

Ben, a self-proclaimed WASP, and Gab, his Korean American wife, live in the basement of her family’s house, Korean-style, as the young couple saves money to move into their own home. But for the mother's sake (a motivation and decision that felt somewhat glossed over)—ostensibly to give her work, the family pools their savings and buys a deli in Brooklyn. Ben is a senior editor at The Paris Review, and his days of dichotomy dealing with literature versus running a corner store provide the impetus for this memoir. The demands of his boss, the late George Plimpton, and the demands of a deli and a feisty mother-in-law spur Ben to consider and contrast his Puritan background and upbringing with the Korean immigrant culture of this family. Written with humor and contemporary wit, the story is filled with fascinating characters (store regulars, family members, and coworkers on both sides of the cultural divide), and reveals the interesting underside of merchandising a New York deli. Sometimes the material seemed like anecdotes more than story, but they add to a whole that explains one young man's journey of self discovery.

Yankee Hobo in the Orient, by John Patric

The egomaniacal libertarian John Patric self-published (and signed) a large number of additional printings of this book, originally pub'd by Doubleday in 1945. An adventurer and recluse, Patric traveled on pennies throughout Japan, China, and Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. This loquacious text reports statistics of the area and times, and tells anecdotal incidents during his travels, both mundane and disturbing. It is a unique slice of the times as seen from one unique fellow, who later became somewhat of a character-recluse in Washington State. More about Patric and what became of him can be found on a blog by Erich Schlaikjer.

Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, by Mary Paik Lee

Born in 1900, Lee’s aristocratic Christian family fled Korea in 1905, fearful of the plight of their famiy with Japan’s growing political influence and imminent colonial takeover. Her family were among the earliest emigres to California and her father was reduced to an agricultural laborer. They faced harsh living conditions and always mistaken for Japanese or Chinese because of U.S. ignorance about Korea at the time, she suffered much racism, particularly after Pearl Harbor. Her courageous spirit is the focus as she fought for civil rights and early social change. Detailed historical and contextual matter by Sucheng Chan enriches this memoir.

September Monkey, by Induk Pahk

Memoir of early immigrant experiences in America and influence of Christian faith in a remarkable woman who rose through difficult cultural mores to become founder/president of Korea’s first vocational school. Inspirational, energetic, persistence are the hallmarks of this amazingly strong woman.

The Cock Still Crows, by Induk Pahk

In her second memoir after September Monkey, Mrs. Pahk continues her passion for her faith and for education, and includes inspirational stories about how people helped to "grow" her vocational school in Korea. Christian.

Man Sei! The Making of a Korean American, Peter Hyun

Memoir of a twelve-year old boy who witnessed the Korean Independence gathering on March 1, 1919, the first of numerous national demonstrations to protest Japan's occupation of Korea, that ended in violence and failure, though it ignited nationalistic passions that persist to this day.

This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood, by Hyok Kang

Because so little is written from eyewitnesses who have survived the famines of North Korea, this book has its place in informing and revealing the closely held secrets of the DPRK regime. Kang describes his youth and schooling, and the gradual descent of the country into hunger and deprivation, where the social structure, based on suspicion on idolatry, begin to show its weaknesses as neighbors and family members turn against each other to have another few cobs of maize. Children abandoned by their parents' death, or by parents who cannot feed them, live pitifully on the streets, begging, crawling the floor of the train station for any crumb that resembles something edible. Kang himself is a bit of a ruffian, and steals food, as do many many others. Kang's father, once photographed with the "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung, manages to avoid arrest though his temper and ambition often get in the way of a subservient life. Eventually he flees to China, works for several months and returns with bags of food only to be arrested and imprisoned for half a year. He avoids the certain death of the local prison in his village by having typhus, and is sent home to finish his sentence. He tells his son about cannibalism, and death upon death from hunger. During that period, though constantly watched (visited ten times a day or more by cadres and informants), he manages to escape once again to China, this time with his son (Kang) and wife. Grandmother is left behind. The decision to leave is agonizing for the mother, who is fearful of the unknown, and the journey the family takes, living in various parts of China, then through Vietnam and Cambodia, and finally to South Korea, is difficult. Their difficulties continue in South Korea, where prejudice against North Koreans is high, verbal, and indicative of the deep culture of mistrust between the two nations.