Wan-suh Park (1931–2011)

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim adapts a 1970 novel by Park Wan-suh into a graphic novel, injecting elements of the author's real life into an original framing sequence to emphasize the roman à clef nature of the work.

In the midst of the Korean War, a Korean woman in her early twenties works in a safe zone of Seoul at a booth at an American PX shilling souvenir portraits on scarves painted by some artisans who work on-site from snapshots provided by the clientele. She quickly develops a crush on one of the painters – who is a tortured soul destined to become become an acclaimed artist, not just a piecework craftsman – and pins on him all her dreams of escaping the dreary life of grief she shares with her widowed mother and compares to the lives of the other women around her.

It's a mild but engaging bit of coming-of-age drama playing out with some inevitable predictability but offering a rare and precious perspective of one America's several forgotten wars.

(Best Graphic Novels of 2023 Project: I'm trying to read all the books on the Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2023 list. Four down, six to go! How many have you read?)

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents:

• The Naked Tree Lives Again / Ho Won-sook [daughter of Park Wan-suh]

• Prologue
• 1951
• Ok Huido
• Demands
• Chimpanzee
• Family
• Crossed Paths
• Women You Can Buy and Women You Can't Buy
• Crimson Gingko Leaves
• The Naked Tree
• Epilogue

• Artists I Have Loved / Keum Suk Gendry-Kim… (more)

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability.
Park Wan-suh 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 the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life.
With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is 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. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/who-ate-up-all-the-shinga/9780231148986… (more)

Park, a highly acclaimed author in South Korea, describes her experiences growing up in Korea, during the Japanese occupation, World War II and the Korean War. Her family lived in a village outside of Seoul, and was dominated by her domineering but loving Grandfather and her unscrupulous Uncle. Her father died when she was very young; her headstrong Mother decides to move her children to Seoul, to the consternation of her in-laws, as education and opportunities for them are better there. The family suffers hardship and social isolation for their country ways, but Wan-Suh is able to make her own way, as she is just as independent and defiant as her mother. Due to her beloved brother's Communist sympathies, the family is caught between his leftist beliefs and friends, and the changes that are taking place in American-occupied Seoul and the nearby Soviet-run northern portion of the country. Their lives and health are threatened when the Korean People's Army invades Seoul, as her brother meets old friends that are amongst the invaders, and especially when the Republic of Korea Army defeats the People's Army and seeks to root out Communist sympathizers in the aftermath of the invasion.

I thoroughly enjoyed this "autobiographical novel", although the author gives us no indication that it is anything but a work of nonfiction. This was an excellent description of life in mid-20th century Korea, and the story is quite compelling and well-written. Highly recommended!… (more)