Still Life With Rice

Still Life with Rice was my favorite title for a graduate class focusing on Asian-American authors. Lee's retelling of her grandmother's incredible story made me envious. I will never know my grandmothers' stories for both are long gone and I didn't think, as a child, that their stories mattered. What I would do for a chance to turn back time and interview them!

biography that reads like historical fiction. Helie's grandmother and her sisters emigrate to California with her family. With her prompting, Helie gets them to start talking about Korea and her grandmother's life was astounding. Helie tells grandmother's story in Hongyong Back's voice. She was raised in a unified Korea in a wealthy family, had an arranged marriage and moved into her husband's parent's home. During the first Japanese occupation, she flees with her husband to China where there is a small Korean settlement, and after husband spends her dowry, she founds businesses, including smuggling opium. Then they go back to Korea, settling in the North near their original home. But during the Korean war, husband and son leave home to show more escape being drafted into the army, which gets Hongyong thrown into jail for a month, with her eldest daughter walking her baby sister to the jail daily, so her mother can nurse her. When she is released, she eventually gathers her remaining children and starts the slow and dangerous trek into South Korea. Eventually, her oldest daughter marries and emigrates, with Hongyong Beck only leaving in 1976 to join her daughters. By a pure miracle in 1991, she finds that her eldest son never made it out of North Korea and now has a family. The book ends with the hope of getting him out of North Korea, an almost impossible task show less

The author goes to Korea in search of her identity, and discovers her grandmother's compelling story of growing up in a traditional Korean household, expatriating to China to escape the Japanese occupation, and returning only to survive the dramatic hardships of the Korean War. Her harrowing journey from the North to Pusan with an infant on her back and three little ones in tow, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing the communists and being shot and bombed by American pilots, is an exceptional and memorable account of the war's harsh toll on civilians. Although Lee's language is stiff and her focus is sometimes narrow, the narrative exposes a rich history of a strong woman's rise from the lowly realm of womanhood, her show more fall through the losses from war and death of her family members, and rise again through through her spiritual strength and the practice of ch'iryo, a heavy-handed massage/healing art Chinese technique. Among the first publications in this genre. show less

A nice insight into the korean war. A womans story is only part of a touching story to guide us through the nightmares a family went through to live a comfortable life in the us