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Sto caricando le informazioni... Still Life With Ricedi Helie Lee
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. 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 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 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 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. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
"In this radiant memoir of her grandmother's life, Helie Lee probes a history and a culture that are both seductively exotic and strangely familiar. And with wit and verve she claims her own Korean identity, illuminating the intricate experiences of Asian-American women." "Born in 1912 - "the year of the rat" - to aristocratic parents, Hongyong Baek came of age in a unified but socially repressive Korea, where she learned the roles that had been prescribed for her: obedient daughter, demure wife, efficient household manager. Ripped from her home first during the Japanese occupation and again during the bloody civil war that divided her country, Hongyong fought to save her family by drawing from her own talents and values. Over the years she provided for her husband and children by running a successful restaurant, building a profitable opium business, and eventually becoming adept at the healing art of Chiryo. When she was pressured to leave her country, she moved with her family to California, where she reestablished her Chiryo practice." "Writing in her grandmother's voice, Helie Lee depicts the concerns and conflicts that shaped one family's search for home. Evocative and keenly felt, Still Life with Rice interprets issues that touch all of us: the complex nature of family relations, the impact of social upheaval on an individual, and the rapidly changing lives of women in this century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)973.0495700922History and Geography North America United States United States Ethnic And National Groups Other Groups Asian Americans Korean AmericansClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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