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Memories of Korea
Twelve Stories, with excerpts from two novels ....
by Therese Park
Koreabridge is proud to feature 12 stories here by Therese Park, one of our most prolific recent contributors.
Therese Park's vision is unique and valuable for our understanding of where Korea has come from. and how its children have long ceased to be be members of a hermit kingdom. As a child in Korea she lived through the horrors of the Korean War - memories which she preserves 
with a clear eye and the understanding that only a Korean could bring to the experience. Her novel, "When A Rooster Crows At Night" perfectly captures this child's eye view. We feature three extracts here : " Inchon Landing & Grandfather's Exile", "The Houseguests" and "My Brother Lost and Found". Another piece, "Growing Pain" describes schooling in the post-war Korea of 1955, a make-do process far removed from the concrete jungle of modern Korean ciities.
Later Therese Park married and eventually moved to Kansas, where she was a cellist in the city orchestra for thirty years. There she has had contact with American veterans of the Korean War, and gives us two sympathetic accounts of their struggle and survival: " Incheon Landing Remembered" and "A Lost Friend". .
No survivors of the Korean conflict have had more searing experiences both during and after the war than the women forcibly inducted into the imperial Japanese army as so-called comfort women. Therese Park devoted her first
novel to this sensitive topic, "A Gift Of The Emperor". We have a taste of it here on Koreabridge, as a young high school girl witnesses the murder of her father and is dragged off to serve the pleasure of the emperor's soldiers.
Sometimes Therese Park is called upon as a Korean translator in Kansas, and in "A Late Bloomer's Resolution" she suddenly comes face to face with possible futures - a Korean translator like her who has suffered a stroke and suddenly lost all knowledge of English.
Life goes on, and on. Therese records her philosophical regret at creeping age in "The Art of Growing Old". Faced with life in surburban America, she struggles to understand a world seen through the eyes of another child in "My American Grandson". Humans are one thing, birds are something else, and in "His Majesty, The Bird" Therese Park admits amused defeat and finally acceptance of (by?) a querrelous parrot. Finally, as an Asian American she finds that she has to educate her fellow citizens, and sets out to give a rather intriguing account of a special delicacy in "Bird-nest Soup, Anyone?" .
February 20 , 2005
