During Chuseok families across Korea gather. They set the table for their ancestors, bow and honor them. I will not be at the table. My closest Korean family has chosen not to include me. I have accepted that. But it does not change where I come from.

I choose to remember my great-great-grandfather Ha-young Lee 이하영 (1858–1929). Our lives and fates are very different, yet I feel connected to him. We are both stories the family preferred not to tell.

Ha-young Lee was born poor and rose further than anyone could have expected. In the 1880s he learned English from the missionary Horace Allen, became King Gojong’s interpreter, and later minister of foreign affairs. His name is also on Korea’s official list of pro-Japanese collaborators.

The story should not be romanticized. Chuseok should not be a day for editing ancestors into something cleaner than they were, but even the sinners are human.

Earlier this month I wrote in The Korea Times that shame is a poor archivist. The family edited itself, as the Korean family registry allowed: A register altered, a name left out or deleted, a story forgotten. In 1972 a child from that line was sent to Denmark and removed from the Korean records. That child was me. I highly doubt I am the only broken line in my family.

Children have always followed in the wake of powerful men, through concubinage, arranged and forced marriages, and relationships no register was allowed to show. Their names were rarely written down, and their mothers quickly forgotten.

I have stopped begging for a seat. I am writing because remembering is something no one can exclude me from. Ancestral rites are not about honoring the living even though it is up to the living to remember.

I cannot claim to officially belong in my Korean family, but I acknowledge what reached me against all odds. History does not stop existing because you wish to forget.

In Korean there is a word for the bond between people that fate does not let go of: 인연, inyeon. The records let go of me and some of the living have too. I am grateful for the bond which can never be broken.

The post Korean ancestry and identity appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

(Post Hill Press, New York, 2026, ISBN #979-8-8956-5671-6)

Review by John Feffer (Fall 2026)

For everyone who has worked in and around North Korea, Kathi Zellweger has been a role model. As the director of international operations at the Catholic charity Caritas, she oversaw food aid to North Korea in the 1990s when it was overwhelmed by famine. Later, she worked in Pyongyang for the Swiss government on various development projects. When that assignment ended, she continued to remain engaged through an NGO she founded to provide the supplies needed for cataract operations in North Korea. Throughout this challenging work, she remained unfailingly dedicated. Even as other international organizations withdrew from North Korea and the government there put restrictions on those that remained, Zellweger still focused on helping the most vulnerable people.

She also provided, quietly, a steady stream of information about what was going on in one of the most secretive states in the world. When my wife and I worked in Northeast Asia for the American Friends Service Committee, we met with Kathi Zellweger several times at her Hong Kong office and also received her regular clippings of North Korea-related articles. It was such a relief to meet with her. People who work on North Korean issues often fall into two categories: Cynical observers or fellow travelers who inexplicably believe in North Korean ideology. Zellweger was neither. She was practical, clear-eyed about the nature of the system, but also hopeful about how outside assistance could improve the lives of everyday North Koreans.

What was once available only to those in Kathi Zellweger’s network is now available to everyone, thanks to a new book, Miss Kathi, that she has written with longtime journalist Mike Chinoy. It chronicles her experiences in North Korea across 75 trips, from her first contact in 1995, just prior to the outbreak of famine, to her last, pre-pandemic visit to the country in December 2019. The book also details her five years of living inside North Korea as a representative of the Swiss government’s official development agency.

The most dramatic descriptions in the book concern the famine years. The North Korean state was reluctant to provide an accurate picture of what was happening inside the country for fear that it would prove the system wasn’t working. Because of a fear of outside military intervention, the government believed that it had to project strength, not weakness.

But North Korea also needed help. The increase in the cost of energy, after both Russia and China stopped providing fossil fuels at concessionary rates at the end of the Cold War, put heavily mechanized North Korean agriculture into a perilous state. Tractors were now useless, and chemical fertilizer had become too expensive. Several natural disasters — heavy rains, drought — pushed the system over the edge.

Since she was already known and to a certain extent trusted, the North Korean authorities showed Zellweger the extent of the starvation. At a pediatric hospital she visited in September 1998, for instance, “were dozens of kids, weak, emaciated, with stick-like limbs and eyes that haunted me — the hollow, staring eyes of malnourished children.” Such scenes motivated her to issue international appeals through Caritas that brought in millions of dollars of food aid.

It just so happens that my wife and I also visited North Korea for the first time in September 1998 to explore the possibility of exchanges with the U.S. and other countries. We were not brought to the scenes that Kathi Zellweger witnessed. Instead, we visited various government offices. We were taken to restaurants where our driver, minder, and translator ordered a lot of food — and took some of it home, presumably to their families — and attended a banquet that our organization had to pay for. We visited a farm that presented us with a lunch of many dishes. We knew of the famine, and it was very difficult to eat anything.

And yet, the only sign of malnutrition that we saw was in the two children begging for cigarettes near our hotel. Two British insurance claims adjustors that we met at the hotel told us not to believe in the reports of hunger, that the only sign of privation they saw in the villages was the substitution of goat for beef in the bulgogi. To the contrary, Zellweger’s reports dispelled any notion that the North Korean government was faking it. The fact that my wife and I saw no evidence of famine, and instead received the royal treatment during our visit, meant only that we were not trustworthy. Later, in subsequent trips to the country, we were able to glimpse some of the terrible impact of the humanitarian disaster.

It was not an easy assignment to work with North Korea. The government is thoroughly autocratic. It has one of the worst human rights records in the world. And it has long pursued — and eventually achieved — membership in the nuclear club. For many, these characteristics have disqualified North Korea as worthy of engagement. But Zellweger has maintained a clear moral position: “My own view was that allowing North Koreans to starve because of distaste for the country’s political system was morally wrong. It was not the fault of the children we were trying to feed that they had been born in North Korea.”

This ethos carried over to her post-famine work. When the North Korean government restricted outside engagement to development work — as opposed to the provision of humanitarian aid — Zellweger continued to develop programs that met the new criteria. Those programs helped farmers develop new and more productive crops and trained young professionals in contemporary business practices. As North Korea shifted to a market economy, the government relied on outsiders to provide it with training in banking, finance, and entrepreneurship. Zellweger connected North Koreans to Chinese MBAs and Swiss training opportunities.

As money became more of an organizing principle in North Korean society, Zellweger both helped train those who were engineering the transition to a market economy and observed the widening gap between rich and poor.

The signs of these changes in society were increasingly evident to me on the streets of Pyongyang. People patronized the growing number of restaurants, not just the Italian pizza place where I had taken my team but many others, including a Singaporean-run hamburger joint and a Viennese café where they could sip cappuccinos while admiring the broad vistas of Kim Il Sung Square, all the while paying with stacks of U.S. dollars or euros. The women would make a point of displaying their jewelry in public, including fine gold chains or fashion from Beijing’s Zara and H&M stores, while the men, often wearing Adidas or Nike sneakers, would smoke expensive imported cigarettes. I could see a growing number of cars on the roads as well as taxis — a half dozen new taxi companies were now operating — but still, the normal way of getting around was by bus, train, subway, bicycle, or what was known as “bus number eleven,” the two ones in the number referring to people’s two legs as they walked and walked and walked.

But as Miss Kathi demonstrates, her heart remained with the most disadvantaged segments of North Korean society. She was one of the first outsiders to work on improving the status of the disabled in North Korea. “In a society so short of resources, I had long felt that disabled people were at the bottom of the priority list, often rejected or marginalized, with few support facilities, so I was always looking for opportunities to raise the issue or find ways to encourage the North Koreans to focus more attention on it,” she writes. As a result of these efforts, and connections to such organizations as Handicapped International, North Koreans could finally take advantage of vocational training. Some ultimately trained for the Paralympics. A semi-independent civil society organization even emerged through which the disabled could voice their concerns.

Miss Kathi sometimes reads like an extended NGO report, the first half designed to raise money for relief efforts and the second half an extended plea to support development projects. But the book contains many fascinating observations about the changes taking place in a relatively cloistered society. Zellweger describes the increasingly prominent role of women in North Korea because of their involvement in market activities (while their husbands still have to report to their official workplaces). She reports on the hardworking professionals — doctors, teachers — who are determined to do their jobs under very difficult circumstances. She takes us inside the tiny world of expats living in Pyongyang, provides glimpses of the lives of her North Korean staff at the Swiss development agency, and offers some details about the North Korean workers at the short-lived Kaesong Industrial Complex who worked under the supervision of South Korean managers.

North Korea shut its borders when COVID-19 hit. Today, tourism remains limited. Embassies have reopened in Pyongyang but the expat community is even smaller than it was during the time that Kathi Zellweger worked there. Diplomatic engagement between North and South Korea has withered and, aside from Donald Trump’s affection for North Korean leader Jong Il Kim, there isn’t much contact between Pyongyang and Washington either.

Now on the outside looking at a country that has again become opaque to foreigners, she remains determined to help those in need and humanize North Koreans for those who still view them as little more than automatons. “While I had no choice but to deal with the system as it was, with all of its oppressiveness and idiosyncrasies — and no question, the system imposed severe constraints on foreigners — my ongoing involvement, which included visiting every province as well as many places other outsiders were not allowed to go, gave me a sense of North Korea as a living, breathing society of twenty-four million individual people, each with his or her own hopes, fears, and aspirations,” she writes.

Kathi Zellweger worked hard over several decades to keep many of those 24 million people alive. Her memoir Miss Kathi now helps to make North Korea come alive.

The post Focusing on the vulnerable appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found.”

Rebecca Solnit, Field Guide to Getting Lost

In the summer of 2006, 20 years ago, I made an abrupt decision to move from Portland, Oregon, where I was an adjunct at Portland State University, to South Korea. The decision came as a shock to my mom. When I told her I was moving here, she didn’t say anything — we weren’t speaking to each other at the time — but I could see in her eyes that she was sad and scared. It was the same look I saw when I moved out of the house my senior year of high school because we were fighting so much.

My mom was an operating room nurse whose husband, my father, died of a heart attack at age 44, an event caused in part by genes, in part by the cigs and booze, and in part by his traumatic experience on the battlefield during the Korean War. Like most Americans, the image of Korea in my mom’s head came from the TV show MASH, which we watched at my grandma’s on Sundays before dinner. She lost her husband and now she felt like she was losing her son.

My decision to move here was abrupt, but my desire to leave the U.S. had been building for several years. In a word, I was beat. Rob Wilson explains that beat “means at one end of the journey being beaten-down, broken up, emptied out, beaten up by life and driven down and out by social forces and over-determinations.” I was beat down and driven out by the neoliberal university and George W. Bush.

I got my Ph.D. in the Literary and Cultural Theory program (LCT-RIP) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2000, and published my book, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture, in 2005. But I didn’t have any luck on the job market. Every fall I excitedly sent out more than 100 applications, only to get a handful of interviews at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. Every spring I wondered what was wrong with me.

Tenure track jobs were, and still are, being replaced by adjunct positions in the neoliberal, “post-welfare state university,” as Jeffrey J. Williams names it. Added to that, my academic work was at the intersection of American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Transpacific Studies, or what is now called the Blue Humanities / Critical Ocean Studies. Back then, the oceanic turn in the humanities was underway, so I was working in a niche field, great for publishing, not great for getting invited into hotel rooms for interviews at the MLA.

My book was inspired in part by Rob Wilson, who was in the English Department at the University of Hawaii back then, before he moved to the University of California-Santa Cruz. I first discovered Rob’s work in 1994 when I stumbled on an academic journal called boundary 2, and saw a special issue entitled New Americanists 2: National Identities, Postnational Narratives, edited by Donald E. Pease. I was immediately drawn to Rob’s contribution, Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime, which I expected to be about a style of electronic music that was born in Detroit in the 1980s.

The article isn’t about techno music but is a head-spinning synthesis of discourse about the sublime from the Hudson River School to cyberpunk, from the myth-symbol critics to postmodernism, all geared toward a critique of George Bush’s Patriot missile speech delivered during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. I was intoxicated by Wilson’s style of writing, which tripped me out. I remember thinking: This is the kind of work I want to do. At the time, I was considering doing my dissertation on hip hop. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. The last thing the world needed at that time was another white person writing about hip hop.

I immersed myself in the Asia-Pacific work of the boundary 2 collective, which to my surprise was headquartered in the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, just across the street from CMU. I wrote a seminar paper, “The American Asiatic Association and the Imperialist Imaginary of the American Pacific,” that was published by boundary 2 in 2001, which was huge. I was told that this article would help me get a good job, so my expectations for success shot up, which made the fall that much harder.

In 2005 I finally left CMU and Pittsburgh, which was hard. Pittsburgh was home. I met a lot of amazing people through the art and music scenes and even converted from being a Rams fan to a devoted member Steeler Nation. But my life was a mess and I needed to leave. When I first moved to Pittsburgh for my MA in 1991, I took an Amtrak train across the country. Now, I was driving from Pittsburgh back to Portland to stay with my mom for what was supposed to be a short visit

Camilla Griggers, a professor in the Literary and Cultural Theory program before moving to California State University Channel Islands said she could probably find me a position in her program. I did a phone interview shortly after arriving in Portland, it went great and was told I got the job, but it fell through at the last minute.

I was stuck in Portland without a job and living with my mom, which was getting tense, just like high school. But a lifesaver stepped up in the form of Lee Medavoi, an old friend from the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), who was in the English Department at Portland State University (PSU). Lee helped me get an adjunct position. The position didn’t provide health insurance, but I was healthy, on a pension, and I was youngish. I figured I could worry about that stuff later. I was happy and grateful.

I had a couple more interviews at the MLA, but interviewers wanted to know what my next book was about. I was beat down and emptied out by the process of writing my book, and by moving across the country, and by teaching three or four courses a quarter. I didn’t have time to think about a new book, or about new research. I wasn’t writing anything.

One of the interviews at MLA was with Yonsei University in South Korea. I was excited about that interview, and that’s when I began to imagine living here. I knew about Korea primarily through teaching the film Shiri in my Transnational Asian Cinema class at CMU, and from knowing the Chan-wook Park film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Before I left Pittsburgh, I saw one of my favorite coming-of-age films, Take Care of My Cat. The dreamy soundtrack by Byul planted the emotional seeds of my desire to move here.

When teaching Shiri, I don’t remember if I came across the term hallyu, but I felt the Korea Wave coming and thought this might be a good time to move to South Korea. I didn’t get the job at Yonsei, but in my mind, my bags were already packed. After a short trip to Taipei and Tokyo in 2000, I realized I needed to live in a global city, not a small college town. Seoul was it. I would be following in Rob Wilson’s footsteps.

Rob first came to South Korea as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Seoul National University (1982-1984) and spent one semester as a visiting professor in the English Department at Seoul National University in spring of 1984. And in 2004-2005, he was invited to be a Visiting Research Professor at Korea National University of the Arts by film scholar and director So-young Kim.

I didn’t know as much about Korean history or culture, or the Korean War, as I should have before moving here. But I did have an intense connection to Korea through my father. In the winter of 1952, my 18-year-old father entered the Korean War. After I read the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines Command Diary and histories of the Marines in western Korea at the time, I hypothesized from what I knew of his war history, that he was probably involved in one of the many battles over Bunker Hill (Hill 122). When I saw Jang Hoon’s Korean War film The Front Line (2011), I got a sense of what my father experienced during the war.

On January 9, 1977, I watched my father, my best friend, die suddenly of a heart attack in the middle of the night. I was nine years old at the time, so I never got to ask him about the war, although I loved playing with his war memorabilia — medals, pins, bayonet, revolver — when I was growing up. It made me feel close to him. I later asked my mom if he ever talked about the war. She remembered him saying that when he was flying over to Korea, he knew he wasn’t coming back. Fortunately he did make it back, minus one body part.

Seven months after arriving in Korea, on September 5, 1952, my father was hit by missile fragments and received wounds to his thigh, buttocks, Achilles tendon, scalp, and face. He lost one of his testicles, but gained a Purple Heart. Because of his wounds, my father could not have children the old-fashioned way, so I was adopted, which means my destiny began to take shape the moment he was wounded in the Korean mountains.

I love going hiking here, and when I’m in the mountains I often tell people I’m looking for my father’s testicle.

Writing about Korean War literature and film, and about social movements to end the unending war, has helped me feel close to my father. I think his spirit might have guided me to this country, and helped me find a home here. I wanted to escape the U.S. empire, and ended up living in Gyungridan, a neighborhood that is next to a U.S. military base.

In the summer of 2006 I was an overworked and underpaid adjunct at Portland State. I was living in a hip city, and loved walking through the gorgeous Park Blocks on the way to class, but the future looked bleak. I was teaching a graduate course on Moby-Dick, and like Ishmael, felt beaten-down and broken up. It was a “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” I was “tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote” as Ishmael says before he joins the crew of a whaling vessel and has wild adventures sailing around the Pacific.

On top of all that, lies about weapons of mass destruction were being used to justify the War on Terror, and the images of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were horrifying. Seeing Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in the news every day was making me sick. My mom had been seduced by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. We had stopped talking to each other, just like high school.

All the signs were telling me that it was time to go, so at the end of the spring quarter I put my CV (a resume, or curriculum vitae, as they call it in academia) on Craig’s List for teaching English in South Korea. Within 24 hours, I had a job offer from an English academy (hagwon). Within a month, I went from teaching graduate students at PSU to teaching children in Korea.   

The academy paid for my flight, set me up with an apartment, and loaned me money so I could get through the first month. I arrived in Seoul in August. It was rainy season – hot, humid, and very wet. My apartment wasn’t ready when I first arrived, so the school got a motel room for me. Walking through the hallway, there were DVDs on a shelf. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that they looked like soft core porn, which made me a little excited and very uncomfortable. What was going on here?

I later learned that this was a so-called love motel, a budget-friendly place to stay if you and your partner need some privacy or if you are traveling. The rooms usually come equipped with a water purifier machine, which is awesome, and a wide variety of hair products.

While teaching children at the academy, which was fun, rewarding, and exhausting in equal portions, I started applying for university jobs. When I went to interviews, some professors were suspicious. I got my Ph.D. from a prestigious university, published a book and several articles in top-ranked journals, so why was I in Korea teaching kids? One professor directly asked, “What’s wrong with you?” There was a lot wrong with me, but I didn’t have a criminal record, so everything was fine.

And for the record, I don’t think professors are more important, or higher up, than teachers at other levels. I say this because a couple of professors tried to shame me for teaching children when I got here. In my view, all teachers are equally important, from preschool to night school. One of the best experiences I’ve had in the classroom was teaching night school for adults at Carlow College in Pittsburgh. The obsession with status and hierarchy, both in Korea and everywhere, is toxic.

I got a full-time teaching gig in the General Education program at Kyung Hee University and finally had time to do some writing. I started tinkering with an article on the Wilkes Exploring Expedition that I started when I was at CMU. It was a huge archival project. I sent it to a couple journals before I left Pittsburgh, but it was rejected. I gave up on it when I moved to Portland.

But I polished it up and sent it to Amerasia. I received expert comments from all the reviewers, one of whom I later learned was Paul Lyons, who a University of Hawaii colleague of Rob Wilson’s in the era before he moved to Santa Cruz. I had read Paul’s work on American Pacificism but had never met him. He gave me helpful suggestions for revision and a solid list of books and articles to read that helped me pull the paper together. That publication helped me move to the School of English at Kyung Hee, where I would be teaching literature, finally.

I owed Paul a lot, so I was thrilled when he visited Seoul and I was able to invite him to our campus where he gave an inspiring talk on Moby-Dick. We had a wonderful time wandering and drinking around Hongdae. Paul tragically passed away in 2018. He was a legend in the classroom, on the basketball court, and in the pool hall, and is deeply missed by people all over this watery world.

After moving here, my mom didn’t lose me; in fact, we became very close. Absence most definitely made our hearts grow fonder. In 2014, my mom and sister visited, and we had a blast wandering around the city, especially Namdaemun Market and Myeong-dong Cathedral. Their visit was one of the highlights of the past 20 years. She was happy I found a home here. My mom passed away in 2020, during the pandemic, and year later, I got tenure.

Since the pandemic, the most important keyword in my classrooms, in my work, and in my life, is mutual aid. If there is a moral to the story above, it is that academia, at its best, can be a mutual aid network that helps people get through hard times. Education, now more than ever, is “survival work,” as Dean Spade calls it.

In 2006, I was beat. Now, in 2026, like many of us, I’m feeling beaten up by the climate emergency, genocide, Trump, but occasionally, I glimpse the other side of beat – beatitude -which Rob describes as the “transformative energies generated from this double sense of happy/holy and ready to make self and world anew.”

The post On getting lost and found in Korea appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

In a short story collection, Nam-Joo Cho discusses the realities of Korean women’s lives

(Translated by Jamie Chang, Liveright Publishing, New York, 2024, ISBN #978-1-3240-9531-6)

Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2026)

Nam-Joo Cho’s popular novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, was an international bestseller, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. It was also adapted into a popular feature film. Published in 2016, it is a searing portrayal of a successful young woman who gives up her career to become a stay-at-home mother, and the punishing toll of this decision.

Almost a decade later, Cho has published her first book of short stories, Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories. In eight sharply-observed narratives, the author returns to many similar themes from Kim Jiyoung, such as sexism in the workplace, mental illness, and the unrealistic division of labor among married couples. She also explores the generational divides among Korean women, sexual harassment of teenage girls, as well as aging, illness, and mortality.

One of Cho’s most affecting stories, Dear Hyunnam Oppa, relates a story of one young woman’s personal growth during a 10-year relationship that began in college. Hyunnam Oppa (oppa being a term of endearment used by girls and young women for older brothers, male friends, and boyfriends) was a bit older than the narrator, and had a prestigious job which required him to dress professionally and network constantly.

For his high school reunion, Hyunnam buys her a fancy new outfit and books a salon for her to get her hair and makeup done, even though she rarely wears makeup.  The narrator relates how uncomfortable she was with this makeover, and how she finally tells him she would rather go just as she was, in her own clothes. He was furious, and gaslit her, asking if her feminist friend had put her up to it.

Still, the relationship continued. There were also very helpful things that he did when she lived alone in Seoul, away from her parents. He took time off from his job to look for apartments with her, he helped her negotiate the rent, put up wallpaper, and did minor repairs, even though she was quite capable of doing them by herself, having grown up with a handyman father.

In one conversation, Hyunnam Oppa told her he wanted her to have a stable job with regular hours so she could be home and available when he was done with his own (very taxing) job. He told her that she would make an excellent librarian, and put her on a strict study schedule so that she could pass the library science exam. Though she wanted to take breaks, he brought her kimbap so that she could eat dinner quickly and go back to studying. When they did go out, he would gaze lovingly at little children, and would tell her he wanted at least three children. He never asked her how she felt about children.

This story is written in the form of a letter to him. It recounts the details of what happened during the relationship, and is an airing of the narrator’s true feelings that she repressed over the years. It’s a powerful manifesto for all the women who have been squeezed by others into a box they did not fit, or made to walk a path they did not choose.

In Grown-Up Girl, a popular and studious boy is accused of sexually harassing a girl at his school, and is in danger of being expelled. His mother immediately shifts into damage-control mode, asking the mother of a female classmate who witnessed the incident to vouch for her son. This mother suffers from severe migraines, and doesn’t want to get involved. What is the truth when it comes to sexual harassment? Is it black and white, or can it be gray?

In Night of Aurora, a middle-aged daughter takes her almost 80-year-old mother-in-law to Yellowknife, Canada, to see the aurora (northern lights). It’s not guaranteed that they will see the aurora, but there is a high chance of it (98 percent) with the four-day package she chose.  Both women were widowed at a young age, and both were overworked and unappreciated their entire lives, taking care of their own young children and later their grandchildren.

The issue of childcare in South Korea is a fraught one; many young mothers want to pursue their careers, but to accomplish motherhood and career simultaneously is risky since there are very few childcare options. Many women enlist their mothers or mothers-in-law to take care of their children full time, knowing that it is difficult, exhausting, and usually unpaid work. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking story of the aurora, and describes the predicament of so many women who spent their lives caring for children and grandchildren they never asked to raise.

Cho is a master of wry social commentary, along the lines of Jane Austen. She seems to have her finger on the pulse of modern Korean women in her crafting of such enjoyable, witty stories, that nonetheless bring forth hard truths in a frank and courageous way.

A decade ago, Cho kick-started a national conversation about gender inequality in Korea with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, and this simultaneously charming and incisive book of short stories picks up right where she left off.

The post Recognizing one’s own path appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Women Cross DMZ (WCDMZ) mourns the passing of Gloria Steinem who played a central role in the 2015 Women’s Peace Walk and DMZ crossing. Gloria made lasting contributions to feminist movements in the U.S. and around the world, and later in her life developed a special passion for peace on the Korean peninsula. 

In 2013, WCDMZ founder Christine Ahn emailed Gloria asking if she would consider a women’s peace walk across the demilitarized zone with a group of international women. Within an hour, she responded, “Yes — my high school classmates went to war there,” and that she wanted to do her small part to help bring healing and closure to the Korean War. 

At a 2015 press conference to the United Nations Correspondents Association announcing the DMZ crossing, Gloria Steinem read her statement Why I Am Walking for Peace and Reunification of Korea (copied below). The crossing took place May 24, 2015. The group that crossed from north to south was comprised of 30 international women peace activists from 15 countries—including Ahn, Steinem and Nobel Peace Laureates Leymah Gbowee and Mairead Maguire. They were joined by North Korean women’s groups in North Korea, and South Korean women’s groups after they crossed over.

Throughout WCDMZ’s historic crossing — on the road to Pyongyang and across the Demilitarized Zone into South Korea — Gloria helped navigate every step, including many political landmines and entrenched hostilities. As the eldest delegate, she drew on decades of challenging political actions and helped the delegation stay on message. With Steinem’s help, the delegation succeeded in getting all three governments — the DPRK, ROK and the U.S. — to agree to collaborate on the crossing when they could agree on little else.

At a Women Cross DMZ reunion in 2018, Gloria reflected, “I consider my life in two parts: before the DMZ crossing, and after.” 

Her contributions to the Korea peace movement did not end with the crossing. She continued to speak and write about the need to end the Korean War, including in a 2019 Washington Post op-ed with Christine Ahn, “Women marched for Korean reconciliation. Washington is in our way.” She spoke before Congress, at the United Nations, and at various WCDMZ events on Korea peace and women’s leadership. In 2019 she traveled with WCDMZ to South Korea again to deliver the keynote address at the DMZ Peace Forum. She continuously offered her guidance, time, energy, and labor to the Korea peace movement to both Korean feminist leaders in South Korea and across the diaspora.

In 2019, Gloria wrote, “One of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life was a peace walk across the DMZ between North and South Korea, together with 30 women leaders from around the world.”

Thank you, Gloria, for all you gave to the Korea peace movement.

Christine Ahn, Women Cross DMZ Founder

Icon. Wonder Woman. GOAT. She was all that and more, but my nickname for Gloria was “super,” which she was, but more like a building super with a massive set of keys that opened many doors.

I was among the circle of sisters privileged to stay with her when I came to New York City. We clicked the moment we first spoke over our effort to stop the naval base on Jeju Island.

In 2013 when I asked if she would cross the DMZ with me, she wrote back yes, that she had lost classmates in the Korean War and she would help to bring healing and closure.

With Gloria on board, we proceeded to assemble a 30-member international women’s delegation, including partnerships with organizations in the North and South. Gloria’s gift for narrative and effective use of media was crucial throughout our preparations. 

While her obituaries lift up her lifelong feminist work, most omit her work for peace in Korea. Gloria spent political capital — and used many of her keys — to help us cross the DMZ. She was masterful in messaging: this was a walk by women for women, demonstrating with our bodies what we hoped would be done politically.

In Kaesong, before the crossing. She wrapped her long arms around me and gave me a pep talk. She reminded me that we had already persuaded three governments to agree on our crossing when they could agree on nothing else. This was a huge victory, and our job now was “to hold our heads high.”

At Dorasan Station, as journalists hounded us, Gloria said, “Christine is the heroine of this group, we should all be thanking her!” As I faced deportation and threats, she shielded me then, as she did so often while we worked together.

But our friendship went beyond activism. She was my wise sister who helped me find my own personal liberation. Once I called her before a flight, tearful and guilty about leaving my young daughter Jeju. Gloria said Jeju would know me as someone who pursued her dreams, and that she would be shaped by watching her dad cook, clean, and care for her. And when I struggled to end my marriage, she told me it was important for me to model the relationship I wanted Jeju to see and to later have one day herself.

Gloria helped us raise funds, offered quotes for press releases, reviewed statements, and spoke on webinars and at multiple events. She hosted talk circles at her brownstone, and always welcomed me to stay with her. She loved our movement, which she called a “roving editorial peace committee.”

On one of my last visits, as we lay in bed sharing stories, she held my face and said, “Christine, you are a magical person. I believe you can do anything.” In Gloria fashion, I quipped, “that’s because you’ve sprinkled some of your fairy dust on me.”

I love and miss you, Gloria. Thank you for all you did for me, Jeju and all our movements. RIP to the Super.

Gloria Steinem’s remarks at the UN Correspondents Press Conference, March 11, 2015

Why I Am Walking for Peace and Reunification of Korea

When I was in high school, my classmates were drafted into the Korean War. One of my classmate’s fathers who had been in World War II actually killed his son and killed himself rather than see his son go to war. I never forgot that.

I don’t know if we could have averted the Korean War, but because Americans participated in the war — and in the division after the war – we have an obligation to think about how the war can finally be declared over and a country unified.

I have stood on the South Korean side of the DMZ in a brand new railroad station; a symbol of hope that is empty and unused. It’s so close to North Korea that you can see the buildings on the other side. It symbolizes the separation between families; so close and yet so isolated. For these and many other reasons, when Korean American women initiated this peace walk across the DMZ, I wanted to join.

I believe it’s crucial that women help initiate and pursue peace efforts. For cultural reasons, we don’t have “masculinity” to prove, and so it’s sometimes easier for us to make connections with other women across divisions. In Ireland, it was the women who crossed the boundaries of religion and region. For generations, those divisions seemed hopeless, yet now Ireland is a peaceful country. Women also crossed lines of religion to unite against warlords in Liberia, and bring about a peaceful election there.

Now we know from massive studies of every modern nation that the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent within itself, or is willing to use military violence against another country, is not poverty, or access to natural resources, or religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence and dominance against females. It normalizes all other dominance and violence because it’s the violence and domination we see first, perhaps even inside the family. It causes us to think the domination of one group by another is inevitable. The Women’s Peace March across the DMZ is a symbol of unification for North and South Korea, and peace between women and men.  We can no longer afford violence and domination on this fragile Space Ship Earth.  

The post A tribute to Gloria Steinem appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Achieving success with fusion, whether in fashion, cuisine or music, is a little like learning to ride a bicycle. On either side, there is certain disaster, and the narrow path of success is balanced in the center.

In terms of fusion music, success looks like creating a way between something too familiar, which does not sound like fusion at all, and something so unfamiliar that the audience loses interest. The magic is in the balance.

Making fusion art also requires attacking the challenge with some speed, and perhaps, some big confidence.  No one ever learned to ride a bike by going slowly. 

For the Korean gypsy funk fusion band Sangjaru, which will have its Minnesota debut on September 30 at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, that big confidence is symbolized by some very big hats.

Audiences are delighted by the humor (including the traditional hats), the energy, and the eclectic styles of music that unroll when this three-person group gets playing.

As Sangjaru discovered in a previous U.S. tour, a general audience happily shows up, and is excited by the driving Korean-style percussion, the sawing sound of the ajaeng (traditional zither), the Korean sounds coming out of a guitar, and the lilted traditional singing.  Sangjaru also treats their audiences to plenty of funky beats, with some lighthearted humor, play, and clever crossover of Korean and American popular music styles.

It is the kind of show that is fun for anyone open to something new, but with deep enough roots in Korean traditional sounds that a musicologist would be curious to dig into it.

A theory about a box and a sack

The concept for Sangjaru was invented by the three members in a college dorm room back in 2014, explained Sungyun Cho, the composer, guitarist, and player of other assorted instruments, through a written interview.  “So by now, we’ve spent most of our lives inside each other’s music.”

Each of the three brought his own pedigree in Korean traditional music – all had been to the National Gugak High School and the Korea National University of Arts. Both institutions are dedicated to preserving Korean traditional performing arts. “My proposal was that we begin as a study group, and if it felt right, become a band. That conversation turned into Sangjaru.” The group discussed, composed, and played together, but did not officially debut until 2019. 

The other two band members are: Hyochang Kwon on the gwaenggwari (handheld cymbal), and the janggu (hourglass-shaped drum); and Seonghun Nam on the aejaeng (one of several types of Korean zither), and taepyeongso (a reed instrument, often played during drum performances).

In Korean, the word for “box” is sangja, and the word for “sack” is jaru.  “The name came out of a theory we were discussing around that time,” Cho explained.  “The rigid structure of a box is more like the repertoire in what is known as court music and other classical music,” a style called  jeongak in Korea. Jeongak is “largely ceremonial music, expressing Confucian thought, so artistic freedom isn’t what matters in it,” he added.

A sack (jaru) also has a particular structure “but its shape changes depending on what you put inside,” he said, which makes it more like folk music, or minsogak.  Folk music, he said, “is an art made among ordinary people, so that freedom shows up in a way it doesn’t in court music.”

The group thought about how they would interpret, as a band, both the history of Korean music and their place in it.  “The more we talked, the closer we got to a version of our own,” Cho remarked. “For three people living in the 21st century, the box could be tradition, and the sack could be our own contemporary experience. Sangja and jaru share the syllable ja, so we joined them right there – Sangjaru.”

Between 2014 and 2019, there were a few other groups headed in the direction of Sangjaru, using Korean rhythms to inject new energy into rock, pop, funk and rap music.  Sangjaru, due to the unique musical backgrounds of its members, was the first to fit together its particular combination of Korean traditional performance style (yeonhui), folk music (minsogak), and  the sounds of the aejaeng – sometimes harsh, sometimes violin-like —  into original compositions.  It was “a first of its kind,” he said.  “It wasn’t planned. It just happened to be who the three of us are.”

In a Sangjaru concert, the audience might hear something that sounds like a Texas Two-Step or swing music piece, where the gwaenggwari (small cymbal) played by Kwon stands in for percussion, accompanied by a scratchy baritone violin sound (the aejaeng) by Nam, along with Cho’s fast-strumming guitar.

In another piece, there may be a moody and mysterious guitar solo that becomes a slow ballad-like version of the traditional Arirang song as the other instruments come in to create layers of music and meaning.

Other pieces sound a bit like unplugged progressive jazz.  Nam coaxes cool jazzy riffs out of his aejaeng, sawing away at it at lap level with a giant bow, convincing us the instrument was absolutely created for a jazz band.

All the players sing catchy folk songs, occasionally speak or even recite poetry. Sometimes, there is a guest singer.  At least one song, Byeoldalgeori, is a recitation of percussion beats that sounds a little like a jazz scat. Such recitation is also a piece of tradition; each beat type has a name in Korean percussion. Singing the gu-eum (the names of the beats)is a kind of mnemonic device Korean drum players use to memorize the piece, and the audience gets to hear a sample of it in the Byeoldalgeori arrangement.  

Sangjaru also plays some original rock pieces mixed with Korean folk song patterns, so catchy that you want to get out on the dance floor.

Korean music – back to basics

Korean traditional music forms, particularly traditional percussion compositions, are characterized by beats that start out soft, slow and simple and build slowly to something loud, hard-driving and complex, often with an abrupt ending. Sangjaru capitalizes on this performance technique in its compositions, often building complexity, adding on patterns and notes, increasing speed and volume, while persuading the listener into a kind of musical hypnosis, until the piece comes to a sudden and satisfying finish.

Cho noted that the three traditions of Korean music they embrace are “quite far apart” from one another in the spectrum of styles that is Korean music. “Yeonhui [Korean traditional folk performance] is percussion-centered performance music, rooted in what ordinary people played,” he said.  The ajaeng (zither), in contrast, “generally belongs to music performed for the middle and upper classes and at court.”  Overlaying that is the group’s compositional technique, which  is definitely contemporary, Cho said.  “So this band was made by three people who really were trained on different paths.”

Cho said he studied the most compositioin “so I do write the most, but I’m not the only one writing. One of the principles I raised in that first dorm-room conversation was that the band should never be saturated by a single person’s musical color. So Hyochang and Seonghun bring in their own pieces too, and some of our music is built by all three of us from the very start.”

There are no rules, per se, but there are characteristics of traditional music to be preserved if the end product needs to look like fusion, Cho believes.  “Our rule for a long time was to avoid dismantling a traditional element as much as possible.”  As a rough comparison, he said, if you are taking a cup completely apart “and then, while putting it back together, pour in so much creative force that it becomes a business card holder, then it’s a business card holder.”

To avoid losing the original cup, Cho explained, when Sangjaru reimagines Korean traditional sounds and patterns, “we bring it over whole, in a standardized form, and lay our own work on top of it.” They want any Korean traditional music lover to recognize what it is.  They also want a general listener to hear it as familiar enough, but to perceive the Korean traditional elements within it.

Over the mountain, they do it differently

These days, South Korea is one of the most modern countries in terms of its communications network and transportation hub. But for most of its history, Korea was a land of impossibly high mountains with few good roads linking habitable areas.

“Performance style differs by region as well, and by genre on top of that. We were taught that these differences developed because in the Joseon era, before modern transportation, you had to cross high mountains to get anywhere, so cultures formed separately and then reinforced themselves,” Cho explained.

The topographic challenges of that past means that modern Korean composers of fusion music have a rich repertoire from which to choose their inspiration.

“Honestly, it comes down to whatever grabs us in that moment,” he said. Influences from Korea are many, from rural percussion forms (nongak) to folk songs with unique time signatures. There are many Western influences too.  In a boppy piece called Gyeongbok Swing, the group was inspired by Mueul Nongak, an ancient performance style from Gyeongsang province, along with the classical jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt’s piece Minor Swing.

Concerning the hats

The signature white hats that make the guys look like pom-poms on steroids are inspired by the traditional dress of the Mueul Nongak drummers. Cho said Sangjaru wear their giant hats only for the two pieces inspired by Mueul Nongak — Jisin RV and Gyeongbuk Swing. “Partly we want the image of nongak to come across more strongly to the audience, and partly because when we play those pieces we feel we’re playing our own nongak.”

“We’re bringing the hats on this tour as well,” Cho added. “They’re so bulky that flying them over would cost an enormous amount, so we make them all again by hand once we get to the United States.” Percussionist Hyochang Kwon is always the one who conceives and handles our stage costumes, he said.

The Korean gypsies

The band was once known as “Korean Gipsy Sangjaru,” according to Cho.  They used the word “gipsy” to suggest their band’s way of life, “traveling and taking in the culture of each place you pass through,” Cho said.  But “because of that name, people increasingly assumed we were a gypsy jazz band, and interviewers kept trying to tie us to gypsy jazz.”

At one point, he said, “we thought ‘fine, let’s make a piece with a gypsy jazz grain to it as well.’ That’s where it came from.” Reinhardt, who wrote Minor Swing, was of Romani ethnicity, and a master composer. He created some pieces in the gypsy jazz style. Sangjaru’s Gyeongbok Swing is, in part, its homage to Reinhardt and his gypsy jazz.

It was apparently a decision based on ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” The word definitely sparks curiosity, and they still use the words “gipsy” and “gipsy jazz” on some of their promotional material.

A breakout moment for Korean funky fusion

Understandably, music reviewers continually try to generalize about Sangjaru’s musical genre, which is difficult, given their adaptability to so many different styles. How do they compare themselves with other Korean bands that are incorporating traditional music? “We get asked it all the time,” he reflected, “and the more we focus on it, the more our freedom to create seems to slip away, because we end up concentrating on the difference instead of the music.”

The Sangjaru signature sound is recognizable by “the density of musical energy that a small number of players can generate,” he offered. “Come to a show and you’ll feel it right away.”

K-pop bands have broken into the popular consciousness in the U.S., and have perhaps helped with U.S. audience acceptance of anything called “Korean music.” But more touring by all types of Korean bands in recent years has helped too.

Sangjaru has been performing in the U.S. regularly since last year, through a New York management group called Sori Artist, which contracts with other groups offering Korean fusion music incorporating Korean traditional music and performing arts.  Originally, Sori booked band tours just in New York state, but “it has become a tour that reaches more widely across the country,” Cho said.

When they first toured in the U.S., Cho said, audiences immediately showed up and liked them even though they had no idea who they were, or where the music came from. “What’s changed recently is that the word gugak [a general term for Korean traditional music] has moved from indifference to at least recognition,” Cho observed.

For this tour, Sangjaru is working on an album and some new pieces to bring with them, Cho said. They are all looking forward to the U.S. tour.  “We really love American audiences. They don’t seem to lock us inside a frame like ‘gugak’ or ‘world music.’ It feels like they’ve simply come to enjoy a culture, an art. It’s always been that way,” Cho said, “and they’re the most active, the most energetic, the kindest. Who are we to target anyone? We just prepare so that the hour someone gave us, and whatever comes after it, leaves them with no regrets.”

Tickets for An Evening with Sangjaru are at the Cedar Cultural Center box office, at this link

The post The theory of a box and a sack appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

President Donald Trump’s social media post on August 16 calling for a substantial reduction in U.S.-South Korea military exercises triggered panic across partisan lines. Instead of just pointing to the high costs of the exercises and unnecessarily hostile approach towards North Korea, Trump also highlighted his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and chastised South Korea for refusing to join the disastrous U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Attacks came from Republicans, including North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who defended South Korea as “a solid military ally for over 70 years,” but then made the bizarre claim that reducing joint war drills frees up North Korean troops “to support Putin’s” war on Ukraine.

Democrats, naturally, piled on, attacking Trump for undermining yet another major ally to side with an authoritarian leader. Hillary Clinton, the champion of the failed policy of “strategic patience” during the Obama administration, posted: “The president is making U.S. policy friendlier to North Korea and Russia than Canada and Oman. Are you kidding me?”

While any diplomatic overture from this administration should be viewed with skepticism — this is, after all, the same White House that condemned South Korea for declining to join its war against Iran — progressives shouldn’t miss an opportunity to take a principled position that advances peace, a reduced U.S. military footprint, and the security of the American and Korean people.

First and foremost, reducing tensions with North Korea is the right policy. Period. The U.S. has been at war with North Korea since the Korean War was temporarily halted in 1953 when the U.S. signed a ceasefire. This has meant that the U.S. is still technically at war with North Korea, justifying the presence of roughly 28,500 U.S. troops on dozens of U.S. military bases and installations on the Korean Peninsula. To maintain “readiness,” the U.S. and South Korean militaries regularly conduct provocative war drills involving tens of thousands of troops simulating the invasion of North Korea with the use of B-2 nuclear bombers, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and submarines. These joint military exercises are a well-known source of tension with North Korea as they have included training for “decapitation” strikes against the leadership, invasions, and preemptive strikes. Far from deterring North Korea, these exercises may do the opposite. Research suggests that these war drills tend to escalate rather than ease tensions, provoking a more threatening security environment instead of the deterrent effect they’re intended to have.

Second, Seoul has been calling for peaceful coexistence with Pyongyang and has abandoned the idea that North Korea would have to give up its nuclear program before dialogue. On July 23, Unification Minister Dong-young Chung announced South Korea’s “peace-first” approach, which aims instead at freezing North Korea’s nuclear program through a three-step process: Halt the production of new weapons, reduce the stockpile, and end with dismantlement. South Korean President Jae Myung Lee has a phrase for the fact that North Korea is never going to give up its nuclear weapons: “Harsh reality.”

Given this reality, President Lee has been nudging Trump to do exactly this. At the June 2026 G7 summit in Evian, France, a 90-minute dinner conversation between Presidents Trump and Lee produced commitments from both leaders to a peaceful resolution of North Korean issues — notably, without invoking denuclearization.

Seoul, then, is not an ally being blindsided, regardless of Trump’s lashing out about the Iran war. This is an ally that has been asking for exactly this shift, and finally has a U.S. president willing to upend the Washington political-military-industrial complex establishment that views South Korea as its floating aircraft carrier.

That’s where the so-called sacrament of the “alliance” deserves scrutiny. The narrative that Trump is abandoning South Korea obscures a longer, less flattering story about the actual purpose of the U.S. military presence there. Since 2006, when Washington and Seoul formalized the concept of “strategic flexibility” for U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), the U.S. mission has quietly been shifting toward preparation for a potential war with China. The USFK commander, Xavier Brunson, has publicly described South Korea as a “fixed aircraft carrier,” and more recently, relayed how China itself views the peninsula: “The dagger in the heart of Asia” when Beijing looks out from its east coast. It’s the same imagery a Prussian military adviser used over a century ago, when he warned Meiji Japan that Korea was “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Only now the metaphor has been repurposed as a geographic fact rather than as a rhetorical warning of Korea’s fate as the flashpoint where great power conflict would begin. Brunson also described the peninsula as a future node in a “kill web” aimed at Beijing, which happens to be South Korea’s largest trading partner. Seoul has protested, but the framing hasn’t changed. In February, 10 U.S. F-16s flew from Osan Air Base toward China’s air defense zone; USFK had told the South Korean military the exercise would happen but withheld its operational plan and purpose. Seoul’s defense ministry confirmed afterward that its military “wasn’t part of the latest training exercise and was not aware of the flight details in advance.” Reducing war drills tied to that broader mission of confronting China is not the same as abandoning South Korea’s defense.

For these reasons, as well as Trump’s push for South Korea to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. armaments dwindle, President Lee has been prioritizing clawing back South Korea’s wartime operational control from U.S. Forces Korea. Since the Korean War, wartime command of South Korea’s military has rested with an American general: If hostilities broke out today, South Korean troops would fall under the operational control of the U.S.-led Combined Forces Command, not their own government. Seoul regained peacetime control in 1994; wartime control is the piece they want back. It may have made sense for the U.S. to hold operational control when South Korea was a poor, unstable fledgling state; it makes less sense now, with South Korea the world’s sixth-largest military power and 10^th-largest economy. This lopsided arrangement even compelled former USFK Commander Richard Stilwell to describe the perpetuation of South Korea’s operational control delegation as “the most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world.”

This week, in the wake of Trump’s unpredictability, President Lee said that South Korea should quickly press ahead, without disruption, on the planned transfer of operational control during his term.

This brings us back to the economy. These military exercises are absurdly costly. According to a new study by David Vine for the Center for International Policy, the true cost of U.S. bases and troops in South Korea was around $5.58 billion in the 2024 fiscal year, not including South Korea’s direct and in-kind contributions, and may run higher still, given the Pentagon’s well-documented inability to track its own spending.

At a time when most Americans can barely afford to survive, U.S. taxpayers should question why our government spends $5.6 billion every year maintaining a permanent U.S. war footing on the Korean Peninsula — money that could instead fund universal school lunch for every child in the country.

Instead of parroting the political establishment that benefits from forever wars, progressives should challenge the fundamental tenet at the core of this bipartisan backlash: The belief that military superiority produces security, that militaristic “deterrence” is stabilizing, and that allies exist for the U.S. to position them. This is not producing peace, and in the case of the Korean Peninsula, it is producing exactly the escalatory spiral it claims to prevent.

Diplomacy doesn’t have to be principled to be worth pursuing.

As a new generation of progressive lawmakers win primaries and challenge both neoconservatives and Cold War Democrats, peace on the Korean Peninsula should be a no-brainer. Trump wants to talk to Jong Un Kim, and for all its contradictions, this represents something decades of sanctions and military pressure failed to produce: a U.S. president willing to engage Pyongyang without demanding surrender as the price of entry.

None of this requires pretending the optics feel right. Watching two men — each of whom has, at different points, governed in ways widely described as authoritarian — sit down to negotiate the fate of a peninsula at war offends much of the world. Trump may want this for the Nobel Peace Prize, a hotel in Pyongyang, or a Nixon-to-China legacy. None of those motives are admirable. But the people who would actually live with the outcome of an end to the Korean War — the longest-running conflict in modern U.S. history — aren’t basing their positions on ending this war on Trump’s character.

While the Pentagon has spent roughly a billion dollars a day on the U.S. war against Iran, more than 770,000 low-income American children were cut from food assistance. That is not just a budget, it is a statement of values — and progressive candidates who won primaries this summer running on “babies, not bombs” clearly understand that voters are starting to notice.

A deal between Trump and Kim, motivated by whatever mix of vanity and self-interest, isn’t something the left should reflexively oppose just because Trump is the one making it. If it ends decades of war footing on the Korean Peninsula, reduces the risk of a war against North Korea or China, and redirects even a fraction of that nearly $5.6 billion toward people instead of militarization, it is worth taking seriously. Diplomacy doesn’t have to be principled to be worth pursuing.

Trump’s transactional instincts may provide him with a benefit, but they also provide progressives with an opening. A messy, transactional peace beats a permanent war footing that no longer reflects the reality on the Korean Peninsula. Washington should walk through this opening before it loses what leverage it still has.

The post Trump moves to scale back U.S. war drills in Korea appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Space Bunny is about a bunny who always wanted to explore the stars — but now that he’s out in space, living on a space colony, Mufftopia, full of alien bunnies, he’s more interested in finding new ways to be lazy and drink his favorite cola, Bulpsie! Featuring many quirky characters, including: Space Bunny, his sidekick (or is it side table?) Pinkan from the Pink Planet, their mad scientist boss Liam, and Space Bunny’s aspiring chef sister, Spice Bunny.  

(be sure to check out Space Bunny merch in the KQ “shop”)

The post Space Bunny: XL400 ~ A mad scientist tail appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Space Bunny is a bilingual comic about a bunny who always wanted to explore the stars — but now that he’s out in space, living on a space colony, Mufftopia, full of alien bunnies, he’s more interested in finding new ways to be lazy and drink his favorite cola, Bulpsie! Featuring many quirky characters, including: Space Bunny, his sidekick (or is it side table?) Pinkan from the Pink Planet, their mad scientist boss Liam, and Space Bunny’s aspiring chef sister, Spice Bunny.  

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To be continued…???

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Space Bunny bonus “From the Vault”

(be sure to check out Space Bunny merch in the KQ “shop”)

The post The Adventures of Space Bunny ~ vol. 2 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Space Bunny is a bilingual comic about a bunny who always wanted to explore the stars — but now that he’s out in space, living on a space colony, Mufftopia, full of alien bunnies, he’s more interested in finding new ways to be lazy and drink his favorite cola, Bulpsie! Featuring many quirky characters, including: Space Bunny, his sidekick (or is it side table?) Pinkan from the Pink Planet, their mad scientist boss Liam, and Space Bunny’s aspiring chef sister, Spice Bunny.  

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To be continued in “Space Bunny ~ vol. 2” folder…

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(be sure to check out Space Bunny merch in the KQ “shop”)

The post The Adventures of Space Bunny ~ vol. 1 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.