You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world
No way. Don’t touch that. If their book said it was true, you can’t tell them that it’s a lie.
The stars are in your favor, darling, you can't be horrible. Nope, they won't let you.
The interpreter, however, is the shadow. The key is to be invisible. She is the only one in the room who hears the truth, a keeper of secrets.
There. Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.
But no phrase puzzled them more than Social Security deduction.
The past was all right there before me: generations of Koreans separated by division; decades of longing, loss, hurt, regret, guilt.
History is a record of many such irrationalities.
For a moment, I felt a pang of envy. I remembered those few drifting years after college, taking off alone with a backpack to explore the world. I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challeng...
Nothing, it seemed, could break through their belligerent isolation; moreover, this attitude left no room for any argument, since all roads led to just one conclusion.
Be careful with your terminology: Great Leader, Dear Leader, Precious Leader. Those names have to be carefully used, or better yet, just stay away from discussing them at all.
We believe what we want to believe.
How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence.
I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.
The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.
For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized fo...
One thing was clear. Their collective decision to switch their essay topics to condemn America seemed to have been compelled by the articles about Zuckerberg.
For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junje...
I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers...
Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after.
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