“After losing both of my parents within the last four years, I have felt a stronger urgency to not lose this connection to my ancestral roots.” We’re in EMart, a large grocery store chain in Seoul and as we approach the cashier to check-out, my heart starts to beat a little faster. My Polish-born, blonde…
Korean Hanbok is the traditional attire that has been worn by Korean people for centuries. Literally translated as Korean clothing, hanboks are worn on special occasions like Korean New Year’s Day (설날, Seollal), Korean Thanksgiving Day (추석, Chuseok), Korean 100th Day Celebration (백일, Baek Il), First Birthday Celebration (돌잔치, Doljanchi), and weddings. Hanbok has been…
Finally! After a series of canceled world tours throughout the pandemic, many of our favorite K-Pop groups such as ATEEZ, NCT 127 and TWICE have announced new world tour dates. I could not imagine anyone being more thrilled and excited about this than yours truly, but I was wrong. It seemed everyone (and their mother)…
2021 has been another banner year for Korean American writing with many standout novels, memoirs, and short story collections put out by both major and independent publishers, many of them appearing on ‘best of the year’ lists and one, Grace Cho’s Tastes Like War, becoming a finalist for the National Book Award. This is not…
Sometime in the 1990s, Chinese journalists coined the word “hallyu” to describe the wave of Korean pop culture and entertainment that was gaining popularity outside of Korea. Almost thirty years later in 2021, hallyu along with 25 other Korean words, have officially found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary, the reference book that is…
Meet Ji-Young, the very first Asian American Muppet and the newest resident on Sesame Street! According to Ji-Young’s bio on the Sesame Street website, she is a spunky 7 years old Korean American who loves playing an electric guitar with her Sesame Street friends, playing soccer, and skateboarding. “Ji-Young is extremely close with her family…
Korean drama Squid Game (오징어게임) is the number one show on Netflix in the US as well as much of the world right now. Squid Game is also scoring a perfect 100% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes. If this news surprises you, you obviously have not yet seen this incredibly stylish series that grips you…
Ultra fresh seafood and photo ops galore on this beautiful island paradise. After a two week quarantine in Korea for my two daughters and myself, a pleasant surprise was awaiting us. My mother had booked a trip to Jeju Island! My girls were definitely excited. “Isn’t Jeju Korea’s Hawaii? Will there be palm trees? Can…
Interspersed in Michael ByungJu Kim’s captivating first novel Offerings are delightful Korean proverbs called sajaseong-eo. In the old days, these wise words written in Chinese characters were recited by scholars and noblemen, and eventually many of these sayings were adopted into the everyday vernacular of the common folk. Sajaseong-eo literally means four character proverb, and…
In 1995, when I read Chang-Rae Lee’s impressive debut novel Native Speaker, I was inspired to read every new novel written by a Korean American as it was published. That was not such a difficult task in the 90s, but in the course of the new century, there has been such an explosion of excellent…