There was a funny scene in an episode of the hit Korean Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience, where the father asks his daughter’s date when the Korean War started, just to test the suitor’s Korean-ness and make sure he is worthy of a date with his daughter. Passing a test like this may not be a…
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…
Doljanchi 돌잔치 is the Korean first birthday celebration. Dol 돌 means birthday and janchi 잔치 means banquet or feast, so doljanchi technically means birthday party. Though the term always refers to the first birthday party, this event is also called “cheot” dol, 첫돌, or “first” birthday. For the doljanchi, parents celebrate by having a party with many traditional foods and rituals.…
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…
NAPABA has established pro bono legal resources to ensure that local communities have legal resources to address the most egregious hate-fueled attacks against our community. NAPABA is the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, an organization of 50,000 Asian Pacific American attorneys, judges, law professors, and law students. Led by their Hate Crimes Task Force,…
As a mother of two young (not yet school-age) boys with the attention spans of a gnat and an exceptional ability to make our house feel twice as small, I have serious reservations about buying them new toys. But I don’t have the same qualms when it comes to books. Our house is cluttered with…
The first 100 days, or baek il, of a Korean child’s life used to be a very somber and anxious time as the infant mortality rates in Korea were once alarmingly high due to disease and malnutrition. It was also a time for the mother to recover from the trauma of childbearing. Other than close…
If you are Korean or if you happen to like K Dramas or Kpop, learning Korean can seem like a fun and worthwhile thing to do. However, learning a language is far from easy and a personal online Korean tutor can seem out of reach and expensive. I have tried an exhaustive number of methods…
What is soju? Simply put, soju is a clear, distilled, rice based drink from Korea that has long been the world’s most popular liquor. It’s the No. 1 selling liquor by volume, and sales have only been growing in recent years. In terms of potency, Jinro classic soju is 20% alcohol and falls somewhere in the middle…
In theory, anyone who could pass state examinations had a chance of advancing their station in life. Education is a big deal in Korea. Korean students are known to spend endless hours outside the classroom in tuition centers, supplementing their normal curriculum with extra-curriculars and test preparations. It’s not uncommon for many Korean students to…