Reviews

I wasn't necessarily a fan of this. I think I could've spent more time thinking about the poems, but the meaning of most was pretty direct (I am sure I missed a lot, though). The usage of children's songs and stuff was really nice and I am a fan of chapter 18 because it made me chuckle.

I loved that there was a recurrent bit where Choi would write "무궁화 꽃이 피었습니다” (mugunghwa kkochi piotsseumnida) and then said she refused to translate - after Squid Game, does this even require translation? Just sing it out loud a couple of times and you know what it is and, in a war context, what it means (I guess).

hannahlees's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

lhegedus's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

chaetrain's review

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challenging hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

4.25

really really good. love all the stuff with beauty and nation. still thinking about the flower motifs. and the repetition, shifts in perspective - excellent & will be useful to me

venneh's review against another edition

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4.0

This is one of Don Mee Choi’s first works that isn’t her translating someone else’s work, and mainly focuses on her father’s experiences in the Korean War. This one was a bit harder for me to follow, mainly due to knowing only vague outline information about the Korean War. Probably the most interesting piece in here is Hardly Opera, which tackles her father’s experience through the form of Chinese opera and the use of flower language to refer to things like Johnson’s Daisy Girl ad, Gertrude Stein, the Republic of Korea’s flag, and others (which I only really understood after reading the end notes) to talk about her father’s experience in the war as a reporter. Definitely worth a look through.

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