Yi Munyol's Books

Meeting with My Brother

A Novella

By: Mun-yol Yi

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Yi Mun-yol's Meeting with My Brother is narrated by a middle-aged South Korean professor, also named Yi, whose father abandoned his family and defected to the North at the outbreak of the Korean War. Many years later, despite having spent most of his life under a cloud of suspicion as the son of a traitor, Yi is prepared to reunite with his father. Yet before a rendezvous on the Chinese border can be arranged, his father dies. Yi then learns for the first time that he has a half-brother, whom he chooses to meet instead. As the two confront their shared legacy, their encounter takes a surprising turn. Meeting with My Brother represents the political and psychological complexity of Koreans on both sides of the border, offering a complex yet poignant perspective on the divisions between the two countries. Through a series of charged conversations, Yi explores the nuances of reunification, both political and personal. This semiautobiographical account draws on Yi's own experience of growing up with an absent father who defected to the North and the stigma of family disloyalty. First published in Korea in 1994, Meeting with My Brother is a moving and illuminating portrait of the relationships sundered by one of the world's starkest barriers.

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Page Count

106

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231544677

ISBN 13

9780231544672

Dust and Other Stories

By: T'aejun Yi

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Dust and Other Stories

By: T'aejun Yi

Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate. Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.

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Page Count

277

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231546343

ISBN 13

9780231546348

The Poet

By: Yi Munyol

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The Poet

By: Yi Munyol

A fictionalized biography of Kim Pyongyon, a 19th Century South Korean singing poet who had to bear the sins of his fathers. The family was disgraced by a grandfather who surrendered in a war, they were stripped of their privileges and Kim had to make a living as a troubadour.

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Page Count

206

Published Date

ISBN 10

0002713640

ISBN 13

9780002713641

Meeting with My Brother

A Novella

By: Mun-yŏl Yi

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Meeting with My Brother

A Novella

By: Mun-yŏl Yi

Narrated in the first person, Meeting with My Brother tells the story of a professor's journey to meet with his younger half-brother from North Korea. The professor's father had left his family behind in the South during the Korean War and eventually had another family in the North. The story includes the professor's negotiations with the go-between who arranges the meeting, his participation in a tour group (the necessary excuse to travel to the area in China where the meeting takes place), his interaction with other tour members and Koreans living in the area, and finally his meeting with his brother. The story includes different positions on reunification and illuminates many of the reasons that make reunification difficult. In this new translation the author has added a new vignette that does not appear in the original.

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Publisher

Weatherhead Books on Asia

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231178654

ISBN 13

9780231178655

Book's by Yi Munyol

Meeting with My Brother

Meeting with My Brother

Dust and Other Stories

Dust and Other Stories

The Poet

The Poet

Meeting with My Brother

Meeting with My Brother

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