The human interest of Hongyong's story is compelling, but its treatment will likely strike readers as incomplete. Born in - "the year of the rat" - to aristocratic parents, Hongyong Baek came of age in a unified but socially repressive Korea, where she learned the roles that had been prescribed for her: obedient daughter, demure wife, efficient household manager.
For more information call More personally, I still don't know how to react to the book. Lee opens her first-person biography of her grandmother, Hongyong Baek, with a telling fraction of her own story--an all-American California girl, slightly uncomfortable with her grandmother's Korean outlook, who travels to Korea, Hong Kong, and China to trace her roots.
And with wit and verve she claims her own Korean identity, illuminating the intricate experiences of Asian-American women. Same thing happened with Amy Tan. Resonates well with Fall of Giants, in that just because you're born into an upper class doesn't automatically imbue you with leadership skills, as the English learned to their sorrow on the battlefield, as the family learned to it's sorrow with Father and Eldest Son and Second Wife, and the absolute spinelessness of Husband.
Nor does Lee seem to have full command of the background to the family's exile to China, where Hongyong entrepreneurially took up opium smuggling and the healing art of Chiryonor to her grandmother's persecution under the North Korean Communist regime for converting to Christianity.
However, your husband must never be threatened by your power and will.
And my perpetual question, 'why, if you didn't like it when you were growing up, repeat the same pattern? There was a problem adding your email address. When she was pressured to leave her country, she moved with her family to California, where she reestablished her Chiryo practice.