ŷ������

아프��, 기쁘��, 뜨겁��
인생�� 파도�� 넘어서며 살아�� 것이��.

“Those guys are just like us. Our life is also a kind of surfing,�� said Hongju

Willow immediately understood what Hongju meant. As Hongju said, for her, too, life’s crises had come raging, innumerable like the waves of the sea. The deaths of her father and brother, the life that had followed, life in Hawaiʻi as a picture bride . . . Nothing was ever easy. The same was true for Hongju and Songhwa.

Willow put her arm round Hongju’s shoulder and watched Songhwa as she followed the children. They, having left Korea together, would go on living together, rising above the waves, painfully, joyfully, passionately.

The Picture Bride (2022) is An Seonjae's translation of 하로��, 나의 엄마�� (“Alola, My Mothers��, 2020) by 이군�� (Lee Geum-yi).

The novel centres around three 'picture brides' who travel from Korea, under Japanese occupation, to Hawaiʻi in 1918, part of a wave of such women in the period 1910-1924, Willow (버들, although the translator explains in her afterword that she chose to translate this name rather than render it phonetically), Hong-ju (홍주) and Songhwa (송화).

For background on the picture brides see , although this entry is more focused on the Japanese experience, this article in the , and this first person .

A latter section of the novel is set in December 1941, just after Pearl Harbour and has one of the women's daughters, 진주 / Pearl, with a close connection to all three women (hence the Korean title), looking back on what happened to them, as well as finding out a surprise about her own origins.

Much of the novel is rather standard historical fiction which at times I found a little melodramatic and others rather dull.

But the most interesting parts of the novel, although in the background, are the factional struggles in the overseas Korean independence movement between Park Yong-man (박용��) and Syngman Rhee (이승��), the latter the first President of South Korea from 1948 and the former assassinated in Beijing on 17 October 1928 by a Korean communist.

And the novel also showcases the entreprenurial spirit of the Korean women (noted in the Wikipedia article above), who support each other's business ventures with a self-help savings club, a �� (gye).

In parts this was a 2 star read, but awarding 3 for the fascinating (4 stars on their own) elements of Korean emigrant and resistance history.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.