Events
Past ASIA Event:
ASIA Bookgroup - Jan. 18, 2004
Still Life with Rice by Helie Lee
Join the bookgroup for our potluck brunch and discussion of Helie Lee's book,
A Still Life with Rice.
From Kirkus Reviews
In a bio-fic, Lee makes her debut both recounting and imagining her Korean grandmother's eventful life: childhood and
marriage under Japanese occupation, opium smuggling in China, and flight during the Korean war.
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. Lee successfully grounds such matters as her grandmother's pampered
childhood and arranged marriage within the context of Korean culture, vividly illuminating family relationships, power struggles,
and the realities of daily life in pre-Communist Korea.
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on interviews with her grandmother and writing in her voice, Lee dramatically describes the aftermath of the
Japanese occupation of Korea, which forced Baek, her husband and their children to flee to
China in 1939, where they supported themselves by selling opium. After they returned to Korea, the 1950s' civil war
caused them extreme hardship. Baek lost her husband to diphtheria and was separated from her son. She supported her other
children by practicing the healing art of Chedo. Baek emigrated to the U.S. in 1972. A captivating memoir of a courageous survivor.
The bookgroup will meet at Anna's house at 11 am. Her house is accessible by the D line (Green).
More info & directions: Bookgroup.
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