Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh is important for the ways in which her writing is at once popular (nearly all her works are best-sellers) and canonical. She is widely discussed in Korean academia, and she has become the subject of a number of dissertations. While this is also the case for many male writers, Park Wan-suh may have combined the two levels more successfully than any other novelist. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is the embodiment of one of these works. -- Theodore Hughes, Columbia University Park Wan-suh is a household name in Korea and draws standing-room-only crowds in North American cities with substantial Korean populations. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is a major work, being both a rare account of a woman coming of age in colonial Korea and the first book-length memoir in English by a Korean writer resident in and writing about Korea. -- Bruce Fulton, University of British Columbia, and cotranslator of There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life. With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.