Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Anne Holzman

Feds tell Asian American Twin Citians “we see you”

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Economic summit draws capacity crowd at Metro State University in St. Paul | By Anne Holzman (Summer 2024)

Twin City Asian American Leaders and U.S. officials pose for a group photo at the economic summit. Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator Amy Klobuchar (center) spoke at the event. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

Speaking in front of a packed auditorium of ethnically-diverse Asian Twin Citians on July 2 at Metropolitan State University, U.S. Trade Rep. Ambassador Katherine Tai and Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Nani Coloretti touted achievements of the Biden Administration and encouraged audience members to engage with federal opportunities for Asian Americans.

Many of those opportunities were on display in a nearby conference room, where local officers of federal agencies met with conference participants and the general public for an hour before and again after the auditorium talks. The room hummed with steady traffic at the tables and side conversations as attendees with academic, business, and other interests took advantage of casual networking.

The full name of the event, the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AA and NHPI) Economic Summit, included a well-attended welcome session in a 300-seat auditorium, followed by a “fireside chat” interview with Tai and Coloretti.

Caroline Goon, White House Director of External Affairs, launched the welcome session by explaining that such summits have been taking place around the country over the past two years but this was the first one in the Twin Cities. She noted that Tai is one of four Asian Americans serving in the President’s Cabinet and said the purpose of the summits is to “better connect [local residents] with critical federal resources.”

In addition to building connections, the event seemed calibrated to remind everyone of the achievements of the current administration during election season. Hmong American Partnership had a substantial presence at the summit, as did the Small Business Administration and the National Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurship (National ACE), a business association.

Local elected officials and business association leaders were seated in the first few rows. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Ilhan Omar both made introductory remarks from the stage. Klobuchar spoke briefly, telling a story about the deep appreciation of education opportunities in a family she once met at her daughter’s school in Minneapolis years ago.

Omar claimed a personal connection to Asian heritage, noting that her mother had ancestors in Yemen. She mentioned her sponsorship of the Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act of 2023, which she brought to a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, but which did not make it to a House floor vote.  The measure was also sponsored by Rep. Betty McCollum, who did not attend the July 2 event but sent staff.

Small Business Association (SBA) official Dilawar Syed touted the Biden Administration’s investment in U.S. computer chip manufacturing and other technology. He said SBA has streamlined the loan process to make programs more accessible to small businesses. “Small dollar lending is up 47 percent yearly,” he said, but there’s more to be done. “This requires intentionality,” he said.

Syed said that while minority businesses around the country have increased participation, Minnesota is lagging in that area. He appealed to the audience to help his office reach minority business owners here.

(left to right) Erika Moritsugu, Deputy Assistant to the President, U.S. Trade Rep. Ambassador Katherine Tai and Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Nani Coloretti. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

Krystal Ka’ai of the White House Initiative introduced Erika Moritsugu, Deputy Assistant to the President, who conducted an interview with Trade Rep. Tai and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Deputy Director Nani Coloretti. Tai’s job is includes negotiating economic policy with foreign countries. She previously served on the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee.

Tai gave an upbeat starting point to the discussion: “We really are the one advanced economy that’s doing better than we were before.” Referring to the U.S. Gymnastics finals that had just concluded in Minneapolis, she added, “What we see is an economy that has stuck its landing the way Suni Lee sticks her landings.” The comparison drew appreciative laughter and applause.

Coloretti worked at Housing and Urban Development under Barack Obama and as the budget director for the city of San Francisco under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. She talked about her reliance on a Pell grant to afford college and said the Biden-Harris administration has worked hard to relieve student loan debt.

A capacity crowd at Metro State University auditorium in St. Paul.

In a room full of small business entrepreneurs, Moritsugu and Tai talked about the efforts to broaden access. Tai acknowledged that “trade policies have been in the realm of large corporations for a very long time.” She said that early in her tenure as trade representative, President Biden asked her to find out how trade policies were affecting American workers. She said the data was scarce, but that she could give him a “rough cut – not all Americans are being affected by our trade policies equally. She said her effort since then has been to make the country’s trade policy benefit more Americans.

Coloretti said one important step is to disaggregate data, to find out in more detail which communities are benefiting or being harmed by various policies. The OMB works across the entire federal government and handles a broad swathe of statistics. In March, they rolled out updated standards for handling data on race and ethnicity.

Coloretti gave the example of a cancer study showing that, while rates may be lower among Asian women than white women overall, the disease has hit Laotian women especially hard. Coloretti also said that FEMA, the federal disaster response agency, would give more accurate information about who is and is not seeing benefits from disaster aid.

At the end of the interview, Tai summarized, “The Biden administration sees you.” Coloretti added, “Democracy requires participation.” While elected officials and others arranged themselves for photos, audience members shouted and waved and sorted themselves once again into their networks, the conversations drifting out onto campus sidewalks.     

After the auditorium session, some participants met in breakout sessions with agencies specific to their interests. Those sessions were closed to the press. Angela Perez, a spokesperson for Tai, said about 150-200 people attended each of the breakout sessions, at least equal to the number present at the opening address.

Author’s notes: For more on Tai’s work, see this article by Garphil Julien in the April/May/June edition of the Washington Monthly, which cites Tai discussing a “post-colonial phase” in U.S. trade policy: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/04/07/trump-vs-biden-who-got-more-done-on-trade/ )

(For more information about the updated rule to use disaggregated data on race/ethnicity, see this link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2024/03/28/omb-publishes-revisions-to-statistical-policy-directive-no-15-standards-for-maintaining-collecting-and-presenting-federal-data-on-race-and-ethnicity/ )

Seeing the universe through music

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Takács Quartet bring Flow composition to New York stage | Music review by Anne Holzman (Spring 2024)

(Takács Quartet in concert, 92nd Street Y/92NY, New York), March 13, 2024)

Takács Quartet (left to right): Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), András Fejér (cello) and Richard O’Neill (viola) perform Flow at 92NY, March 13, 2024.  Photo by Joseph Sinnott

Suspended between two giants of the string quartet literature, Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama’s new composition, titled Flow, offered an escape into the Big Bang in the capable hands of the Takács Quartet at their March 13 concert.

The Takács Quartet commissioned the piece, prepared it in consultation with the composer, and first performed it at their home base in Boulder, Colo.  The New York performance should establish theirs as the definitive interpretation of a score that will now venture into the world of advanced strings repertoire.

The program at the 92nd Street Y began with Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4, nicknamed Sunrise. Austrian composer Joseph Haydn wrote 68 string quartets, which are widely considered the foundation of the art form. This one, composed in 1797, was one of his last and most adventurous, shifting rapidly between tempos and straying from established key sequences.

The Takács gave the opening movement of Sunrise a light, ethereal sheen, using fast bow strokes and minimal vibrato. They playfully evoked birdsong and contrasted light and shadow. The second movement drew contrast with exaggerated slowness, delicately easing into pitches, but still with a soft clarity.

The Haydn third movement sounded more like traditional string quartet performances, regular and solid, as if to remind us of the canvas on which the rest was painted. The fourth movement combined the airy playfulness of the first movement with the rhythmic experimentation of the second. It takes a sophisticated, experienced ensemble to pull off the kind of collective tempo-bending on display here.

Our ears now primed for galactic adventures, the audience received a brief introduction to the new piece by Ngwenyama (nicknamed Tula).  Second violinist Harumi Rhodes rose to describe the development of the piece and the quartet’s experience with it.  Rhodes said that Flow opens “with dramatization of what the beginning of the Universe might have sounded like.”

She continued, “Tula orchestrates a conversation between some of her most favorite areas of research: Physics, chemistry, biology, and spirituality.” Through it all, Rhodes said, runs “this idea of flow, that constant, buzzing, vibrating energy” of the Universe. Rhodes noted that the performers appreciate the music’s “playfulness, sense of humor, theatrical range … and positive energy.”

Indeed, Flow begins with playful energy, tossing about strange harmonics (a string instrument technique that involves touching a string lightly while bowing fast to produce a thin, high-pitched sound), slides, and pizzicatos. This palette of unusual string sounds has become a standard opening gambit of modern composition, but Flow quickly finds order in the chaos. Rhythmic pulses establish themselves, overlap, disappear. Melodies appear and intertwine. It was not difficult to hear how the new piece fit with the Haydn quartet composed two centuries earlier. Both opening movements break between tempos and melodies above a pleasing harmonic base.

Although Flow does not stick to the classical quartet tradition of four movements (typically fast, slow, dance or scherzo, and stately), it does cover the customary terrain of contrasting dynamics and moods. The opening Big Bang gives way to a slower section in which extended solo melodies weave themselves into choruses. This is more reminiscent of Beethoven’s complexity than Haydn’s clarity. The Takács kept the playing style light, but, as in the Haydn second movement, allowed long suspensions of near-silence to resonate.

The quiet passage gives way to a burst of melody, as if a dance band had suddenly taken the stage. The next few minutes offered a bouquet of pretty tunes shot through with the weird buzziness left over from the Big Bang. I thought of stray electrons whizzing about among planets now fully formed and finding their orbits. Then the melodies began to disintegrate, seemingly helpless in the face of entropy, spinning into chaos. From my notebook: “I’m almost laughing at some of the cartoonish sounds.”

A clear break, perhaps a deep breath, leads Flow to its culmination in a full, balanced choral sound. This phase is not as warm as the earlier slow phase, but the harmonies are familiar, the melodies sustained and expressive, the conversation woven together in recognizable patterns. The piece ends with all four musicians playing fast at full tilt, quite a traditional finale except for some weird whistling that reminds us that we’re still out there beyond the stratosphere.

Even viewing the concert online, the decaying vibrations of the music seemed palpable. An intermission offered a bit of downtime as the audience burst into conversation, energy still vibrating audibly from the screen. The chatter kept up until the Takács Quartet came back for their second half, Beethoven’s String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2, part of the series labeled Razumovsky,  constituting much of the “middle Beethoven” string quartet repertoire.

Hearing the Beethoven quartet after Ngwenyama’s piece gave it a fresh frame. Beethoven’s first movement is full of fast runs of notes spilling in turn from the different instruments; like both Sunrise and Flow, it opens with alternating quick and slow passages. There were long pauses that seemed more prominent this time around, vibrating with the accumulated energy from the first half of the program.

After the irregularity of Flow, the Beethoven brought back the structures underlying classical-era composition. Written in 1806, the work follows fairly clear patterns of phrasing and balance among the instruments, although with less clarity as to key and chord progression than in Haydn. The music sounds familiar, if only because this repertoire is so widely performed, yet it seemed oddly unfamilar in the wake of Flow.

The second movement of this particular Beethoven quartet is said to have been written after the composer enjoyed an evening of stargazing – hence the choice for this program with the theme of exploring the universe. It was interesting to contemplate the balance of melody and harmony as an interpretation of 19th century physics and mathematics, before the age of relativity and quantum mechanics. No quarks zinged through the silences; no asteroids whistled past. The planets moved with pleasing regularity, observed by an audience confident in the predictability of their motion.

Beethoven’s third movement served as a reminder of his distance late in life from his teacher, Haydn, as he took a Russian melody (the connection to his patron, Count Razumovsky), broke it, bent it and rearranged it. And the fourth is a wild romp through a Slavic dance, demanding the utmost virtuosity, which the Takács players were absolutely there for. From the entangled voices, they pulled out tiny shreds of melody, landed fast-paced offbeat entrances with panache, and displayed perfect ensemble playing that left abrupt pauses ringing with overtones.

The audience leaped to its feet and made even more noise than the quartet had made, and with good reason. It was a program full of big ideas delivered with energy and united by Flow.

Listening to the universe

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Korean American violist Richard O’Neill finds the “flow” in new music | By Anne Holzman (Spring 2024)

András Fejér (cello) and Richard Yongjae O’Neill (viola). Photo by Joseph Sinnott

When the Takács Quartet takes the stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on March 13, concertgoers will be treated to the area premiere of Flow by composer Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama. They will hear the whispers and bangs of the universe as Ngwenyama, known to the group by the nickname Tula, puts their 16 strings to work evoking the music of the spheres.

Freshly-composed music has not always been in the quartet’s wheelhouse; they made their name back in the 1980s and ‘90s as some of the most interesting interpreters of the standard classical repertoire. But for their current violist, Korean American Richard Yongjae O’Neill, new music has been a passion and a career.

O’Neill, born and raised in the Seattle area, moved to Manhattan in August 2001 to start his master’s work in viola performance at the famous Juilliard School for musical performance in New York City. He quickly befriended cello professor Fred Sherry, who hired O’Neill for gigs around town.

“I think Fred literally knows all of the living composers,” O’Neill told KQ during an interview in early March. O’Neill discovered that he enjoyed the adventure of tackling unknown scores. “I’m very grateful for that period,” he said.

Around the time he started at Juilliard, he and his mother, who had left a chaotic South Korea in the wake of the war, were trying to reconnect with relatives who they thought might be somewhere in Korea. They traveled to the country, made videos about themselves, and appeared on Korean television shows.

In spite of a few hopeful meetings with families, Richard and his mother had no success at finding their own. But the effort introduced Richard to filmmaking, and he has developed a second career in making documentaries about his musical projects. He said his favorite is Hello?! Orchestra (2013), a four-part television series about his work with Korean children from non-musical backgrounds learning about classical instruments. That series garnered an International Emmy award.

The 2010s were full of opportunities for O’Neill. He appeared on stages around the world, both as an individual soloist with orchestras and with several top string ensembles. He recorded on the respected Deutsch Grammophon label and continued to produce films. He was nominated twice for Grammy awards for solo recordings.

In May 2020, just as the ferocity of the COVID-19 pandemic was becoming clear, he joined the Takacs Quartet and moved to that ensemble’s home base in Boulder, Colorado.

The Takacs Quartet was founded in Hungary in 1975 and moved to the U.S. in 1983. The University of Colorado at Boulder welcomed the group for a residency, and Boulder became its permanent home. Quartet players have changed over the years; of the original group, the cellist is only founding member.

Riding out the pandemic, O’Neill again found his filmmaking skills useful, creating a film about the viola for Korean audiences.

That year he also accepted an invitation to play at a Presidential event in South Korea commemorating the Battle of Taejon. “It was really surreal,” he said, especially given all the limitations of the pandemic.

In 2021, O’Neill’s third Grammy nomination proved to be a charm, as he won Best Classical Instrumental Solo Performance for his recording of Christopher Theofanidis’ Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra. O’Neill is only the second person to receive an award for a viola performance in the history of this category.

Takács Quartet (left to right): Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), András Fejér (cello) and Richard O’Neill (viola). Photo by Joseph Sinnott

O’Neill and the Takács Quartet commissioned Stephen Hough to compose a piece as a companion to a program of composers Ravel and Dutilleux. They performed Hough’s piece, and also released a recording of it in January 2023. Soon after that, they were approached about their next project, which became Flow.

During his undergraduate years in Los Angeles, Richard had heard Ngwenyama performing on viola, which is her instrument as well. He was taken with her playing and began following her composition work too. He realized this commission could be an opportunity to work with her.

The Takács Quartet (left to right): Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes, Richard O’Neill and András Fejér — collaborated with composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama (center) to premiere her composition “Flow.”

O’Neill explained that the commission for Flow involved a long list of partners, including the 92nd Street Y, but was organized by a group in Berkeley, California. They were considering ideas for a commission, called the quartet, and asked about possible composers. The quartet called Ngwenyama, she was interested, and they embarked on a project that would explore “the concept of energy flow in the universe,” as O’Neill explained it.

Tula, as they came to call her, sent them a manuscript in September 2023, then visited them in Boulder to polish the piece and attend early performances. Approximately 25 minutes long, “flow” demands substantial preparation. O’Neill said they have thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration. “There’s no better way to learn about music than to work with a composer,” he said.       

O’Neill said there is not yet a recording of Flow available to the public, but that the quartet has been discussing the possibility. Meanwhile, the 92nd Street Y will make the concert available online for 72 hours after the March 13 concert, which starts at 7:30 p.m. EDT.

The theme of the concert is the inspiration of the natural world. Also on the program are Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4, Sunrise; and Beethoven’s String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2, Razumovsky.

O’Neill said listeners might find similarities in the three quartets’ evocation of nature and the cosmos. While listening to the newest piece, he advised, don’t overthink it. “Sit back and relax and enjoy it,” he said. “Go with the flow!”

Feeling a parent’s loss

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Ten Thousand Things delivers an emotional story while keeping the comedic virtuosity | By Anne Holzman (Winter 2024)

(left) Tyson Forbes and Michelle de Joya and (right) Michelle de Joya and Clay Man Soo in Ten Thousand Things’ The Hatmaker’s Wife, by Lauren Yee.  Photo by Tom Wallace

The Hatmaker’s Wife by Lauren Yee
(Directed by Joel Sass, Ten Thousand Things Theater, various locations through March 17, 2024)

A wall that can talk and a writer’s imagination connect two generations of apartment dwellers in surprising ways in The Hatmaker’s Wife, brought to life with the usual panache of Ten Thousand Things Theater (TTT) at various Twin Cities locations through March 17.

The script by Lauren Yee is a strange, abstract read, but TTT roots it in dusty, sweaty realism as a young couple moves into an apartment and embarks on a shared life. It soon becomes apparent that the character scripted as Voice, played by Michelle de Joya, has access to a world that her partner Gabe, played by Clay Man Soo, cannot hear or see. This world will drive them apart, even as an older love story breaks through and resolves itself in newfound passion.

Yee’s wall is a character called Wall, played at TTT by the very tall and craggy Tyson Forbes draped in beautiful plaster-toned patchwork by costume designer Sonya Berlovitz. Wall drops pages of the older story into Voice’s hands, driving each new scene. As she watches each scene play out, perhaps in her imagination, Voice drifts farther from Gabe’s quotidian existence. Yee seems to ask, “how far apart can a couple drift before the relationship is truly over? Can we ever really know the person we call our life partner?”

The older couple who inhabited the apartment years before are the hatmaker named Hetchman, played by Jim Lichtscheidl, and Hetchman’s wife, played by Kimberly Richardson. A central issue of the play, and a sly critique of marriage in the Western tradition, is that no one can recall the wife’s name; she is known only by her relationship to Hetchman. As we can see by the parallel unnamed Voice, not much has changed between generations.

Wall, Hetchman, and Wife all speak in thick Yiddish accents, as does Meckel, an old friend of the couple, played by Pedro Bayon. Hetchman seems to have no emotional interest in his wife but is weirdly attached to his hat, which issues happy hat music that makes him shiver with pleasure. Wife resents this and takes the hat to have a copy made for herself by the second, third, or fourth best hat maker in town since her own husband, the best, refuses to make one for her. A Golem shows up, another reference to Yiddish storytelling. The Golem reveals secrets as the Wall keeps dropping pages to launch new scenes, until a connection is revealed between the couples that is more than just living under the same roof.

In a weekday afternoon performance at Avalon School in St. Paul, appreciative laughs met Hetchman’s crassly humorous opening scene, in which he used a claw tool meant for reaching objects on high shelves to scratch himself and retrieve snacks from the TV stand. He remains firmly rooted in his chair as Wife passes back and forth with various housecleaning tools, berating him for his laziness. Richardson’s voice as the Wife, ranging from squeals to growls, made her character especially poignant.

There was only one brief bit of audience interaction, unusual for TTT, which typically engages its audience throughout a performance. Nevertheless, the intense sadness and loss in The Hatmaker’s Wife was balanced by the company’s comedic virtuosity. Directed by Joel Sass, with music director Katherine Fried, this production brims with music and noise that fill the spaces of the spare script and lend it an air of magic.

Like all TTT performances, this one is done in the round, so that the viewer sees the action against the backdrop of an audience reacting across the circle. It is as if a story told around a fire had come to energetic life. When a character says, “love keeps you grounded,” and then a baby flies away, it is at once both heartbreaking and funny.

At the heart of the story is the loss or abandonment (depending how one looks at it) of a child. A baby left unattended is spirited away while a parent turns to attend to work. It is a message that is particularly meaningful for parents. It landed heavily for me, both as an adoptive mother and as a mother remembering a time when I had a colicky infant, who for months gave me little rest.

The story, although delivered with enough lightness and comedic balance, reminds us that children leave, families fall apart, and our best is often not good enough. We blame ourselves, we blame each other, and we keep our hat music trapped in our heads. We live with our choices and our failures, and if our walls could talk, we would probably hear more questions than answers.

Plastic tubs, wooden spoons, and imagination

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Cookin’ reminds us that we’re born to play, dance, and make music | Theater review by Anne Holzman (Summer 2023)

Cast of the Children’s Theatre Company production of Cookin’, 2023. Photo by Glen Stubbe

The kitchen is a playground and the cooks are the wildest kids you ever knew in the long-running South Korean show Cookin’ (in Korea the same show is known as Nanta) which is enjoying a madcap run at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis.

The five actors carrying on their antics at top speed for an hour and a half have much more than just comic ability. They have also brought serious dance and drumming chops to this show about what goes on in a restaurant kitchen. Cookin’ is a rare opportunity to see a South Korean production based in Korean traditional percussion, comedy and martial arts on a Twin Cities stage.

In a brief introductory scene, we see an ancient hearth at which early humans delight in exploring rhythmic patterns as they chop food for cooking. The connection between chopping and drumming becomes the axle upon which the rest of the show will turn. It’s an odd premise for a drama, but this show falls somewhere between a circus act and an operetta, with the plot serving mainly as a showcase for the actors’ impressive stagecraft.

On the night I attended with my teenage daughter, gag after comic gag kept a nearly sold-out theater rocking with laughter. To my right, a boy of about 12 came in with parents and a flock of younger siblings – the bored older brother, complete with earbuds pounding his own music as the show started. Within five minutes, the earbuds disappeared and he was shouting and clapping along with everyone else.

Hyejin Song, Changhwan Ko, and Min Goo Jung in the Children’s Theatre Company production of Cookin’, 2023. Photo by Glen Stubbe

Cookin’ has been compared to Korean cooking shows, but this is a different kind of entertainment. Other than a brief sequence in which teams, including audience members, race to churn out mandu (dumplings), there is nothing competitive about this show, and it’s only marginally related to actual cooking. It’s more about workers making the best of a tedious existence by introducing play into their work shift and sticking it to the boss at every opportunity.

The cleverness is nonstop. Anything can be a percussion instrument – pots, tubs, even the kitchen scissors. And almost anything can fly through the air – pans, plates, knives, and vegetables. Lots and lots of vegetables. Wooden salt and pepper shakers appear briefly, morphing into claves as two characters engage in a sudden tango. This is facilitated by a bit of flirtation between two of the cooks, but as always, the plot is driven by stagecraft opportunities rather than the other way around.

Brooms and whisks become props for martial arts-inspired swordplay. A strainer comes in handy as a fencing facemask. Plates are, obviously enough, Frisbees, but these actors take the sport to new levels by sitting on each other’s shoulders and setting up a juggling pattern among four people.

And there’s plenty of old-fashioned “Three Stooges” style slapstick humor. People get slapped and punched and stuck in garbage cans. It’s all ridiculous, and hilarious.

Every now and then, the drumming becomes mesmerizing and we are suddenly in a world that’s more artistic than funny. The audience gets very quiet at those moments, absorbing the shifting patterns of pitch and tempo. In one especially clever episode, we see water tanks and plastic tubs mounted on wooden frames. These are similar to the frames used in a certain traditional Korean percussion in which women play on three mounted drums, one on each side and one at their backs.  In Cookin’s version, the actors do a more athletic-looking version of this drum dance, beating the tanks and tubs with kitchen implements, expertly spinning and jumping while maintaining a rapid rhythm. It is a pause for some unique Korean percussion before these proficient drummers turn back into rebellious cooks.

Eventually, there is a wedding feast, featuring a surprise for some audience members and great waves of applause and laughter to close the show.

It’s hard to focus on themes at the level of frenzy that is the fun of Cookin’, but the show does offer a message: Human beings can turn anything into a toy, a musical instrument, or both. We’re born to play. We might as well start in the kitchen.

Describing the indescribable

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U of M student conductor launches New York career with prestigious youth symphony | By Anne Holzman (Summer 2023)

Andrew Jinhong Kim

Andrew Jinhong Kim took the podium at Ted Mann Auditorium in the fall of 2022 to conduct one of the required four concerts toward his doctorate in music. He chose Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5, a piece not often heard in American concert halls. He introduced it with a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Things do not change. We change.”

Kim drew warmth and expression from the University of Minnesota Symphony, the music school’s top orchestra. Typical of Vaughan Williams, the piece is full of staggered entrances and introduces harmonies that evade the familiar Romantic patterns and hearken back to earlier English sources. Kim and his players took all this on with confidence and delivered a performance comparable to a professional ensemble.

One year and several big transitions later, Kim is settling into life in Boston, where his wife, violinist Emily Scicchitano, is studying at the Boston Conservatory. Kim was hired last spring as music director of the New York Youth Symphony (NYYS), which performs at Carnegie Hall. It’s an auspicious start for a conductor just finishing his studies.

Kim was born in South Korea and lived there until he was 12, when his father, a broadcast journalist, was offered a year of study in the U.S.  Kim’s father decided to study at Duke University and brought his wife and son to North Carolina.  Andrew enrolled in a public middle school and enjoyed his time there so much that at the end of the year, he asked his parents to let him stay in the country. They had to return to Korea, but they found a boarding school for their son near Philadelphia.

At the time, Kim said, he wasn’t focused on music. He had been given a recorder to play in elementary school, didn’t have much success with it, and decided music wasn’t for him. “I didn’t like when I wasn’t good at something,” Kim admitted in an interview with Korean Quarterly in July. He attributed this to the way Korean culture has approached classical music training. “If you’re not a virtuoso in Korea,” he said, “you’re not encouraged.”

At his North Carolina middle school, he discovered that every student was encouraged to sign up for a music class, regardless of ability. His mother insisted that he learn clarinet – perhaps, he suggested, because she thought he ought to get over his early experience with the recorder. He loved his band teacher and grew in confidence until he was the third-chair clarinet in the school band.

At his new school in Philadelphia, Kim dropped clarinet and joined a choir. “I just needed to unlock music to myself in gradual steps,” Kim reflected. He went on to a different boarding school for high school, and in his junior year, he sang with a community chorus. He remembers an inspiring performance of the Mozart Requiem as the moment he grasped “the sense of one-ness” that would lead him into a musical career. “This,” he realized, “is why classical music exists.”

Parallel to his singing was a growing interest in literature, which Kim attributes to his father’s career as a writer. “The way we think is via writing,” he said. He entered Swarthmore College intending to double-major in English and music. He wound up one class short of the English major and committed himself to the music. By then he had served as a student conductor at Swarthmore, and he was accepted to Ithaca College for his masters in music. He met Scicchitano at Ithaca, who would follow him to Minnesota and perform with orchestras in Buffalo (Minnesota), and Sioux City, Iowa. They were married in fall 2022.

At the University of Minnesota, Kim had a teaching fellowship that included conducting the university’s Concert Orchestra program, which is open to non-majors and encompasses many levels of playing. He also conducted both the professional and youth orchestras of the Duluth Superior Symphony. While many conductors chafe at working with nonprofessional players, Kim said he loved working with students who had other priorities. “This is why I’m a conductor,” he said. “It’s not for the perceived glory. It’s one person sending me an email about how we rekindled their connection with music.”

Kim’s doctoral studies were heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but he credited University of Minnesota music director Mark Russell Smith with making the most of a very difficult situation. University staff worked out ways for ensembles to rehearse in-person and safely as much as possible, which often meant breaking into smaller groups and coordinating the resulting fragments. As one of three conducting fellows, Kim said, “Mark Russell Smith gave us an incredible amount of podium time. Talk about turning adversity into opportunity!”

Speaking on the phone from his new home in Boston, Kim said he will commute to New York for NYYS rehearsals and concerts. He is finishing up work on his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Minnesota, but even with those dual responsibilities, he’s going to have more free time than he’s enjoyed in many years. He said he is looking forward to attending concerts, reading for pleasure, and getting back to writing.

Kim said his dual interests in music and literature serve him well on the podium. “I think music expresses something that words can’t,” he said. To make that happen, he said, a conductor often has to start with the right words to describe what he’s looking for. “In rehearsal, my job is to describe something that’s indescribable.” He sometimes turns to literature, he said, because it’s the best way of “getting everybody to imagine something – that shared experience.”

Holding up a mirror to Shakespeare

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Emilia celebrates women artists in history who struggled to be heard | By Anne Holzman (Spring 2023)

Marisa Tejeda, Sun Mee Chomet, Greta Ogelsby in Emilia. Photo by Alvan Washington

Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Ten Thousand Things, producer
(Directed by Marcela Lorca, Open Book, Minneapolis, and other community locations, through June 11, 2023)

What’s that, you say? An evening of storytelling with some of the Twin Cities’ finest actors, in this case all women, in a vintage high school gymnasium with an appreciative crowd that got in for free?

Yes, please!

Even better: A clever script yanking on memories of well-worn plays, twisting them like so much laundry and wringing out laughter and tears, and the amazement of sitting four feet from Greta Oglesby as she narrates this story in a voice that bounces off the basketball backboards with ease.

Not to mention the side-eye from actor (and Korean adoptee) Sun Mee Chomet as she grunts and strides and transforms her small frame with hockey-player braggadocio; and the hilarity of Kimberley Richardson in her role, high kicking, squealing and mugging in every direction at once.  There is also Mo Perry puffing out her cheeks and snorting the lines of an aging sexist aristocrat, and Marisa Tejeda’s divine chanting and regal bearing as the younger Emilia.

There is also George Keller’s quick transformations of manner and voice, Sophina Saggau doing body bumps off her teammates, and Maggie Chestovich contorting a comic face that must be made of Silly Putty, then holding the room’s whole collective breath through a brave woman’s silent suffering.

Yes, to Emilia, produced byTen Thousand Things, and directed with characteristic brilliance by Marcela Lorca with a star-studded cast.  The brilliant cast is all women (to make up for all those years when the Globe Theater, where Shakespeare staged his plays,  could only allow men to be actors). Yes to a theater company that gives us this fresh new look at where our theater traditions come from and the many that this tradition has left behind.

Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Emilia tells the story – with considerable imaginative embroidery – of Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (or Lanier), a poet of early 17th century England who, in spite of many headwinds as a woman of modest means, managed to publish a book of poetry and prose. The play picks up on the unproven theory that she became Shakespeare’s lover and inspired his references in sonnets to a “Dark Lady.” This reference is thought to be about Lanyer because the Bassano family was of southern European origin and likely Jewish.  

Three of Shakespeare’s plays have characters named Emilia, and there is a Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, but the evidence for more than a passing connection between Lanyer and Shakespeare is scant. That said, there’s no denying the achievements of Lanyer’s surviving work and the historical barriers for women to publish literature using their own names. Emilia is fiction, but it’s also a whopping load of truth.

Emilia premiered in London in 2018 and won three Olivier awards in 2019, including Best Comedy.

In this script, the playwright exploits  language differences across the centuries not only for comic effect, but to remind us that Emilia’s voice can be heard now in a way that was not possible during her lifetime. The actors deliver many lines in Elizabethan language but break to a line like Alfonso’s exit shot: “That would’ve been a massive drag, hmm?”

Echoing across the centuries are the many references to the ongoing struggles of women (“We merely ask for them to let us join”) and controversies over intellectual property (“No one owns words”). Beneath all the hilarity and fury of this script lie carefully constructed themes of authorship and authority that should keep the story fresh for generations.

The play follows conventions familiar in Shakespeare plays, including the use of a few actors to cover multiple roles and the nudging and winking that comes with actors impersonating the opposite sex. There is even a scene set at the Globe Theatre, the original venue for most of Shakespeare’s work, in which Emilia recognizes her own words in the mouths of actors and begins to shout over them, producing a strangely operatic effect of layered voices.

Audiences of Ten Thousand Things productions can count on becoming part of the action. The company sets up each performance space with a stage area surrounded by about a hundred folding chairs, arranged two rows deep around a square; actors enter and exit at the square’s corners and get their costumes from racks at the edges of the room. Occasionally an actor will briefly take a seat in the audience. Two characters in conflict sometimes circle the stage as in a boxing ring, using hand gestures to gin up excitement in the crowd. Toward the end of Emilia as the poet’s work finally begins to be published, the actors distribute poetry broadsides to the audience bearing lines by Aemilia Lanyer in a cursive font. Throughout the play, characters seek allies and start debates with audience members, adding to the fun and keeping us alert lest we be their next target.

Ten Thousand Things performs for paying audiences at Open Book in Minneapolis, where the show runs through June 11. The company also performs in community locations including parks, schools and prisons, some of them open to the public. The show at Patrick Henry High School was hosted by Project Success, which connects high school students with theater and other opportunities.

More info on Aemilia Bassano Lanyer can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aemilia-lanyer

What’s next for Asia-U.S. relations?

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State Department official Kin Moy visits Twin Cities to discuss policy in Asia | By Anne Holzman (Spring 2023)

Kin Moy, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State, speaking at the University of Minnesota. Photos by Stephen Wunrow

State Department official Kin Moy visited the Twin Cities in April to meet with Asian diaspora communities about recent developments in U.S. foreign policy in the region.

Moy, who is currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the U.S. Department of State, attended the University of Minnesota some 35 years ago and went on to a career in foreign service that has included posts in Seoul (1992-93) and Busan (1993-94). Korean Quarterly invited to attend his session with Global Minnesota at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs on April 24 and interview him afterwards.

Moy said he visits South Korea frequently, most recently with Vice President Kamala Harris when she traveled to the funeral of slain Japanese ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which included a stop afterwards in South Korea.

Moy’s talk at the Humphrey School emphasized the growing rivalry between the U.S. and China in the Indo-Pacific region and the increasingly military nature of policy in the region. While he stressed that the U.S. policy toward China is “a separate animal” from the more “affirmative” policy of the U.S. in the rest of Asia, his comments returned frequently to the priority of containing the influence of China. “Peace in the Taiwan strait is essential,” Moy stated, reiterating that the U.S. will “uphold our commitments” in Taiwan. He later mentioned “strategic ambiguity” as the Biden administration’s ongoing policy in Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, he acknowledged the worrisome increase of military activity in North Korea and said the administration considers its nuclear weapons testing to be a real and imminent concern. When an audience member asked about a peace settlement between North and South, Moy spoke about the enhanced military relationship that would soon be announced as part of South Korean President Suk Yeol Yoon’s visit to Washington. He added, “We favor having a dialogue with North Korea with no preconditions.” He did not directly address the question of a peace process.

Moy briefly referred in his talk to a recent shift in China’s stance toward North Korea at the United Nations. He elaborated on this in the interview with KQ, explaining that as North Korea has ramped up military threats over the past year, the U.S. has repeatedly introduced resolutions to the Security Council seeking to condemn that activity. He said that whereas China in the past has either stood aside or expressed support for such resolutions, their recent tactics have actively obstructed such measures. “Most of the world feels quite threatened” by this shift, Moy said.

The public talk was framed by references to Asian connections in Minnesota. Concerning the students of the University of Minnesota, where the event was held, Moy mentioned the impact of students traveling in both directions. He acknowledged the advantage of receiving tuition from abroad and the perception that many of those seats are filled by wealthy students, which some have complained is unfair.

He said the results are worth the tradeoffs. If someone comes here for higher education, Moy said, “They are enduring fans of the United States.” While some do stay here to work, he said, many more go home and bolster the “people-to-people” contact that aids international relationships. He noted a recent backlog in the State Department’s passport processing times and said the rebound in travel interest is a hopeful sign as people around the world re-engage with each other.

Moy noted a shift in the origins of foreign service personnel during his three decades in the field. He said that when he joined, most of the staff were from elite East Coast universities. It was rare to meet a colleague from a Midwestern university, but this region now supplies many graduates to the U.S. foreign service.

He said another important shift has happened in Korea, where the increasingly wealthy nation has evolved from aid recipient to one of the foremost donors in the world. He said this is not only financial but also aid in the form of volunteers. Once a destination for U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, South Korea has established its own international volunteer program, World Friends Korea. “Korea plays an enormous role in peace around the world,” Moy said. “They are giving back.”

Regarding an audience question about militarization in Japan, Moy said Japan has historically been “successful forging soft power in the region” and touted the development that Japan and South Korea are “on the verge of embracing” in spite of deep historical divisions, due to “deeper threat.”

Asked about free trade agreements and other international measures dropped under the Trump administration, Moy said that free trade in particular has become difficult due to domestic politics. “It has cost a lot of American communities in manufacturing and jobs,” Moy said, referring to global trade in general. He said his department engages in trade in Asia through Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a 21-member trade organization based in Singapore that includes the U.S., China, and South Korea among its members.

Photos by Stephen Wunrow

KQ asked Moy about recent concerns that the Yoon administration, which represents a swing to the right in South Korean leadership, may show signs of suppressing dissent. Moy acknowledged having heard such criticism but said the U.S. views the Yoon administration as “a strong supporter of democracy.” He said that South Korea has come a long way in the past few decades and his department takes the long view concerning the health of democracy there.

KQ also asked about concerns that Yoon may be entertaining a closer bilateral relationship with China. Moy responded, “We do understand that the Republic of Korea and China have a strong trade relationship.” Moreover, he said, “They [South Korea] have taken some brave action [with respect to North Korea] even though they knew it would alienate the PRC [China].” But he said approval ratings for China among South Korean citizens have been trending low. “China’s manner has been off-putting,” Moy said. (A Pew Research study from September 2022 backs up this claim, showing a 2017-2022 trend of public sentiment in China indicated a new high of 80 percent disapproval last summer.)

Asked about concerns in Korea over the “reshoring” of American manufacturing, particularly cars, Moy said his department has been in discussions with counterparts in Korea to make sure they are treated fairly. He acknowledged the extensive investment by Korean companies in U.S. manufacturing and said the country is a leader in electric vehicle development. Korea is “well invested in technologies that will move us away from greenhouse gases,” Moy said.

Moy concluded the KQ interview by saying he was hoping for dinner at a local Korean restaurant and praising the flood of Korean culture in the U.S. in recent years. He said he enjoys Korean television dramas and hears frequent references to K-pop. “Those cultural exports – you cannot overestimate the effects of people’s perceptions,” Moy said.

                        –30–

A tale of tusks

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Mlima’s Tale uses playful humor to explore a moral and environmental topic | Review by Anne Holzman (Winter 2023)

Joy Dolo, Brian Bose, Will Sturdivant and Clay Man Soo in Mlima’s Tale. Photo by Alvan Washington

Mlima’s Tale Script by Lynn Nottage

(Directed by Ansa Akyea, Open Book (Minneapolis) and other community venues, February 9 through March 12, 2023)

International ivory bans notwithstanding, the loss of elephants to the ivory trade continues, and it’s no laughing matter. A production of Mlima’s Tale, from the Twin Cities-based Ten Thousand Things theater company, draws belly laughs at human hypocrisy which is part of this remote conservation issue. The actors are hilarious; the story pulls at the heartstrings. It’s an evening’s entertainment that sends its consumers out into a world that needs changing. The phrase “if you’re listening” opens and closes the story, calling on the audience to hear and perhaps to act before more tusks are lost.

Before the actors took the stage on a February evening at Open Book in Minneapolis, Ten Thousand Things’ artistic director Marcela Lorca welcomed the audience back to the company’s first full-fledged production since the pandemic closed theaters. “We hope that this awakens conversations about our relations with the natural world,” Lorca said. And then she added, “Laugh out loud. Talk back to the actors if you feel like it. Have a good time.”

Will Sturdivant, Katie Bradley and Clay Man Soo, perform Mlima’s Tale at Project Success. Photo by Alvan Washington

Ten Thousand Things designs all of its productions to be portable. The company travels to schools, community centers, parks, and prisons with a vanload of props, ready to set up in whatever rooms happen to be available. Their challenge is to do more with less, and they target their productions to audiences who might be seeing their first play. The actors develop their characters by means of gesture, posture and voice with minimal reliance on costumes or props. Anything that cannot be depicted through a few yards of fabric, or a stool and a board, has to be delivered through good acting.

In Mlima’s Tale, expert direction is provided by Ansa Akyea. Much depends on carefully-developed accents as the actors’ roles switch rapidly among social classes and continents. Kudos to the company for investing in that effort, with guidance from dialect coaches Patrick Chew, Anh-Thu Pham, and Wariboko Semenitari. The steady hand of Dameun Strange on sound effects also does much to create illusions of time and place.

In this script, written by Pulitzer laureate Lynn Nottage, five actors play many characters, four of them switching quickly from scene to scene, announcing each new location as they also change roles. Brian Bose enacts the painful death of the iconic elephant Mlima in an African nature reserve. He becomes Mlima’s ghost listening to human discussions of his fate, then Mlima’s tusks being shipped clandestinely from Kenya to Vietnam, then to China, and finally an ivory sculpture in the home of an American celebrity, before he joins the circle of storytellers to close the play.

Katie Bradley and Clay Man Soo.

The other four actors, Joy Dolo, Will Sturdivant, Katie Bradley and Clay Man Soo, cover half a dozen characters each. There is no protagonist, really, just a victim of corruption being carried along by series of transactions, variations on a theme that resolves itself with the appearance of an avatar of wealth and power from yet another continent, who ultimately carries the blame for the corruption.

The story opens with elephants singing together (beautifully!) and tossing out names, family lines and brief biographies. These elephants claim the dignity of individual souls. The refrain of names will ring out again as the tusks make their passage across oceans, and the play will end with a reprise, framing the story of losses for elephants expressed in human terms. It is an ambitious premise, and some of the fun of this production lies in our conspiracy as audience and actors believing there are elephants on the stage.

In the play’s early scenes, the motivations that drive illegal ivory exports are carefully explored. The hunters debate honor, compassion, and the need to feed their families. The officials who turn a blind eye – for a price – cite wealth and power beyond their borders.

Motivations on the Asian end of the trade are less developed and the characters less sympathetic. The lack of balance between the ethnic groups and nations opens the script to the danger of stereotyping the Asian characters, which is mitigated by mixed-race casting, but caused me some discomfort nonetheless.

The story holds together, much as some of Shakespeare’s shakier plots hold together, on the strength of compelling language. Nottage has a musical ear and uses repeated lines and images to great effect. There is lyricism in the appreciation of fine ivory sculptures with their ancient heritage. A hunter explains his choices in terms of Islamic morals. An American ship captain (Stars and Stripes propped on a stool, Georgia accent) tries heroically to resist temptation. A model container ship, roughly carved and painted, tosses about Mlima’s body to represent the tusk’s journey across the Indian Ocean while also evoking historic passages of enslaved people. The evocation of elephants’ names and lineages returns here in a haunting chant. The ship docks in Vietnam, and the humans reappear, bringing their corruption with them.

There is a Brechtian self-consciousness about all of this as the actors, mainly staying in character (an actor did lose it in laughter at least once in the performance I saw), appeal to members of the audience for sympathy or agreement. Much of this appears to be improvised, using gestures and vocalizations without straying from the script, and the cast carries it off with great panache.

Leading the charge is Joy Dolo, who plays several of the bullying officials with chilling enthusiasm and appears at the end of the story as the wealthy celebrity who bought the carved tusks. Her forays into the audience drew repeated laughter on the night I attended, including one episode in which she waded abstractedly between rows, clambering over the knees of audience members while shouting into a cell phone.

The best thing about the play is that it really is a “play” – the actors play with one another and with members of the audience, and it’s just plain fun. The aperture between elephants and people widens as human actors attempt to portray another species, with minimal props and costumes, inhabiting them as named characters and endowing them with histories and afterlives. Waves of sadness and joy, humor and regret, rise and fall but leave the central problem unresolved, with work to be done and many directions to explore before we figure out how to put a stop to the cruelty we inflict on another species.

Mlima’s Tale runs until March 12, to order tickets, visit: https://tenthousandthings.easy-ware-ticketing.com/events

American students find joy in “sijo”

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Sijo: Korea’s Poetry Form ~ By Lucy Park and Elizabeth Jorgensen, editors

(Parkyoung, Sejong Cultural Society, Chicago, 2022, #ISBN 978-1-63519-041-0 52399)

Review by Anne Holzman (Winter 2023)

Liz Jorgensen was looking for publishing outlets for her students. Lucy Park was looking for poems. They found each other in the Sejong Cultural Society’s annual sijo writing contest, and a decade later, they have collaborated on a book to help more teachers bring the ancient Korean form into their U.S. classrooms.

Jorgensen, who teaches creative writing at Arrowhead Union High School in Hartland, WI, a few miles west of Milwaukee, said she first heard of sijo when she read about the contest. “I’m always looking for authentic purposes for my students’ work,” she said – a contest, a website, an anthology, any form of publication.

So she used the materials available on the Society’s website to teach herself the sijo form, and then turned around and taught her students. They submitted their poems to the contest. From among her students, there were winners, followed by another year’s submissions, and another year of winners.

After several years of this, she said, she got a call from Park, who had noticed the Arrowhead winning streak and wanted to record some of Jorgensen’s lessons to share with other teachers.

Park, a pediatric allergy specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, is a founding member of the Sejong Cultural Society and serves as executive director. She oversees the Society’s annual writing and music composition contests, promoting Korean cultural forms in U.S. schools and colleges.

Jorgensen was happy to share her sijo teaching experience. She contributed videos and lesson plans to the Society’s website. She offered workshops and talks at conferences to introduce the form to colleagues. She and Park began talking about a book “over a decade” ago, she said, and they are pleased to have published it under the Sejong Cultural Society’s imprint last year.

So, what caused Jorgensen, who had no prior contact with the form, to devote so much energy to sijo? It turns out to be popular with students, she said. “They like that there’s a formula – and it’s short!” she added with a chuckle.

The prevalence of the Japanese haiku form of poetry in American classrooms was also a factor; several lesson plans and articles in the book help teachers build on that knowledge to get to the longer (but not much longer) sijo form.

Sijo, as adapted in English, consists of one or a series of three-line poems, each line counting about 15 syllables. Syllable counting plays out differently in English than it does in Korean, so the English rules tend to be looser on that point. And some poets break the three lines into six paired lines. But the content remains the same: An observation in the first line, elaborated or reflected upon in the second line, with a surprise twist at the beginning of the third and final line.

If this sounds like the sort of thing that doesn’t just readily pop into a student’s head, Jorgensen has helpfully traced the development of several poems by including her back-and-forth with students in the book. She shows us their early drafts, her comments, their revisions, and their comments about each other’s work and the process as a whole.

By the time Jorgensen is done, sijo really does seem like something most students could handle. “My kids are middle-America,” she said. She has had a few Korean students who have expressed deep appreciation for the inclusion of the Korean form in their writing class. But most students know of Korea because they have heard some K-pop and read some manhwa/manga (Korean comics and graphic novels), and the only history they know is about the U.S. involvement in the Korean War.

In a phone interview, Jorgensen pointed out that hers is a typical situation for a high school creative writing teacher: A few students are aspiring poets, but mostly kids view the class as a palatable alternative to reading 19th century fiction for their English elective during junior or senior year. “The majority of the kids in my classes aren’t here because they love writing,” she said.

She particularly sees a lot of math and science enthusiasts looking not to spend too much time on English. She thinks that might be a key to the popularity of sijo. “It’s almost like a puzzle,” she said. The students get going on the challenge, she can hear them collaborating: “I need a two-syllable word that means this.” Many of them wind up submitting poems. A few of them have become contest winners.

Jorgensen said quite a few social studies teachers have also picked up on sijo at teacher conferences. “They’ve had a lot of ideas to add a creative element” to their curriculum, she said.

Just like a sijo poem, Sijo: Korea’s Poetry Form has three sections. The first section consists of articles introducing the form, its history, and its development in the U.S. Park wrote several of the articles. There are also contributions by David McCann, a Harvard professor who has done much to bring Korean literature to American audiences, and by beloved children’s author Linda Sue Park. Brigham Young University professor Mark Peterson sets sijo in the context of haiku and other Asian literary traditions. Seoul National University professor emeritus Seong-Kon Kim reflects on problems of translation.

The second section is the gold mine for teachers – the lesson plans, links to more lesson plans online (many of them through handy QR codes), descriptions of editing routines, comments from students. The challenges range from casually introducing the form in elementary school, to counting syllables and mapping ideas at the college level. And if that’s not enough guidance, there’s plenty more available on the Sejong Cultural Society website.

The third section of the book will be very helpful to anyone contemplating contest submission. Here, student writers, teachers, and judges offer their comments on past submissions, many of them with accompanying illustrations. It’s also a charming reminder of just how much thought and effort can go into 45 syllables of writing.

Teachers at all levels who want to try sijo will find everything they need in this book. The methods would also adapt easily for homeschoolers, camps, even adult clubs (does your book group need a new direction?). Coupled with resources on the Sejong Cultural Society website, this volume should broaden Americans’ familiarity with this aspect of Korean heritage.

Resources for teaching sijo are available on the Sejong Cultural Society webpage, https://www.sejongculturalsociety.org/resources/resources.php

A complimentary copy of the book is available for any teacher who wishes to include sijo in their writing classes. Request a copy by email, sejongculturalsociety@gmail.com

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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