Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

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 her extraordinary memoir of growing up in Korea during the 1930s and 1940s, a time of oppression, deprivation, and immense social and political instability.Park Wan-suh was born into a small village near Gaeseong, a protected hamlet containing no more than twenty families. Park truly believed that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and that everyone in it was Korean." Then the Japanese occupation began to encroach on her idyll, complicating the day-to-day life of her family. With wit and 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 in the years leading up to the Korean War. Most striking is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to social and political stricture and became an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter.