cover image Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family

Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family

K. Connie Kang. Da Capo Press, $23 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-201-62684-1

In an unusually frank and vivid narrative, Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Kang chronicles her Korean-American family from the turn of the century to the present. Her grandfather, Myong-Hwan Kang, a resistance fighter against the Japanese occupation of Korea, was tortured and imprisoned twice by the Japanese, once in 1914 and again in 1919. At the outbreak of the Korean War, her family fled their ancestral home in North Korea, settling in Seoul, then Pusan and moving to Tokyo, where her father, Joo-Han Kang, an English teacher, was recruited to assist General Douglas MacArthur's command in the early 1950s. After an adolescence in Japan, the author studied at the University of Missouri in 1961, followed by Northwestern University. Then Kang moved back to Korea (1967-1970), marrying a white American Vietnam veteran against her parents' protests.The marriage fell apart in Baltimore when she refused to cut her ties to Korean ways. In the 1970s, as a reporter in San Francisco, she helped her family relocate and open a grocery store there. Writing with deep insight about Korea's tumultuous political history, her bicultural identity and the challenges facing Asian-Americans, Kang delivers a stirring, beautiful book. Photos. (July)