Creating a New life of Healing on Jeju Island Jeju's magic brings both blessings and curses. Its volcanic topography is beautiful, but left the island with a harsh environment; hidden underneath the peaceful fishing villages lie the scars of Korea's painful modern history. Around 25 years ago, after the passing of her young son Tommy, Brenda Paik Sunoo struck out on a journey in search of harbors for the heart. Of all the different places she visited, it was this island that drew her in, and she decided to build a home there. Stone House on Jeju Island is a record of building and moving into a home in a foreign land, and an adventure yarn about tackling a new life in one's twilight years. Within a Tiny Stone Cottage, a Philosophy of Nature, Culture, and Life Brenda and her husband Jan struggle to renovate a traditional stone cottage on an island where they did not speak the language. As culture clashes and natural disasters ensued, what was supposed to be a five-month building period turned into a year and a half before the two finally had their hideaway reflecting their philosophy of life in everything from its materials to its design. Daily life in Jeju is quite different from New Jersey or California. Residents can eat vegetables grown by their neighbors and leave their doors open without fear standing on their own two feet every step of the way. They learn to deal calmly with the odd natural disaster, sharing indescribable warmth and soothing their suffering with their neighbors. At Seventy, Still Dreaming of a New Life Brenda Paik Sunoo turned 70 this year. When asked by one of the construction participants why she was building a home in a foreign land at her age, she replied, Why not? Stone House on Jeju Island is a book for people who are not afraid of challenges as they grow older people seeking to live their lives without losing their sense of purpose and direction. Passing through the seasons twice over in her newly built stone house, she continues awakening to nature's cycles of growth and perishing and to an attitude of hope and affirmation.

Literary Nonfiction. Southeast Asia Studies. Photography. Interpretred and translated from the Korean by Youngsook Han. magine strolling along the windy shores of Jeju Island, off the southwest coast of Korea. Suddenly, you hear whistling echoing from the sea. Turning to the water, you spot weathered faces bobbing to the surface, and you realize that the sound is the exhaled breath of sea women, known as haenyeo. With a sigh of gratitude, the aging divers have returned to the surface to replenish their aching lungs. Jeju Island's haenyeo are a dying breed--perhaps the last of their generation. As their maternal ancestors did for centuries, they have scoured the island's sea floor, harvesting seaweed, octopuses, sea urchins, turban shells, and abalone. Their numbers have dwindled from 15,000 in the 1970s to approximately 5,600 in recent decades. Driven by economics, these free-divers continue to labor well into their eighties--the hardier ones often plunging 65 feet while holding their breath for two minutes or longer. Brenda Paik Sunoo gathered these women's stories while living in their diving villages for a total of seven months between 2007 and 2009. MOON TIDES is the first book by an American journalist to document the lives of these rare divers through intimate interviews and photographs. Their stories will appeal to those of us desiring a life of purpose--undulating and infinite as the sea.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A mesmerizing new historical novel” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Lisa See, the bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, about female friendship and devastating family secrets on a small Korean island. Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility—but also danger. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook find it impossible to ignore their differences. The Island of Sea Women takes place over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point. “This vivid…thoughtful and empathetic” novel (The New York Times Book Review) illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge and the men take care of the children. “A wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women” (Publishers Weekly), The Island of Sea Women is a “beautiful story…about the endurance of friendship when it’s pushed to its limits, and you…will love it” (Cosmopolitan).

A POPSUGAR Best Book of December 2020 An AMAZON Editors Pick December 2020 A SHE READS Best Historical Fiction Novel Winter 2021 A BUSTLE Most Anticipated Winter 2021 Read A LIBRO.FM Influencer Pick, December 2020 Inspired by true events on Korea's Jeju Island, Sumi Hahn's "entrancing [debut] novel, brimming with lyricism and magic" (Jennifer Rosner, The Yellow Bird Sings) explores what it means to truly love in the wake of devastation. In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep sea diver in a family of strong haenyeo. Confident she is a woman now, Junja urges her mother to allow her to make the Goh family's annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade abalone and other sea delicacies for pork. Junja, a sea village girl, has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth. While there, she falls in love with a mountain boy Yang Suwol, who rescues her after a particularly harrowing journey. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place. Spiraling in grief, Junja sees her younger siblings sent to live with their estranged father. Everywhere she turns, Junja is haunted by the loss of her mother, from the meticulously tended herb garden that has now begun to sprout weeds, to the field where their bed sheets are beaten. She has only her grandmother and herself. But the world moves on without Junja. The political climate is perilous. Still reeling from Japan's forced withdrawal from the peninsula, Korea is forced to accommodate the rapid establishment of US troops. Junja's canny grandmother, who lived through the Japanese invasion that led to Korea's occupation understands the signs of danger all too well. When Suwol is arrested for working with and harboring communists, and the perils of post-WWII overtake her homelands, Junja must learn to navigate a tumultuous world unlike anything she's ever known.

Literary Nonfiction. Asian American Studies. Memoir. "Heartfelt and at times heart-rending, SEAWEED AND SHAMANS details Brenda Paik Sunoo's journey through grief into solace. Written with courage and generosity, her collection of essays traverses personal memory and Korean-American history, as well as the thoughts and drawings garnered from diary entries of the child she lost. A testimony to the endurance of faith and art, life and love. SEAWEED AND SHAMANS is a gift of healing"--Nora Okja Keller, author of Comfort Woman and Fox Girl.

Concepts Rites and Officiants Divinities and Sacred Entities Ritual Venues Ritual Props Ritual Offerings References List of Photographs

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir Named One of the Best Books by Asian American Writers by Oprah Daily Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice.