Still Life With Rice Summary

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Subject: This novel is a memoir of Hongyong Baek, who grew up in Korea and had to experience the repressed roles assigned to women within the society. It examines the gender, religious, and racially oppressed individual between world war II and the Korean Civil war. She left during the Japanese occupation and again during the korean civil war that now divides her family, but be becomes victorious and continues her successful ch’iryo practice in California.
Occasion: Lee is the author of national bestseller Still Life With Rice, and its sequel In The Absence of Sun, memoirs in which she documents her family's experience in war-torn Korea from the 1930s to 1997. Born in Seoul, South Korea, her family emigrated first to Canada when she was four years old. A year later, they emigrated to
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She then, decides to travel back to her birthplace to understand more of her heritage and why her mother and grandmother are so proud to be Korean. It is then decided that she would return to America and interview her grandmother’s story of living in socially repressed and broken Korea.
Audience: Still Life with Rice is intended more for females, given the explicit details of being a woman. It also captures the hardship Baek faced and readers interested in a war story through the eyes of a mother instead of a soldier. Still Life with Rice also appeals to readers looking to understand a heritage other than their own.
The story is told as if Baek is telling her granddaughter, Helie Lee. In an interview Lee mentioned she never saw herself as a writer, in fact she hated English class, but she had a desire to bring her grandmother’s story to life through words and to share that with other

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