Korea

June 23, 2008

Korean women and golf...

Pak's success 10 years ago began a Korean avalanche

Mark Lyons, Getty Images

Se Ri Pak became mentor and role model for all the young Koreans who have followed her since she won the U.S. Women's Open 10 years ago.

Last update: June 23, 2008 - 7:06 AM

Like many young girls of Korean descent, Han idolizes the South Korean woman who 10 years ago turned an entire country into golf fanatics by winning the U.S. Women's Open as a 20-year-old rookie.

"Se Ri," said Han, "is golf."

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.startribune.com/sports/golf/20644599.html?location_refer=Homepage:highlightModules:4

December 04, 2007

Asians ACTING! Yahoo! Come see these shows.

       

   
    Mu Images II    
                                           
                                                               
                Nov. 29, 2007                                         Two new exciting works!                                                
                       
Mu Performing Arts is proud to be showing new works by Sun Mee Chomet and Paul Juhn for this year's New Directions Festival.  These two pieces were commissioned as part of  the Jerome Foundation's New Performance Project. Please come and support these talented Asian American Artists as they present their works in progress.

Also note that ASIAMNESIA will be performed at the Center for Independant Artists in Bloomington next weekend, while WORKS OF ART will be at the Mu Studio the following weekend.
               
       
           
                                   
ASIAMNESIA and WORKS OF ART!
       
                                 New Directions            
     ASIAMNESIA
by Sun Mee Chomet
Directed by Randy Reyes
Performed by Katie Leo, Rose Tran, Katie Vang, Katie Bradley, Sun Mee Chomet

This is an exploration of what it means to be Asian-American women.  What do five creative, restless Asian-American create in a room if given time, books, pens and paper.  Who are we today? Who have we been?  What influence do stereotypes have on Asian-American women¹s minds?   Do stereotypes entrap us?  Who would we be if we could escape the prison of categories in our minds?  It is a process using dance, movement, music and scene work.   It is a complete collaboration.  And the questions are still being asked

.Dec. 8 @7pm, Dec. 9 @3pm and 7pm
Tickets $7
at the Center for Independent Artists
4137 Bloomington Ave. S, Minneapolis
612-724-8392

           

        WORKS OF ART
by Paul Juhn
Directed by Victor Maog
Performed by Paul Juhn

Art is a Korean American actor in NYC.  His Korean American buddy needs him to go on a blind date in his place.  His friend beinga lawyer and Art being the typical out of work actor, Art accepts. With that ensures a very twisted romance that is the Works of Art.

Dec. 15 and 16 @7pm
Tickets by Donation
at Mu Performing Arts Studio
2700 NE Winter St (see website for directions).
612.824.4808
       

           
   
   
 
   
                                   
Reverberations from on high
       
                             words by Rick                            
       

What do five women and one man have in common?  Mucho Mu talent, as they say. The women, led by our ringleader Sun Mee Chomet take a rapid fire approach to what they have to deal with on a daily basis, from stereotypes to archetypes and delve into the history behind it all.  The man is Paul Juhn, one of our original performers from the early days.  He's now based in NYC and making waves with his recent work on Sides: The Fear Is Real which ran Off Broadway.  Paul is creating his first one person show about romance, and knowing Paul it's full of charm. Both of these presentations come through the Jerome New Performance Program so enjoy and let us know what you think!            
   

September 21, 2007

Book of the day

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially if you understand Seoul as a kind of underworld. -sys

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself
Young-ha Kim  Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim

    0156030802 Trade Paperback
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780156030809
$12.00
132pages
Available
Trim Size: 5-5/16 x 8
Copyright Year: 2007
Territory: World English
Read an Excerpt

Synopsis
In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

Biography

YOUNG-HA KIM has published three novels and numerous short stories and has a daily radio show. He teaches drama at the Korean National University of Arts and has received all of Korea’s top literary awards. He lives in Seoul.

September 04, 2007

Koreas summit delayed because of floods

N Korea floods kill more than 220
                                                                                    

North Koreans repair road in flood-hit South Pyongan province (Photo from Xinhua news agency)
Many roads have been washed away by the floods
More than 220 people have been killed and 80 are still missing after severe flooding in North Korea, according to Red Cross officials in the country.

The province of Kangwon suffered the highest toll, with 181 confirmed deaths, the International Federation of the Red Cross's Terje Lysholm said.

Aid agencies are working with the Pyongyang government to get emergency relief to the many thousands affected.

But power cuts and washed out roads are complicating the aid effort.

The heavy flooding of recent days has left as many as 300,000 people without homes and destroyed one-tenth of the country's much-needed farmland, North Korea said on Wednesday.

       

                                 
                                                                         
How many people are still completely without shelter at this point is difficult to say because communication lines are down
                                                         
Terje Lysholm
IFRC, Pyongyang
                            
       

International aid workers have been carrying out assessments in the four worst-affected provinces and say the damage is extensive.

In one county alone, near the South Korean border, some 4,500 homes have been completely destroyed, affecting 18,000 people, Mr Lysholm told BBC News.

Many people will have been able to seek refuge in neighbours' homes and in public buildings such as schools and clinics, he said.

"How many people are still completely without shelter at this point is difficult to say, because communication lines are down," he added.

Red Cross teams and other agencies are trying to deliver more than 20,000 tarpaulins, kitchen sets, blankets and water purification tablets to the worst-hit areas.

Aid considered

Terje Lysholm said the assessment teams had confirmed figures of 221 dead and 82 missing in the southern provinces of Kangwon, North Hwanghae, South Pyongan and South Hamgyong.

But it is feared the death toll could rise. Last year's flooding, which affected a much smaller area, killed at least 500 people although the exact death toll was never officially released by the normally reclusive state.

       

                                 
                                   
                            Map                    
                                                            
                           
                        
                                         
                               
                            
       

International agencies and governments were also waiting for Pyongyang to confirm what is needed in terms of food aid.

Michael Dunford of the World Food Programme in Pyongyang said they were waiting for the government to finalise its assessment of what is needed and where, so they can start diverting their stocks of food supplies already in the country for emergency use.

South Korea, a key donor of aid to its impoverished northern neighbour, has offered emergency humanitarian assistance.

Japan and the US are also said to be considering what aid to send.

Pyongyang made a rare plea for international help after announcing on Monday that storms since 7 August had led to "huge human and material damage".

August 29, 2007

KEEP trip

Dsc00591I took this photo at rally for E-Land irregular workers on 8.15.07 (liberation day) in Seoul. The protest took place on a street in front of a 24-hour McDonalds and a Starbucks.

Here's one news piece about the struggle, and the police suppression:

E.Land workers' human rights were violated by police - 37 civic organisations have launched joint complaint - Park Sung-soo remains silent

Korean police violated E.Land workers' human rights when they forcibly ended sit-in strikes in the Korean capital last month. According to leading English-language newspaper Korea Times, 37 human rights groups have filed a joint petition with the National Human Rights Commission.

The  petition points at human rights violations on several occasions when the police went to attack against striking shop workers at the Seoul World Cup Stadium Homever store on 20 July, and the Kangnam New Core Outlet department store on 31 July.

24 August 2007 Full story

* * *

For those who are interested, here was the itinerary for KEEP (Korea Education and Exposure Program) (August 2007). There were some changes; for instance it was too thundery for Bukhansan (and people had been killed by lightning during recent storms) and the 8.15 mass rally moved from Busan to Seoul at the last minute.

                                                       
 

Sun

 
 

Mon

 
 

Tues

 
 

Wed

 
 

Thur

 
 

Fri

 
 

Sat

 
 

5

 

 

 

Orientation,   part 1

 

 

 

Check-in   @ Motel Sarangbang (Time TBD)

 

 

 

Hiking @   Bukhansan

 

 

 

Get to   know each other, review objectives, expectations, itinerary

 

 

 
 

6

 

 

 

Orientation,   part 2

 

 

 

Guest   speakers

 

 

 

· Lee Chang-geun (KCTU)

 

· Kim Dong-kyu (KOA/Jinbo Yondae)

 

· 

Korea

International Network – struggle   of overseas Koreans

 

 

 
 

7

 

 

 

Duraebang   (military camptown)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FTA   action

 

 

 
 

8

 

 

 

Comfort   women rally @ Japanese embassy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pyeongtaek

 

 

 
 

9

 

 

 

Donginryon   (LGBT)

 

 

 

 

 

Migrant   Trade Union

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(If time   – Mingahyup rally – mothers of political prisoners)

 

 

 
 

10

 

 

 

Irregular   workers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urban   poor sector

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(If time   - Munhwa yondae – people’s art)

 

 

 

 

 
 

11

 

 

 

March   along DMZ with tongil sunbongdae women’s sector

 

 

 
 

12

 

 

 

March   along DMZ with tongil sunbongdae women’s sector

 

 

 
 

13

 

 

 

Travel   thru Gangwondo en route to Busan with tongil sunbongdae

 

 

 

 

 

(Alternative   option: split off from tongil sunbongdae and visit Nogunri)

 

 

 
 

14

 

 

 

8.14   activities with tongil sunbongdae in Busan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8.15 eve   mass rally @ Busan with women’s sector

 

 

 
 

15

 

 

 

8.15 march   with Naju farmers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel to   Naju with Naju farmers

 
 

16

 

 

 

Nonghwal   @ Naju

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

17

 

 

 

Nonghwal   @ Naju

 

 

 

 

 
 

18

 

 

 

Kwangju

tour with Sangwook-hyung

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final   program evaluation @ Jirisan

 

 

 
 

19

 

 

 

Leave   early morning for

Seoul

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 

 

July 22, 2007

Take Action for Irregular Workers in Korea

www.kctu.org

[KCTU Call to Action] Appeal for Solidarity : E-Land irregular workers Crushed with the Police

SITUATION SUMMARY

The Police Break-up of the E-Land Workers will Legitimize the Abuse of the Irregular Workers' Bill
- The Irregular Workers Bill has now revealed its ineffectiveness and loopholes to the entire nation

On 20th of July, the Roh Moo-hyun government crushed with police shields the calls on the part of the women irregular workers that "they be allowed to work," and took all of them to police stations. The government, despite being responsible for a bill that expands irregular work instead of protecting the casual workers, used government force to repress the irregular workers' demands for their livelihood. The government has legitimized the incapacitation of what little protective measures existed in the bill by protecting E-Land's abuse of such provisions.

The struggle by the irregular workers at E-Land began when management, in order to evade relevant provisions in the new irregular workers bill that went into effect on the 1st of July, terminated the contracts for the cash register workers and contracted out the operations. The KCTU has consistently asserted that the new bill would lead to more irregular workers because the law, which was suppose to give permanent status to workers employed as irregular workers for over two years, left open the door to ways to evade such measures, such as outsourcing and termination of contracts. However, the government and the employers have ignored such warnings. The KCTU's predictions are now reality.

E-Land has used weaknesses in the law to lay off contract cash register workers, and have forced them into illicit contracts, and have contracted out their work. The management even breached the collective agreement, which had clearly stated that those who had worked for over 18 months would not be layed off, by unilaterally terminating their contracts. They have also ignored the local government labor committee's decision that it was an unfair dismissal. While E-Land management has not hesitated to engage in illicit and unjust practices, it has used such extreme language as 'terrorism' to denounce the strike and sit-in by the workers, and has sued the union leadership for obstruction of justice. There is no way for the E-Land management to evade criticism, for they are mobilizing all sorts of illicit means to evade resolving the irregular work issue, while they have accused the workers that their desperate actions for their livelihood are illegal.

Even though the root of all the problems is the irregular workers bill, the government has not put forth an earnest effort to resolve the E-Land incident. Despite numerous cases of unfair and illegal labor practices on the part of management being revealed as a result of a special labor inspection, it has not acted to correct them. Labor Minister Lee Sang-Soo, while giving the false impression that he has been doing all that he can to resolve the issue, has constantly threatened the workers at the sit-in sites that he would send in the police. E-Land management, with the labor ministry's protection, just repeated it's position that there would be no negotiations until the sit-ins at the retail stores ended. They even made it seem in the press that their offer to "give permanent status to irregular workers that have worked over 18 months at the company" was a big concession when it was the terms of the original collective agreement which they broke. They blamed the union for the failure to reach an agreement and induced the break-up of the negotiations. For them, as well as the employers association and the labor ministry, the negotiations were solely formalities from the very beginning, and the only way to resolve the issue was through sending in the police.

The repression of irregular workers at E-Land is not an isolated incident. 271 workers were arrested during the past year alone, and 200 of these were irregular workers. 73% of all arrested laborers were irregular workers. Regarding the E-Land incident, the government has already issued arrest warrants for 6 members of the company union, and 7 for the leadership of the other union that has been on strike, New Core.

The number of workers arrested under the Roh Moo-hyun government is now at 958. This is a higher number then the two previous governments(Kim Yung-sam 632, Kim Dae-jung 892). If the government continues to respond to the heartbreaking struggles by the irregular workers across the country with arrest warrants and the use of police forces, then Roh Moo-hyun will go down in history as the most vicious of governments regarding workers' struggles.

Our Demands :

- We denounce the acts by E-Land management that have led to the loss of jobs for a vulnerable sector and that have threatened the livelihood of these workers.
- We call for the laid-off workers to be reinstated.
- At the same time, we believe that the irregular workers bill, which has now revealed its ineffectiveness and loopholes to the entire nation, needs to be revoked.
- We call for a complete revision to the law, one that implements limitations on the uses of temporary or contract work.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

We are calling for protest letters to the President Roh Moo Hyun at the Blue House, +82-2-770-1690(Fax) or e-mail at president@cwd.go.kr Copies should be sent to the Ministry of Labor, Minister Lee Sang-Soo +82-2-504-6708 or e-mail at m_molab@molab.go.kr

Please be sure to send a copy to KCTU by +82-2-2635-1134(fax) or e-mail at inter@kctu.org

Your solidarity would be enormously helpful not only for the E-land workers' struggle but protecting the entire irregular workers' rights.

July 19, 2007

6 Days...Off the to Mothership (aka Korea)

Seoul_2 Kwangju2


July 13, 2007

New Kim Ki-duk Movie

They’re All Through With Love, Yet Searching for More

LifeSize Entertainment

Seong Hyeon-ah as a woman who changes her face in “Time.”

Published: July 13, 2007

Stephen Sondheim once said that melodrama and farce were his two favorite forms of theater because “they are obverse sides of the same coin.” Kim Ki-duk, the Korean writer and director of “Three-Iron,” has minted a cinematic example of that coin with “Time,” a tale of big-city 20-somethings and the masks they wear. Throughout, Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.

The film starts and ends with the same scene: a woman clad in a long coat, sunglasses and a surgical mask (an echo of “Dressed to Kill”) leaving a plastic-surgery clinic and colliding with our heroine, See-hee (Seong Hyeon-ah). The impact causes the patient to drop and break a framed photograph. See-hee promises to repair it and takes it along to a coffee shop, where she’s meeting her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo).

Clearly, their relationship is doomed. See-hee accuses Ji-woo of growing bored with her and having a wandering eye, paranoid accusations that she thinks are confirmed when Ji-woo checks out a waitress, then interrupts their conversation to exchange insurance information with a young woman who dinged his parked car. When the lovers’ quarrel reaches a Jerry Springer pitch and See-hee stomps out of the coffee shop, the driver tells Ji-woo, “She must love you very much; I envy you.”

See-hee, a self-loathing basket case who once said, “I’m sorry for having the same boring face every day,” goes to the clinic glimpsed in the opening and signs up for a new face. Then “Time” switches its focus to poor Ji-woo, who knows only that his girlfriend suddenly moved away without saying goodbye. He doesn’t realize that the cute new coffee-shop waitress with the suspiciously similar name Seh-hee (Park Ji-yun) seems familiar for a reason.

As “Time” follows Ji-woo through familiar big-city mating rituals — karaoke, speed dating, thwarted one-night stands — en route to an uneasy relationship with his new/old love, it becomes clear that Mr. Kim has more on his mind than the ethics of nose jobs.

“Time” has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is. The film’s three lead performances, by Mr. Ha as Ji-woo and by Ms. Seong and Ms. Park as the two incarnations of his lover, are fearlessly honest, so attuned to contemporary anxieties about sex, love and social status that the characters’ unhappiness is as squirm-inducing as the movie’s close-ups of sliced flesh.

But while the film’s cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless. Many scenes end on the same uneasy note, a mix of cynical dissatisfaction and desperate, almost childlike neediness. This, too, is reminiscent of Sondheim, specifically the title “Sorry-Grateful,” a song from “Company.” Like Sondheim’s Nixon-era swingers, Mr. Kim’s clueless, self-absorbed 21st-century materialists are miserable in love, and they can’t get enough of it.

Mr. Kim repeats ideas, situations and shots with musical precision. He puts certain sentiments in the mouths of different characters at different times. He lets pivotal moments play out through scrims or partitions, or as reflections in mirrors or windowpanes, depriving them of emotional solidity. He shows characters donning actual or metaphoric masks (getting new faces, moving to new places, starting new relationships) and then becoming depressed when these alterations alter little. As Sondheim’s married men sing in “Sorry-Grateful,” “Everything’s different, nothing’s changed/Only maybe slightly rearranged.”

The flyspeck insignificance of the characters’ narcissism is expressed through a recurring setting: a sculpture garden that includes a pair of giant hands topped by a connected series of increasingly small iron squares that seem to vanish against the sky. The film’s oft-repeated image of lovers photographing themselves in those palms, naïvely trying to immortalize their affection, is the closest the director comes to a moral: Don’t obsess over surfaces, because your life is not really in your hands.

“Time” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has frank sex, nudity and gory documentary images of plastic surgery.

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written (in Korean, with English subtitles), produced, directed and edited by Kim Ki-duk; director of photography, Sung Jong-moo; music by Noh Hyung-woo; art director, Choi Keun-woo; released by LifeSize Entertainment. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 97 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Seong Hyeon-ah (See-hee), Ha Jung-woo (Ji-woo), Park Ji-yun (Seh-hee) and Kim Sung-min (Doctor).

July 11, 2007

Map of the Korean Peninsula + Latinoization

I am getting very excited to go to Korea. I am going to try to blog there as much as possible, although I will be off the grid (most likely) during my time with KEEP.

Here's a map of my beautiful homeland (click on it to enlarge):
Korean_peninsula
While we're at it, check out this docu-blog: http://journeyacrossouramerica.blogspot.com/           

July 10, 2007

Drunk Driving in Seoul (aka Driving Drunks Home)

Seoul Journal

Drinkers in Korea Dial for Designated Drivers

Seokyong Lee for The International Herald Tribune

Hur Rak checked his cellphone in Seoul, South Korea, at a waiting area for drivers who take over the wheel for customers too inebriated to drive.

 

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: July 10, 2007
 

SEOUL, South Korea — At 6:20 p.m., a line pops up on the screen of Hur Rak’s palm-size digital wireless device with his first order of the evening: a shoe dealer has had too much to drink and wants to be driven home in his own car.

Skip to next paragraph        
Seokyong Lee for The International Herald Tribune

Mr. Hur drove a customer’s car. Drivers, who work fast to do as many jobs as they can in a night, are often stranded far from public transit.

   

Mr. Hur rushes off into the subway and then finds his customer — and the car, a red subcompact — in less than 15 minutes.

“Speed is money in this business,” said Mr. Hur, 43, who received  about $16 for driving his customer home.

“You want to get as many orders as possible before dawn breaks,” he said. “I sleep in the day, work at night, six days a week.”

Mr. Hur is a “replacement driver” who makes his living by delivering inebriated people and their cars home. There are tens of thousands of them operating in this hard-drinking metropolis of 10 million people. They go to work when Seoul’s streets blossom with neon signs and end their shifts well after the last lights blink off in the early morning mist curling up from the Han River.

Their work has become such an essential part of life in Seoul and other major cities of South Korea that the national statistical office last year began monitoring the price of replacement driver services as an element in calculating the benchmark consumer price index. An estimated 100,000 replacement drivers handle 700,000 customers a day across the country, the number increasing by 30 percent on Fridays, according to the Korea Service Driver Society, a lobby for replacement drivers.

“The peak is between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.,” Mr. Hur said. “But I usually don’t get to bed until 7 a.m. I suffer chronic fatigue, but it’s the way I make my living.”

Mr. Hur’s service grew out of a compromise between competing forces in Seoul: the capital’s nightlife and a police force determined to crack down on drunken driving.

The Korean emphasis on teamwork means frequent group dinners, and plenty of “bombs,” a glass of beer with a shot of whiskey in it. Now, however, the police are putting up random roadblocks to catch drunken drivers, who risk losing their licenses. Some simply abandon their cars at the sight of a roadblock and flee, figuring that illegal parking is a far lesser crime.

Besides the night hours and low job status, replacement drivers have an obvious occupational hazard: their customers, who can become abusive. There have been reports of a replacement driver stopping in traffic, locking the car and walking away, leaving the customer kicking and raving. “My teenage son once asked me not to tell his friends what my job was,” Mr. Hur said.

The most common problem, he said, is having customers who “can’t tell north from south, east from west, in their own neighborhood.” Then there are those who refuse to wake up. Drivers often are forced to shuffle through the customer’s wallet to look for a home address. (Complaints of theft are not uncommon.) Or they check a cellphone to find a home telephone number.

“If the customer is very drunk, I make sure I get his home number from his sober drinking partners,” Mr. Hur said. “You can struggle with a drunken man for half an hour, pleading and shaking him, but he wouldn’t stir, and you are stuck with him in a forest of apartment blocks well past midnight, wasting time that you could use to get more orders. But when his wife comes out and says two words, ‘Wake up!’ — and I am not making this up — he comes right around.”

Some orders take Mr. Hur outside Seoul to places where there is no public transportation or where it has stopped running for the night, complicating his journey back to the capital. “You walk and run to reach a gas station or a toll gate,” he said. “There, you hitch a ride on a truck bound for Seoul. You constantly think how fast and cheaply you can return to Seoul to get another order.”

He said he sometimes spent time at a 24-hour cafe, waiting for bus service to resume at 5 a.m. “About 80 percent of the passengers on the first bus bound for Seoul are replacement drivers,” he said. “We recognize each other by how weary we look.”

Mr. Hur starts his evening by traveling to an underground bookstore plaza at the bustling Chongno subway station in central Seoul, where he waits with a dozen other drivers to receive their companies’ orders.

When they come, the orders usually include the customer’s cellphone number, which Mr. Hur calls to locate him. “You take a taxi and run, only to find that your customer had called more than one company and already took off with the one who got to him first,” Mr. Hur said. “This is the most frustrating. I am always in a rush.”

Many replacement drivers are part-timers, cashiers, students or salesmen who need extra income to pay debts. There are husbands and wives working as teams, usually with the woman following the man in a car to pick him up after the customer is dropped off. There are also female replacement drivers for female customers.

Mr. Hur began working full time as a replacement driver after he went bankrupt and lost his house more than three years ago.

He now makes a little over $2,400 a month. After paying his expenses, he still manages to send around $1,000 a month to his wife and son, who live with his mother in a rural town.

“Like most people, I am doing this only temporarily until a better job comes along and helps me get back on my feet and reunite with my family,” Mr. Hur said. “Until that happens, I drive drunks.”

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UPCOMING EVENTS

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Copyright

  • © All rights reserved 2007 by Sun Yung Shin. Poems, essays and posts may not be republished, reprinted or repurposed without permission.
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