Word: pyongyang
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...Originally published as The Dog of Crossover Village in 1948, the second grouping (of seven stories) describes a ghastly ethical vacuum in the wake of World War II, infested with craven church elders, black marketeers and property speculators, which Hwang, who himself crossed over with his family from Pyongyang to Seoul in 1946, knew first-hand. "What a wretched state it was, with Koreans trying to swallow each other up," he writes in "Booze," venting authorial indignation, as he often does, in the guise of one of his characters. In this case, it's through the thoughts of an upright...
...Taek's 2000 film version was a blockbuster.) But the ending of Hwang's reworking is all his own. As are the livelier scenes, in other stories, of a jazzy, prewar North Korea, full of concert pianists and painters and their nude models. It's hard to believe that Pyongyang was once a glittery Little Shanghai of waltzing, snaggletoothed flappers and buxom barmaids pouring shots of absinthe. But geonbae to the day this particular fiction of Hwang's is translated back into reality...
...Phnom Penh or Changi in Singapore. To visit is upsetting but essential if you're to see Korea the Ko Un way - that is, an experience of harmonious extremes, a bracing yin and yang of Buddhas and booze, temples and taverns and, if you've scored a visa to Pyongyang, visits to both sides of the 38th parallel...
...mate for whom Ko penned an encomium included in Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), his 30-volume magnum opus profiling everyone he's ever met, as well as figures from Korean folklore and history. The three are toasting each other at a state banquet during the first Reunification Summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, during which Ko recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after a ramble around the Hermit Kingdom the year before, heralded the future of the North Korean capital as a lepidopterist's playground that...
...credible deal on its nuclear program. "But," he adds, "I know I'm about the only optimist left standing these days." In Washington and Seoul, not to mention Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow, somber realism, not giddy optimism, is the prevailing sentiment on North Korea diplomacy. When dealing with Pyongyang, that's about as good as it gets...