[Focus on Author] The Depth of Everyday Life Being Returned to a Mourning Community: Hyun Ki Young, This Is Jeju Island / Paik Young-Gyung
The Quarterly Changbi 201, Autumn 2023
Abstract
For “Focus on Author,” Changbi’s editorial board member and cultural anthropologist Paik Young-Gyung met Hyun Ki Young, who recently published This Is Jeju Island, a three-volume novel covering the roots of the modern history of Jeju and the Korean peninsula. In this careful conversation, revealing the present meaning of this novel, we realize how especially meaningful this work, which deals so thoroughly with the modern and contemporary history of Jeju, is to the author, who has scrutinized the April 3 Uprising and Massacre throughout his career. At the same time, it inspires us who are living in a deeply troubling reality, making us think about a narrative imagination that can create alternative lives from the mourning Jeju communities, whose communality was destroyed by a tragic incident.