Writing ‘Piñatas for the Year of the Dragon’
Writing ‘Piñatas for the Year of the Dragon’
Terrible news. Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni, one of the South Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery who used to live at the House of Sharing, died last Sunday. She was 97, and she must have been in poor health for…
I’ve been re-listening to the audiobook version of Karen Levenson’s book “Confessions of an Animal Rights Terrorist” and looking for a pithy way to sum it up. It’s not easy because it’s a memoir with multiple threads. There’s the author’s…
The Canadian election is over, and the results are a letdown. It was the first time I ever voted from abroad, and the first time I ever voted Liberal. It was also my first-ever vote for an incumbent member of…
It was quite an honor to interview Yiombi Thona for a special issue of Groove Korea to commemorate the magazine’s 100th edition in 2014. The theme was “100 expats who made a difference in Korea.” Even though the resulting article…
Rod Coronado is a legend in the animal and Earth liberation movements. In the 2009 book “Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War To Save American Wilderness,” Dean Kuipers takes readers behind the scenes. In 1990, we learn from Kuipers, Coronado…
It was a big beagly day at the Beagle Rescue Network shelter in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, when I visited in July 2019. The group’s head volunteer, Jeong Buyun, led me to a magical place full of wagging tails, inquisitive…
The first time I observed a Cube of Truth event in Myeong-dong, the busy shopping area in downtown Seoul, I’d followed the group’s activities on social media for some time. The activists were representing Anonymous for the Voiceless, and on…
Sometime around 2007, a woman I barely knew started a thread on a message board and addressed it to me. She made sure to tell me to fuck off in the subject line. Another member of the same site sent…
Since I started my first blog sometime around 2008 or 2009, I’ve had to reevaluate my content strategy many times. My first blog was part tech experiment, part creative outlet, part rant. I wrote in response to social media discussions,…
Looking back on my 2019 conversation with Heeji Yi, maybe I was too optimistic. She was in her late 20s at the time and we met up at a café in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, just outside Seoul, to talk about…