South Korea

When I moved to Seoul in 2019, it marked a twenty-year homecoming. I came back to my father’s homeland not as a Korean but a gyopo, the name for us westernized sojourners, distinctively set apart from locals thanks to our loud tattoos and poor Korean speaking skills. Living in diaspora, you arrive everywhere hollow. Sometimes you […]

October 20, 2020 is a day that Na-Yeong and her family dread, and one that most South Koreans resent. It is the day the man who brutally raped 8-year-old Na-Yeong while drunk, leaving her with lifelong physical and mental disabilities, will be released from a prison in Pohang, South Korea. In 2008, Cho Doo-Soon was […]

BY RUFINA PARK This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  On the surface, South Korea’s education system has notable merits. In the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which measures the cognitive skills of fifteen-year-olds from sixty-five participating economies […]