6/25/2023 0 Comments Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim![]() But the impossible promise to reunite her mother with her first son, Jina’s half brother, lost to the north, weighs heaviest. Jina’s guilt over caring for her ailing mother, still stuck with a wartime mentality, is palpable. Gendry-Kim’s black-and-white hand drawings of aging Gwija-wrinkles, moles, unibrow, and forehead etched with deep affection-and her lonely life in an apartment in Seoul are poignant. Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong, explores this ongoing division through the eyes of Jina, a writer, and Song Gwija, her mother. The Korean War (1950-1953), which began over 70 years ago, permanently sliced the peninsula into two nations, and the remaining families, separated by the 38 th parallel, still wait for a reunion with their loved ones. ![]() She had grown up in North Korea and had left behind family-an older sister in Pyongyang, who she desperately wanted to meet again. Her mother was staying with Gendry-Kim in Paris for two months after Gendry-Kim’s father passed away when she revealed a family secret. ![]() Gendry-Kim was in her late 20s living in Paris, however, when she heard the story that grew into The Waiting(기다림), a moving and dramatic graphic novel of aging, war, family reunions, and separation. She lived there for 17 years before returning to South Korea. ![]() Before she was an award-winning graphic novelist, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was a painter, a sculptor, a bookbinder, and a translator between Korean and French, living in Paris. ![]()
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