Year of Impossible Goodbyes

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Year of Impossible Goodbyes By: Sook Nyul Choi Fourth Quarter Novel: Year of Impossible Goodbyes is a historical novel about a family’s courage, love, and determination to find freedom, based on the author’s childhood experiences in Korea near the end of the Second World War. Setting: 1945-1946 Kirimini, a village in Pyongyang, North Korea. Point of View: First Person Point of View, it is told by Sookan, the protagonist. Protagonist: Sookan, a ten-year-old girl whose family bravely endures the cruelty of the Japanese occupation forces. Conflicts: Main Conflict: struggle between the Japanese military and Korean civilians (representing the forces of dicatorship and repression versus freedom.) This struggle is played out in several conflicts between members of Sookan’s family and Japanese officials. External Conflict: An additional external conflict materializes when Russian Communists occupy North Korea and threaten Korean civilians. Internal Conflict: The protagonist’s main internal conflict is one between fear and courage as she faces the Japanese, the Russians, and her flight into South Korea. Themes: 1. Family love makes people strong enough to endure terrible adversity. 2. A cruel dictatorship may take away a family’s material wealth, but not the values of hope and determination to survive. 3. Freedom is worth fighting and dying for. Main Characters: 1. Sookan, the narrator, a ten-year-old Korean girl. 2. Grandfather, a frail elderly man. 3. Mother (Hyunsuk), formerly active in the Korean Independence movement. 4. Captain Narita, a cruel Japanese officer. 5. Kisa, the narrator’s cousin. Haiwon, young,energetic worker in the sock factory. Aunt Tiger, the narrator’s aunt, lives with her sister’s family; Japanese killed her parents and babies; her husband is fighting in the war. Inchun, narrator’s brother, almost 7 years old. Narita Sensei, Captain Narita’s wife, teaches first grade at a Japanese school. Guide, unnamed man that leads the children to a house at Yohyun. .

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Yearning for Freedom in Sook Nyul Choi's Year of Impossible Goodbyes
157 영어영문학연구 제44권 제3호 Studies in English Language & Literature (2018) 가을 157－176 http://dx.doi.org/10.21559/aellk.2018.44.3.008 Yearning for Freedom in Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes Seong Suk Yim (Chonbuk National University) Yim, Seong Suk. “Yearning for Freedom in Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes.” Studies in English Language & Literature 44.3 (2018): 157-176. Owing to the legacy of Japanese Imperialism, Korea had a shameful past. When two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan to surrender unconditionally during the War in the Pacific in 1945, people in the United States suddenly felt compassion and sympathy for the Japanese due to the explosions and loss of life. Crucially though, internationally, few people are aware of Japanese colonialism and the atrocious acts committed against Koreans. Year of Impossible Goodbyes is a novel about the plight of Koreans during the period of Japanese colonial rule, and the Koreans peoples' yearning for freedom. This paper studies five symbolic icons representing the freedom, identity and pride of Korean traditional culture and history, and examines how the Korean traditional patriarchal system or family system disintegrated because of Japanese colonial imperialism. This paper outlines how the colonial period school curriculum yielded educational products promoting a transition to the communist ideologies of 'Mother Russia' without clearing away the vestiges of Japanese colonialism, and traces the journey of the heroine who comes to the South seeking for freedom from the Russian communists and the Town Reds in the North. (Chonbuk National University) Key Words: Korean identity, Japanese colonialism, atrocious acts, Russian communism, freedom I.
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