BOOK CLUB REPORT - June 2025
By Casey Eckersley
KCCNYC Dosan Hakdang May Meeting
The Dosan Hakdang Book Club gives the KCCNYC community a place to discuss Korean writing in translation. Book Club members take stories crafted from Korean history and culture and place them in the context of their own experiences. In remembrance of the May 18 Democratization Movement, a group of twenty current and former students gathered for the inaugural meeting to discuss Nobel laureate Han Kang’s novel Human Acts.
Human Acts made for a solemn commencement, offering vignettes of humanity lost in the massacre at Gwangju. Many of us struggled with the grief, suffering, and guilt portrayed at such an unflinchingly intimate level. The words that came up again and again in our discussion - despairing, grueling, heavy, haunting - all felt apt to describe such a monumental loss of human life. We discussed the role of the reader and how ambiguity might have been lost in translation, given the English language’s specificity with pronouns. In particular, the seemingly pointed use of “you” in the first two stories was disorienting and left us unsettled: is “you” directed at me or someone else? Am I a victim? A witness? A perpetrator?
“I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean…the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”
Individual agency within broader societal structures is a theme that carries throughout the book. Does a crowd magnify the worst elements of human nature, or can it transform individual kindness into a collective selflessness? Is a group greater than or less than the sum of its parts?
In our Book Club, together we dared to feel a part of the events at Gwangju. We explored these questions and worked together to face directly the enormity of loss, grief, and anger: to mourn, to reflect, and to find hope that together we can bring out the best of our shared humanity.
July Book Announcement for DOSAN HAKDANG: Yeonnam-dong's Smiley Laundromat
For the month of July, we are reading Yeonnamdong’s Smiley Laundromat by Kim Jiyun. We will enjoy our summer book club with heartwarming stories of customers of Yeonnamdong Smiley Laundromat. The story begins with someone leaving a diary behind at a laundromat in Yeonnamdong, and customers writing their stories and replies to each other.
The book is a quick but a fun read!
Join us on July 20, 2025 at 2PM (Eastern Standard Time) to share your thoughts and feelings for the book. RSVP for the July Meeting HERE
The Book Club Meeting is online via zoom! Feel free to join us with your own drinks and food.
Yeonnamdong’s Smiley Laundromat can be purchased in hardcover or ebook from these shops or taken out from the NY Public Library
