by Don Mee Choi
A bricolage of poetry, prose, real and imagined translations, photographs, memories, and hand-drawn overlapping circles, Don Mee Choi’s excavation of the lasting legacy of decades of war and occupation on the Korean peninsula is shot through with birds. I write of the land mass rather than the countries’ political designations because the line that differentiates the experiences of the people of North and South Korea is often muddy in Choi’s
DMZ Colony (Wave Books). While she is walking in Missouri, a migration of snow geese passing overhead sets off the author’s vertigo and triggers her return to Seoul. We learn the circumstances which caused her family to have to flee to have to, as her mother says, live “like birds” and we read about people who could not escape, those who “had no place to land.” Choi’s 2020 National Book Award winning
Updated: 4:18 PM CDT May 4, 2021 Shanon Maglente Product and Reviews Assistant Editor
Pacific Islanders are the group that makes up the PI part in AAPI, or Asian American and Pacific Islander identities. They re a much smaller group in fact, according to the 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimate, there are roughly 1.4 million Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders alone or in combination with one of more races who reside within the United States. Thus, this group is often underrepresented in media, and when their culture actually
is featured, society often paints a false narrative of paradise. The history of the islands is complicated, but the spirit of the people who live and have origins there is unwavering.
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