Musings
by Ty Pak
About me
Born in Korea shortly before World War II, Pak witnessed Japanese colonial rule, Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, its division during subsequent U.S. and Soviet occupation, and the trauma of the Korean War in his early childhood and adolescent years, receiving his law degree from Seoul National University in 1961. In 1957 he started working as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes, and in 1958 for the Korean English dailies The Korean Republic and The Korea Times, until 1965 when he emigrated to the United States.
After earning his Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, in 1969 he taught in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi from 1970 to 1987. His first collection of short stories, Guilt Payment (1983), has been used as a textbook at many US colleges. His other books include Moonbay (1999), in the UCLA English syllabus, Cry Korea Cry (1999), A Korean Decameron (1961, reissued 2019), Dear Daughter: On the Eve of Her Wedding (2018), The Polyglot: Union of Korea and Japan (2018), serialized in English and Korean by the Korean New York Ilbo Daily from Jun 1, 2019 through Jun 5, 2021, The SEE Creed: Sex Equality and Emancipation (2021), which champions the matronymic surnaming of children to alternate with the patronymic, The Global Federalist Manifesto (2021), a pamphlet urging all sovereign states to surrender their sovereignty, a toxic relic, to the United States of the World, and Lucy Wong, the Guardian Angel for the USW: United States of the World (2022), a novella where Lucy Wong turns out to be Xi Jinping’s daughter.
Recent
Earl Kim, one of the world’s greatest composers
This is my email, dated May 30, 2024, to Ty Kim, Emmy winning Director-Producer of the documentary, Earl. Dear Ty, Your magnum opus, Earl, puts Earl Kim among the world’s greatest composers through the interviews with his luminary peers like Itzhak Perlman and John Harbison and selected performances of his music, thus immortalizing him and […]
In Memoriam Luck-Hyun Sung, a Korean Patriot
Dear Luck-Hyun Sung, My heart breaks to hear you have left us. I’ll be following you soon, judging from the persistent geriatric signs like lightheadedness and heaviness in the legs, but in the meantime who shall I turn to, tell me, to unload and be unloaded to, refreshing and recharging our minds? I […]
A Petition to Supreme Leader of North Korea Jongeun Kim
The title of the 97-page novella on amazon.com is A Petition to Supreme Leader of North Korea Jongeun Kim with the subtitle Dangoon II, the Second Coming in 4,357 Years of Dangoon, the Birch King, Founder of Korea. I quote the published synopsis: Upon hearing North Korean Supreme Leader Jongeun Kim’s renunciation of Korean unification […]
Unification of Korea
Dear Supreme Leader of North Korea Jongun Kim: Heartbroken by reports that you have seemingly given up on unification with the south, denying kinship with anyone living there, excising the word Unification from Unification Station, a subway hub in the capital city of Pyungyang, and banning the 2-System 1-Federation notion, touted as a preliminary […]
The Archaic Mystique of Travel
Some people, especially retirees with means and time on their hands, take to travel, ostentatiously, in the belief that it cloaks them with an air of savvy and success. Indeed in the olden days an aristocrat had to have traveled far and wide and brag about it to uphold his or […]
Contact me
If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hello, feel free to reach out to me at typakmusings.com@gmail.com – I’m always excited to connect with my readers!