The Homes We Build on Ashes

by Christina Park

Overview

God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason. After surviving the grand tragedy of the Busan Fire that leaves 28,000 people homeless, Nara leaves the squalid tent city that had become her home and is thrown headlong into a new life in Vancouver, Canada, where she elucidates the poetry of home. Amidst violence and abject injustice, Nara finds a way to rise up from the ashes again and again to rejoice in small triumphs in the homes she has lived, in the homes she has lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771332347
Publisher:	Inanna Publications
Publication date:	08/30/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Christina Park has worked in marketing, public relations and in the investment industry as well as technology. She has worked for technology start-ups and large corporations, writing numerous articles and reports for industry publications. She was also editor of UBC’s ARC Magazine for two years and attended Oxford University to start her Master’s Degree. Her writing is informed by personal experiences as a second-generation Korean as well as having lived in Vancouver and Montreal — two Canadian cities that are in stark contrast culturally, politically, historically, and from a the perspective of language, both spoken and unspoken. The Homes We Build on Ashes is her debut novel.

Editorial Reviews

"Christina Park is a talented storyteller. The Homes We Build on Ashes, a family saga, is a compelling novel about the Korean resistance to the Japanese occupation, opposition to the forced Japanese assimilation, the Busan fire and the Korean War, as well as immigration in Canada in the 1960s. Her poignant depiction of women's ability to survive war and oppression, and their capacity to keep the family going through hardships and dramatic changes in life, will live with you long after you put the book down."—Zoë S. Roy, author of Calls Across the Pacific and The Long March Home

From the Publisher