By Iwazaru
When a younger Korean friend offered to share her own family’s experience with divination, I didn’t know what to expect.  It began with the simple background of her grandparents seeking a reading about the compatibility of their children — should they marry?  The answer was no; the signs were not favorable.  Nevertheless, the couple went ahead with the wedding.

By El Locaso

It’s 8am on the Hailun Road subway platform. Line 4 is the purple “loop” line  which I have to take to transfer to line 6 to get to work each morning. I’m standing on a very clean and modern platform, there are waiting benches that have people calmly reading the free morning Chinese newspaper. It is a scene of absolute quiet and zen. Then the bells sound, a serene voice is heard over the station intercom announcing that the next train is arriving. The people calmly make their way to their positions like ballet dancers getting in their places on stage before the curtain rises.

POEM IN EXILE

By Loreta M. Medina

I gaze upon the mountains
To shake me out of a drunken sleep.
Today they are full and lush
They don’t leave a trace
Of the colorful crown
They had worn last spring
Or the bareness
That had clothed them in winter.

By John M. Rodgers
The first diviner that I met with, Baek Il-hong, went blind at the age of three from measles and said of her own fortune: “It said I would be a diviner of the owner of a brothel.” History and the blind seers themselves say that divining was one of the few jobs the blind were able to pursue in the past. Masseuse and prostitute were two others. Now in her 60s, Baek has a right eye that’s milky offering only enough vision for her to identify movement and shapes. Her left eye has no vision and remains closed. Yet it is clear that she must have been pretty as a younger woman, something that she was not shy about admitting. She explained that she began her studies at the age of eight saying that she knew “studying hard was my only chance.”

By Iwazaru

As the Lunar New Year heralds the White Tiger in the East most people of Western mind have forgotten New Year’s parties and parted ways with irksome resolutions. Yet that New Moon portends much from the moment its obscure rays reach across the land setting in motion a series of events for each sign and soul. Reverence, custom, superstition and desperation are just some of the forces that send people searching for guidance through and protection in the unknown year ahead.

PRELUDE TO SEOUL

My belly is empty

Was nailing the

Sauce free scenario

Till the Friday corkscrew

By Yann Kerloch

By Haerin Shin   On my next visit, I told her the piece was indeed impressive, so beautiful and sad – the language exquisite and the imagery so vivid. But was there any particular reason why she favored this poem over others, since it was neither the best known nor the most critically acclaimed poem [...]

By Iwazaru The recent news of J. D. Salinger’s death at his isolated farmhouse in Cornish, New Hampshire resumed the conversation about what the hell he’d been up to, why he vanished from the outside world more than 50 years ago and how relevant Holden Caulfield is today. The first two questions may finally get [...]

By Penelope James

I’d been living in Australia for 8 months and I was bored and broke. Things weren’t working out. English First China said I could be on a plane, sorted with a flat and a visa and teaching the English within 10 days. Sure, why not, but where? I’d been to the east before [...]

By Haerin Shin

There are myriads of Korean legends on the theme: “the bride in waiting.” These stories often come from times of social turmoil, when men had to leave their homes for war, for “greater causes”… The stories embedded in what we read in our history textbooks, quietly but persistently murmur the tales of those whose lives remain untold. [...]

Review by Mizaru I hadn’t had a full breakfast when I picked up “every second sunday”,  the 2009 anthology from the Seoul Writers Workshop and I was late for the free food at this book launch as well. So on an empty stomach: in an October that had been too hot is to this winter [...]