For Author Crystal Hana Kim, Fiction and Optimism Go Hand in Hand

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Individual: Joseph Kushner

For Author Crystal Hana Kim, Fiction and Optimism Go Hand in Hand

Crystal Hana Kim’s The Stone Home tells a story of itinerant youths rounded up and placed in a government-run reformatory center in South Korea where they are abused and tortured. It is a work of fiction, but “homes” like the one in the novel did exist in Korea in the 1980s under the Chun Doo-hwan regime. Today, they’re more aptly termed internment camps. In her author’s note at the end of the novel, Kim writes, “What does it mean that state-san…