Meeting with My Brother: A Novella (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Yi Mun-yol's __Meeting with My Brother__ is a sobering yet hopeful depiction of the volatile relationship between the divided Koreas. Yi, the narrator, is a South Korean university professor searching for his father, who defected to the North at the outbreak of war. Instead he finds his half-brother, and their tense meeting takes a surprising turn. This semi-autobiographical account upends the West's assumptions about North Korean life. Yi Mun-yol's __Meeting with My Brother__ is narrated by a middle-aged South Korean professor, also named Yi, whose father abandoned his family and defected to the North at the outbreak of the Korean War. Many years later, despite having spent most of his life under a cloud of suspicion as the son of a traitor, Yi is prepared to reunite with his father. Yet before a rendezvous on the Chinese border can be arranged, his father dies. Yi then learns for the first time that he has a half-brother, whom he chooses to meet instead. As the two confront their shared legacy, their encounter takes a surprising turn. __Meeting with My Brother__ represents the political and psychological complexity of Koreans on both sides of the border, offering a complex yet poignant perspective on the divisions between the two countries. Through a series of charged conversations, Yi explores the nuances of reunification, both political and personal. This semiautobiographical account draws on Yi's own experience of growing up with an absent father who defected to the North and the stigma of family disloyalty. First published in Korea in 1994, __Meeting with My Brother__ is a moving and illuminating portrait of the relationships sundered by one of the world's starkest barriers. "Narrated in the first person, Meeting with My Brother tells the story of a professor's journey to meet with his younger half-brother from North Korea. The professor's father had left his family behind in the South during the Korean War and eventually had another family in the North. The story includes the professor's negotiations with the go-between who arranges the meeting, his participation in a tour group (the necessary excuse to travel to the area in China where the meeting takes place), his interaction with other tour members and Koreans living in the area, and finally his meeting with his brother. The story includes different positions on reunification and illuminates many of the reasons that make reunification difficult. In this new translation the author has added a new vignette that does not appear in the original."