The Northern Wind

About the Book

The Northern Wind depicts turbulent South Korea in the mid-1960’s, a time when her troops were fighting in Vietnam and North Korean infiltrators were terrorizing their southern neighbors with killing and kidnapping. While doing her laundry at a remote creek on Kanghwa Island on a Saturday morning, eighteen-year-old Miyong, a member of women’s group involved in urban development, notices a unit of armed South Koreans passing her. As the men gather on a dry creek bed some yards away, she discovers their use of certain words and their accent are not typically South Korean. She waits until they leave and hurries back to the community and reports them to the director, an army reserve officer working for the Central Intelligence Corp (CIC).

The next day news reports a botched assassination of the South Korean president. As the person who saw and reported the commandos, Miyong becomes an overnight celebrity. Her exposure to the media leads her to an unexpected journey to North Korea as a South Korean agent, to help a prisoner escape from a labor camp. Edward Yi, a distinguished Korean-American architect, was abducted while visiting his ailing father, who is the brother of Korea’s last king, Emperor Yi Sunjong. In the dreary labor camp, Miyong witnesses starvation, forced attendance of executions, rape and forced abortion of women inmates. When she returns, unexpected news awaits her.

About the Author

Born and raised in South Korea, Therese Park came to the United States to be a cellist with the Kansas City Philharmonic (now the Kansas City Symphony) in 1966. After 30 years, she retired and began writing seriously. Her first book, A Gift of the Emperor is the story of a young Korean school-girl whose life is shattered when she was forced into sex slavery in a Japanese military brothel on Palau Island in the Pacific during World War II. In 1998, Park was one of the featured authors at three national bookfairs—Th e Los Angeles Bookfair, The Miami Bookfair, The Heartland Bookfair. This book was also published in Turkey in 2001.

Park’s second novel When a Rooster Crows at Night is based on her memories of the Korean War. She has published 80 articles and essays during the past decades, and in 2006, she was selected to write Midwest Voices column for the Kansas City Star Opinion page. Since January 2009, she has been writing Commentary for the Kansas City Star-Johnson County Neighborhood News.