My parents were both born in North Korea. The Korean War in the 1950s left them and 10 million other Koreans “ee-san gajokmega swerte,” separated from their families. A move to the United States allowed them to start over and raise four American-born children in rural Minnesota.
They always avoided talking about Korea, and I mostly learned about the country on my own, through my research as a novelist, and during a year, decades ago, when I lived in Seoul as a Fulbright scholar.
With my father’s death and my mother’s final slide into dementia, I had an urge to reconnect with the country that’s still a mystery to me. I longed for a tour providing food and sightseeing, but with opportunities to find personal connection on the way.
K-dramas came to my rescue.
During my year in Seoul, I had been teased by the Korean Fulbright staff for my love of yeonsokguk, “serial dramas.” These lugubrious TV shows were usually the purview of at-home elders. I was in my early 30s. But family epics with emotive acting meant I could enjoy them even with minimal language comprehension.
With the advent of streaming, the shows acquired subtitles and burst onto the global scene. In 2019, a week after its premier, “Squid Game” became the most viewed Netflix show in the United States, and would become the company’s most popular series of all time, with 330 million views to date. The second season, airing Dec. 26, has been widely anticipated by fans across the world.
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The accountability office said many of those systems “have critical operational impacts” on air traffic safety and efficiency. Many of them are also facing “challenges that are historically problematic for aging systems,” according to the report.
Robinson’s history of comments that have been widely criticized as antisemitic and anti-gay made him a deeply polarizing figure in North Carolina long before his bid for governor was upended last week by a CNN report that he had called himself a “Black NAZI” and praised slavery while posting on a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012. Now, some of his allies are abandoning him. Most of his senior campaign staff members have resigned. The Republican Governors Association said that its pro-Robinson ads would expire tomorrow and that no new ones had been placed. And former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in the spring, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not mention him once during his rally in the state over the weekend.
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