Ty Pak

Biography

Born in Korea shortly before World War II, Pak witnessed Japanese colonial rule, Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, its division during subsequent U.S. and Soviet occupation, and the trauma of the Korean War in his early childhood and adolescent years. After receiving his law degree from Seoul National University in 1961 he worked as a reporter for the English dailies The Korean Republic and The Korea Times.

In 1965, he emigrated to the United States. After earning his Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, in 1969 he taught in the English Department at the University of Hawaii from 1970 to 1987. His first collection of short stories, Guilt Payment (1983), has been widely adopted as textbook at many US colleges. His other books include Moonbay (1999), Cry Korea Cry (1999), A Korean Decameron (1961, to be reissued 2016), and The Polyglot (2016). Currently he writes a blog, typakmusings.com, followed by a wide spectrum of readers who find intellectually stimulating and entertaining his unique point of view and satire on politics, economy, and life in general, especially as races and cultures interface in America and worldwide.

Married with three children and six grandchildren, Pak lives in Norwood, New Jersey.

Selected publications

In addition to his numerous articles and reviews in Semiotica, Journal of Formal Logic, Language, and other academic journals, his fiction appears in the following anthologies:

"Guilt Payment," Pow Wow (2009, Da Capo Press), 319-329.

"Exile," Honolulu Stories (2008, Mutual Publishing), 489-497.

"The Water Tower," Kori (2001, Beacon Press), 186-208.

"The Court Interpreter," LA Shorts (2000, Heyday Books), 239-257.

"A Fire," Asian Pacific Literature (1981, State of Hawaii Department of Education), 443-450.

Reviews

In a review of Guilt Payment^[4] S. E. Solberg, University of Washington, ranks Pak’s well-crafted stories “better than any others written by a Korean American,” as they unflinchingly confront “the voids and wounds, both psychic and physical, that drive and inhibit a generation of Koreans born to division, war and a homeland that is not whole either,” noting their “tight plots [that] move the reader forward with the urge of the adventure tale, then bring him up short with an ironic twist of action or situation.”

Basing her landmark study^[5] on an extensive analysis of Ty Pak’s “The Court Interpreter,” King-Kok Cheung, UCLA, finds the story “both illuminating and troubling, especially in its depiction of the tension between blacks and Koreans,” which along with the acquittal of white policemen for beating Rodney King leads to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. As well as an Aristotelian tragedy, the hero overthrown by his hubris, the story is seen as a fictional confirmation of the “divide and conquer” scheme inherent in the white-dominant American social structure, the narrator observing that during jury selection both the prosecution and the defense are intent on eliminating those who belong to the race of the opposite party: “The last survivors were. . . all white, Anglo white” (101). It dawns on him that “this was the secret of white success in the US. By default, because the minorities could not trust each other.”

Announcing Moonbay and Cry Korea Cry, Publishers Weekly (May 17, 1999) praises “the coolly unruffled prose of Pak’s first-person narrators [that] suits the ironies they confront as they explore the dilemmas of Korea-American history, memory, “national reputation,” migration, survival and pride.” (June)

Writing in The Honolulu Advertiser (June 26, 1999) on Cry Korea Cry, Charene Luke notes the “sensitive portrayal of Korean Americans particularly the first generation of immigrants—their idealism, naiveté and rude awakenings to the realities of American life.”

In Magazine: Inside Asian America (Aug/Sept 1999) Peter Ong remarks the “astonishing vision and force" of Cry Korea Cry that "succeeds in conveying how human lives become expendable in the sinister politics of war," with emphasis on "Pak’s brutal honesty about the human compulsion toward the darker elements of humanity [which] offers us an unsettling, provocative window onto hard truths rather than satisfactory resolutions.”

Nowhere is Ty Pak’s commitment to meaningful interaction between races and cultures more evident than in The Polyglot, his latest novel. Deported to Central Asia under Stalin’s plan to cleanse Eastern Siberia from ethnic Koreans Peter, a polyglot, fights in the Korean War, comes to America, marries an Oscar winner, and rises to stardom, but, upon discovery of his Japanese-Korean parentage, is almost assassinated, losing all his verbal skills, his precarious restoration suggesting hope against racism and tension, however slender.