Full Description
In Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, Crystal Mun-hye Baik offers an intimate cultural history of war, illness, banishment, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family. Beginning with her father's death and mother's psychiatric hold in 2022, Baik situates her parents' lives within the enmeshed narratives of Japanese colonialism, war, and transoceanic migration, examining Korean diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than an object of study. In doing so, she reckons with diasporic genealogies of precarity that have configured the everyday lives of her parents and ancestral communities. Blending different genres from narrative prose to visual essay, epistles to ancestral mourning rites, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun is a meditation on the personal and ethical entanglements scholars must confront when they are implicated in the histories of violence they study.
Contents
Note to Readers vii
An End Is a Return to the Beginning 1
I. Father
The Eye of the Storm 23
The Wind Phone 45
II. Mother
A Cooking Lesson 67
The Diasporic Family Album 98
III. The Memory Keeper
Grief and Return 117
Posthumous Translation 147
IV. Invocation
A Protection Spell / Cristiana Kyung-hye Baik 159
Acknowledgments 163
Notes 169
Bibliography 177
Index 183
Credits 187
