Blurb: “[N]ot being a part of the problem wasn’t enough.” On Facebook, find out how Kim Han-min starting working as a quartermaster on the “Sea Shepherd,” and what happened to the totoaba fish that they found one night in an illegal gillnet.

Then, explore Kim Han-min’s personal website. Make sure to press the “about” button in the top right corner, and keep pressing the “switch” button in the center to view all the panels.

Jamie Chang. Courtesy of Korean Literature Now, the world’s only free English-language quarterly of Korean literature.

“Tell Me Where to Go” is not the first time Jamie Chang has used the word “roach” in a translation—read an interview
in which she explains why she used the term “Mom-roach” in her translation of the novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982.

Then, find out why Chang “ditched . . . medical school” in a piece she wrote for the magazine Words Without Borders.

Next, visit Sora Kim-Russell’s website (in English and Korean—the two non-English headings say “Welcome!” and “Nice to meet you!”).

And watch a video clip in which she talks about the “visibility” of Korean literature outside Korea.

Listen to pronunciations of the Korean terms in this story, read aloud by WWB Campus graduate intern Olan Munson.

A page from Kim Han-min’s Kafe Limbo

Read a summary of the dystopian graphic novel Kafe Limbo, from which this chapter was excerpted. In the novel, members of a renegade group called Limbo “undertake three missions:
strike the Roaches as hard as possible, secure an escape route, and find the Mirror.” (There are a few typos in the text.)

Brother Anthony of Taizé

Read Brother Anthony of Taizé’s description of this story in his introduction to Korean literature:

. . . [A] variety of science-fiction tale set far from Korea or any everyday reality. The fantasy world it evokes may be understood as a satire of the enthusiasm Koreans have developed in recent years for travel. Despite discomfort and danger, Koreans have been traveling to every remote corner of the world and becoming experts on the negative things awaiting them there, although “Cockroachification” is not usually mentioned. But perhaps after the current pandemic it might be?

“Tell Me . . .” might also be understood as an indictment of immigration policy. Korea is a very closed society, notorious for a refusal to welcome immigrants—asylum-seekers, in particular. Many young men from Southeast Asia come to Korea to work in small factories for low wages, but they are not allowed to stay for long, and certainly not to settle for good. In recent years, reporting on immigration has sometimes employed the term “Fortress Europe” to refer to highly restrictive policies on that continent; “Fortress Korea” may be equally apropos.

In the dystopian world of this graphic novel, the members of “Limbo” race through a world of closing borders, desperately trying to find a country willing to take them in. What’s it like to do this in the real world, today?

First, watch this TED Talk by a young man from Afghanistan who undertook a dangerous journey in the hopes of finding asylum in Australia.

Then, get some basic terms and facts from the U.N.’s factsheet for World Refugee Day, and find out 9 myths and facts about immigration from the Anti-Defamation League.

Finally, find out why refugees today “spend longer and longer periods in limbo” in a short article from The New Humanitarian.

One reason behind the longer times in limbo is a change in U.S. policies around refugees: the chart below shows how many refugees the U.S. used to take in, compared to today.

Street painting in Seoul, by leifbr. License: CC BY-SA 2.0. Access at https://flic.kr/p/G4ggkp.

New to learning about Korea? Read a short profile of modern Korea from the BBC, or a more detailed, historical profile from the Asia Society.

The book cover of Tiptoe Tapirs

Read about a jungle that is not as peaceful as it looks in Kim Han-min’s children’s book Tiptoe Tapirs (click on the cover image to use the “Look Inside” feature).

Then, find out how Kim Han-min’s drawings connect to older Korean artwork in a review
of Tiptoe Tapirs.

Next, look at pages from his Korean-language book Moving, which asks, “Why Leave? Why Move? Why Mobilize?”

Combining graphic narrative and activism, the book tells stories of migration (among fish as well as humans) and imagines an encounter between journalist Marie Colwin, who died covering the war in Syria, and migration activist Jerome Rodriguez.

In addition to being an author and artist, Kim Han-min is also a translator. Watch a Facebook clip of him reading aloud from his Korean translation of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

In the clip, Kim reads a line that Pessoa wrote in a letter to his friend Adolfo Casais Montero. Translated into English, it reads: “Since childhood I had the tendency to create around me a fictitious world, surrounding myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed.”

(For more on Pessoa, read Richard Zenith’s short article “The Poet of Many Masks” and look at his work on the Poetry Foundation website. To find out why “you will never get to the bottom” of Pessoa, read an article by Carmela Ciuraru.)

Explore Kim’s personal website. Keep pressing “switch” until you find his “Organizes” page. Here, you can explore some of Kim Han-min’s activism work.

Then, learn more about the direct-action ocean conservation movement called the Sea Shepherd, where Kim Han-min worked as a quartermaster.

For more on the “totoaba” fish, and what it has to do with the endangered “vaquita” (a type of porpoise), listen to this 5-minute NPR story.

(For Korean speakers) Listen to Kim Han-min talk about his experience on the “Sea Shepherd,” where he describes himself working as a “non-violent pirate.”

Read Jamie Chang’s translation of a chapter from the YA fantasy novel The Wizard Bakery and Sora Kim-Russell’s translation of the memoir-essay “A Meal of Solitude for a Restless Heart,” both available on this site.

For more about The Wizard Bakery, check out the trailer below.

Then, read “I Am a Communist“, a different graphic story on which Chang and Kim-Russell collaborated, about a man on the run between North and South Korea when the country was being divided. They write about what it was like to translate the story in an essay, also published in the magazine Words Without Borders.

Finally, check out a short comic about “wild times” in a translation workshop. Sora Kim-Russell wrote the story and artist Yerong drew the illustrations.

Watch a clip from a Korean experimental theater’s production of Kafe Limbo. In this scene, the Limbo members dissect a Roach, commenting on how small its brain is.

• • Watch the trailer for Dear Pyongyang, a documentary in which the director, Yang Yonghi, tries to find out why her father sent her three brothers to live in North Korea.

• Read Yu Miri’s novel Tokyo Ueno Station, a “deeply felt depiction of the lives of Japan’s most vulnerable people.” (Yu Miri, like Yang Yonghi, is a Japanese-born Korean person.)
• Read a review of Princess Bari, a myth-based novel about a young woman fleeing North Korea by Hwang Sok Yong.

Got 20 minutes? For answers to such questions as Who is a refugee? What can you do to help refugees? And what can you do to avoid becoming one?, watch Mohammed Elsaleh’s TEDx talk “The Refugee Crisis: Coming to a Doorstep Near You.”

Then, find out where immigrants to the U.S. come from in this interactive map.

You can see which countries take in the most refugees in “figures at a glance” from the United Nations’ Refugee Agency, and follow “the global flow of people” up to 2010 in this interactive chart published in Science magazine.

This last resource comes to us from the website of The Penguin Book of Migration Literature, edited by Dohra Ahmad. For more stories of leaving home and other resources, visit the website or read the book!

For the most recent news about migration, look through archives from The New Humanitarian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

For more videos, access the UN’s video archive.

“Every country has walls. The essence of a country is its walls, not what lies beyond them.”

Do you agree with this idea from “Tell Me Where to Go”? To get some perspective, read “When Is a Border Just a Border? Almost Never” from the New York Times.

Then, watch a trailer for Ay, Mariposa, a documentary about butterflies and the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Does it remind you of these lines from “Tell Me Where to Go”?

But people are animals, not plants. And animals never stay in the same place. It stands to reason that a cornered being will seek to broaden its territory.

For a short history of US-Mexico border issues, take a look at a seven-minute film explaining How Walls Ended Up Along the U.S.-Mexico Border from the New York Times.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2020, a Canadian court ruled that the U.S. is no longer a safe place for returning migrants, citing “cruel and unusual” conditions that place the U.S. outside “the norms of free and democratic societies.”

Get a sense of how this happened in the articles below, published in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Humanitarian:

• Sept. 2017: Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees
• June 2018: The Government Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families It Is Tearing Apart
• March 2019: U.S. Continues to Separate Migrant Families
• June 2020: At the US-Mexico Border, Asylum Chaos and Coronavirus Fear
• Oct. 2020: Trump Virtually Cuts Off Refugees as He Unleashes a Tirade on Immigrants
• Oct. 2020: ‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said

The narrator of “Tell Me . . .” asks:

Why hasn’t anyone invented a country for those who don’t belong anywhere?”

Many others have asked and tried to answer the same question:

• Read director Ava DuVernay’s thoughts on the imaginary land of Wakanda in her film Black Panther. She says that “Wakanda itself is a dream state . . . a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” Watch the trailer to get a sense of Wakanda.

• Look at a drawing of of La Tierra Nueva en Aztlán or The New Land in Aztlán, and read about its role in the Mexican American civil rights movement.
  

  

• Read about the Guaraní indigenous myth of the “Land Without Evil” and then read the contemporary poem “Serpent,” which possibly refers to this myth. (Guaranís are indigenous people living in what is now Paraguay and in neighboring countries.)
• Take a look at Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which imagines a Jewish homeland in Alaska.

Henry Spira. Wikimedia Commons, fair use

On his website, artist Kim Han-min captions an illustration from Kafe Limbo, entitled “Tomb,” with
this quote from the animal rights activist Henry Spira:

We identify with the powerless and the vulnerable, the victims, all those dominated, oppressed and exploited. And it is the non-human animals whose suffering is the most intense, widespread, expanding, systematic, and socially sanctioned of all.

Learn more about the life of Henry Spira, who led the first successful campaigns against medical testing on animals in the U.S., in his New York Times obituary.

On WWB Campus:

• A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee, a graphic memoir from Iran
• Garden of My Childhood, a story about a girl in a Korean family of war refugees (during the Korean War)
• Hunger, a memoir of fleeing the Iran-Iraq War for the U.S. as a teenager

Elsewhere:

• A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, about a boy who is displaced by war in Sudan
• A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea, which tells the story of a young woman who is forced to flee political unrest in Syria
• How Dare the Sun Rise, a memoir of a young woman’s life in a refugee camp and her immigration to the U.S.
• For more stories about seeking asylum, look through this PDF guide from the organization Hearts and Homes for Refugees (middle-grade books start on page 6, young adult and adult books start on page 11.)

**For Teaching Idea 1

In Words Without Borders:

• Scandorama: another graphic-fiction dystopia set in a futuristic Scandinavian country where “It’s almost impossible to get in, but getting kicked out is easy.”
• Death Fugue: a young man begins to see beneath the surface of a seeming utopia

Elsewhere:

• Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood; also a television series; the scene below shows a country welcoming an asylum-seeker from a fictional dystopia.

Defining Dystopias

• Find out the “blueprint for dystopia” in the TED-Ed video “How to recognize a dystopia“
• Read a detailed definition from the National Council of Teachers of English, or NCTE.

**For Teaching Idea 2