Umma's Table
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
The joy of food and tradition brings a family together
Translated by Janet Hong
Madang is an artist and new father who moves to a quiet home in the countryside with his wife and young baby, excited to build a new life full of hope and joy, complete with a garden and even snow. But soon reality sets in and his attention is divided between his growing happy family and his impoverished parents back in Seoul in a dingy basement apartment. With an ailing mother in and out of the hospital and an alcoholic father, Madang struggles to overcome the exhaustion and frustration of trying to be everything all at once: a good son, devoted father, and loving husband.
To cope, he finds himself reminiscing about their family meals together, and particularly his mother's kimchi, a traditional dish that is prepared by the family and requires months of fermentation Memories of his mother's glorious cooking—so good it would prompt a young Madang and his brother into song—soothe the family. With her impending death, Madang races to learn her recipes and bring together the three generations at the family table while it's still possible. A beautiful and thoughtful meditation on how the kitchen and communal cooking—both past, present and future—bind a family together amidst the inevitable.
Umma’s Table is translated by Janet Hong, a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the 16th LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was a finalist for both the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award. She has translated Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold, Ancco’s Bad Friends, and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this mature and nuanced follow-up to Hong's graphic memoir Uncomfortably Happy, the artist and his wife are still living a poor but mostly contented life in the South Korean countryside. They now have a baby, Iwan, and Hong imagines the home they've built together as a tiny, idyllic private planet; all the characters are represented as cartoon cats. But the larger world intrudes in the form of Hong's aging parents, who share a grim basement apartment in Seoul and are starting to require constant care. Having worked hard to escape his father's alcoholic abuse and his mother's depression, Hong feels that "only beyond my parents' reach is my world free to grow." But he comes to appreciate how the work he does to support his wife and child cooking, gardening, raising chickens, making kimchi for the winter grows from an urge to nurture passed down from his mother. "Almost every memory I have of my mother begins with her cooking," he reflects, and food provides a link between Hong's two worlds. In Hong's cheerful drawings, the countryside bursts with life, and his culinary escapades are a jubilant theatrical sequence. But even as the narrative grows darker, the simple, friendly art remains surprisingly effective. This moving story about being both a parent and a child represents a creative leap forward for one of Korea's up and coming contemporary comic artists.