Ty Pak (born Tae-Yong Pak in 1938) is a writer and speaker on Korean/Asian American affairs and literature.
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, receiving his law degree from Seoul National University in 1961. In 1957 he started working as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes, and in 1958 for the Korean English dailies The Korean Republic and The Korea Times, until 1965 when 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 Hawaiʻi from 1970 to 1987. His first collection of short stories, Guilt Payment (1983), has been used as a textbook at many US colleges. His other books include Moonbay (1999), in the UCLA English syllabus, Cry Korea Cry (1999), A Korean Decameron (1961, reissued 2019), Dear Daughter: On the Eve of Her Wedding (2018), The Polyglot: Union of Korea and Japan (2018), serialized in English and Korean by the Korean New York Ilbo Daily from Jun 1, 2019 through Jun 5, 2021, The SEE Creed: Sex Equality and Emancipation (2021), which champions the matronymic surnaming of children to alternate with the patronymic, The Global Federalist Manifesto (2021), a pamphlet urging all sovereign states to surrender their sovereignty, a toxic relic, to the United States of the World, and Lucy Wong, the Guardian Angel for the USW: United States of the World (2022), a novella where Lucy Wong turns out to be Xi Jinping's daughter.
Reviews
In a review of Guilt Payment (Amerasia Journal (1984), pages 160-162) S. E. Solberg, University of Washington, praises Pak's stories which, "better than any others written by a Korean American," 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 study, (Mis)interpretations and (In)justice: The 1992 Los Angeles "Riots" and "Black-Korean Conflict, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), Oxford Journals, Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2005, pages 3-40, on an extensive analysis of Ty Pak's “The Court Interpreter” in Moonbay, 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)