In Home was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family, Connie Kang, a Korean-American reporter for The Los Angeles Times, skillfully blends the life stories of the Kang clan with the narratives of the turbulent political history of her native Korea from the turn of the century to 1994. Chapters 1 through 4 focus on the life stories of her "uncommon ancestors" living in what is now North Korea. The stories read like a historical novel, for Kang deftly interweaves then with the background narratives of the major political events of twentieth-century Korea up to 1950. The book continues with Kang's transnational migratory journies that began in 1951 when she was eight: riding with her mother on the rooftop of the last train for Pusan as refugees of the Korean War; crossing the sea illegally with her mother from Pusan to Tokyo to join her father; relocating with the family to Okinawa where she spent three adolescent years before going to the United States to study journalism; returning to Korea to start an independent life as a newspaperwoman and university professor; and immigrating to the United States as a consequence of her "international marriage" to an Anglo-American journalist.

(Adapted from my review of this book in the
Journal of Asian Studies, 55,[4]: 1019-1020, 1996.)