The year is 1951. Lee Kyeong is a young woman trying to survive in Seoul with her mother, who has aged too quickly after the death of her husband and two sons. Kyeong works in a shop, selling handkerchiefs with hand-painted portraits to the GIs who swarm around the town. She falls in love with one of the painters, but their love is without hope. This graphic novel, adapted from the novel of the same name by Park Wan-Suh, is a beautiful love story set in a country destroyed by war and doomed by the insolence of the strangers who take advantage of the Korean woman. The drawings, all in black and white, convey the bleakness and hopelessness of that Korean period, but also the delicacy and tenderness of the love story being told. A wonderful book.
“Paint bottles strewn everywhere, palettes that were still wet, the smell of oil paints and turpentine… but one painting stood out from the clutter. It was a painting of a tree – a bare tree set against a wintry background, with two women on either side. One woman stood carrying a baby on her back and the other was striding away with a basket on her head. The scene lingered in my mind for a long time.”
