Pachinko

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. This story is told from multiple perspectives, focusing on a multigenerational story that begins in 1910 and ends in 1989. What other novels can you think of that are told like this, and what themes do they explore across time?

Teaching Suggestion: As students brainstorm ideas, encourage them to think about how these stories move from person to person and how they can keep all the characters straight. Additionally, you can introduce the theme of a mother’s sacrifice by encouraging students to think about how gender roles may have changed over the course of a century.

• The Book Satchel has a list of 9 multigenerational stories, including Pachinko, while this list on Book Riot covering 100 generational and family novels can help students brainstorm.
• The Asia Society’s Center for Global Education published this article on women’s roles in Korea from the late 19th century to the present.

2. The New York Times Book Review wrote that, in Pachinko, “history itself is a character.” What other works of historical fiction can you think of? Was history a character in those?

Teaching Suggestion: Pachinko keeps a lot of the explicit political history in the background, but many of its characters struggle with the theme of being multiethnic in a monoethnic society because of the dual identities of being both Korean and Japanese. Use this as an opportunity to introduce this theme and the way that political changes can be seen in their effects on characters.

• The New York Times Book Review discusses history and the role it plays in Pachinko.
• The Asia Society’s Center for Global Education compiled this short history of Korea, which includes information about its colonization by Japan.

Short Activity

Choose a family member or family friend who might have been alive during a major world event (World War II, the Great Depression, or 9/11, for example) and conduct a short interview with that person, taking careful notes. Each student will have the opportunity to share one or two of their interviewee’s answers with the class.

Teaching Suggestion: The theme of a mother’s sacrifice is a reminder that many real-life stories like Sunja’s are often forgotten or left out of history, even though they were impacted by larger events happening at the same time. Encourage students to think about how stories are passed down. To inspire them in investigating and retelling a family story, choose an oral history from StoryCorps to share with them.

• The Association for Asian Studies includes a family tree for Sunja and Isak in this article by Todd Munson.
• Tri-County Technical College put together a list of resources on oral histories, including how to conduct interviews, best practices, and ethics.