Finalist for the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Awards

Selected As One of the Best Books about Asia published in 1998 by The Asia Pacific Media Network  

"You see the simple afternoon light that long ago shone on your mother’s hand and give it a ghostly soul.  Here and there, you stumble onto secrets although they were not secrets at the time..."
 

About the book:

HOUSE OF THE WINDS, set in the 60s and 70s of Korea, is a portrait of a Korean family and especially its women whose lives have been deeply affected by its tumultuous history: the thirty-six years of Japanese rule and the Korean War. The narrator is a girl, the youngest of three children, who observes the world around her with a keen understanding of and deep sympathy toward her family of sad women. It is a world full of historical, mythical and ghostly implications where voiceless women roam.

The narrator is our guide through a world in which even birds cry instead of sing (“Everything cried and cried beautifully in Korea”). An American electric iron is so powerful it sets off a coup d’etat.  Grandfather dies with a crab-apple in his mouth.

Mia Yun invites her readers into the “folds of history” where Korean women, the descendants of the she-bear woman and the son of the king of heaven, live... “laughing, wailing, spirit-cajoling, poetry-writing, tear-hiding, bosom-bracing, scheming, fire-breathing.”

 

Reviews of House of the Winds 

Excerpts from House of the Winds

Writer's Notes