start here | Explore Korean Literature — Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

In 2018, when I was 18, I studied abroad in Seoul, South Korea through a government scholarship: the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y). Every weekday I woke up at 6 AM and prepared to commute two hours from Anyang, a satellite city, to Ewha Womans’ University in Seoul. Right before the campus, where a cluster of makeup stores and stalls selling tteokbokki lay nestled, were statues commemorating comfort women. Back then, I had no idea what I was looking at, but knew it was something of importance. I was in graduate school when I began returning back to these statues, which, by then, I knew depicted Korean comfort women from World War II. It was in a decolonization class my first semester of a master’s degree I began digging deeper into the subject of Japanese colonization in Korea, and after an independent study of literature from the period, I decided to turn this into my master’s thesis. For the thesis, I expanded the timeline from 1917 to 1961, as I wanted to e

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