Yun Soon-ok
Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
Yun Soon-ok is Min-ho's mother: ninety, small, neat and still upright, and the grandmother of the family Seo-yeon married into. She prays at dawn with the elders' mothers and comes home from it softened, and her room is the one place in a busy, careful household where anything is plainly felt. She notices more than she says, takes a quiet reading of a tired face across the breakfast table, and now and then lets slip a fragment of a childhood lived under the colonial occupation, eighty years gone. Nobody in the house quite has time to listen.