By: Choe Sang-Hun
SEOUL, South Korea
LIKE so many South Korean parents at the time, Shin Kyung-sook’s mother saw education as her daughter’s best chance of escaping poverty and backbreaking work in the rice fields. So in 1978 she took her 15-year-old daughter to Seoul, where Ms. Shin would lie about her age to get a factory job while attending high school at night to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.
Seoul-bound trains at the time, like the one mother and daughter boarded that night, picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way — part of the migration that fueled South Korea’s industrialization but forever changed its traditional family life.
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