Tag: memoirs

Filterworld

If I find myself somewhere bored and bereft of a book, I like to dig back through my TBR and find something I can get as an ebook from one of my libraries. This is how I came to be sitting in my favorite neighborhood haunt, drinking a beer and reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld. In brief, Filterworld is a snappy history of how recommender algorithms have come to shape our Internet, and our broader cultural, experience. It covers a lot of the same territory as Chokepoint Capitalism, though with less pissed-off creator-side rage in favor of a more anxious user-side perspective. “Do I actually like the things I like?” is Chayka’s recurring question.

Chayka’s proposed solution to The Algorithms, to the extent it is a workable solution (and to the extent he even calls it a solution), is to slow down our focus:

If there is a simple answer to breaking down Filterworld, then it might be something like a version of the slow food movement, as it was popularized in the 1990s, but for culture…We need to bring that same understanding of sustainability and specificity to the way that we consume and support culture online, too. Resistance to algorithmic frictionless requires an act of willpower, a choice to move through the world in a different way. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic one.

He then gives the example of visiting a local cafe that he’s always passed but never visited because he didn’t find it appealing; in his own words, it wasn’t “Instagrammable”:

I felt both bemused and sad that this was a rare experience, something like visiting a museum. Our phones and feeds absorb so much of our attention and dominate so many of our preferences that stepping out of their conveniently predetermined paths and choosing an experience not immediately engaging feels somewhat radical. This applies to fashion choices as well as food, which television shows we watch, which books we read, which furniture we buy, where we travel. If we shift our priorities away from the space of algorithmic digital platforms and once more to the physical world, in which everything is not instantly evaluated in terms of engagement, we might find ourselves building not only better culture but better communities, relationships, and politics as well.

I’m cutting to the chase partly because that’s what struck me most about the book. Chayka is describing an experience that I know a lot of people have, and yet that I don’t (not entirely). I only begrudgingly acquired a Twitter as a means of freelance self-promotion, but never became hooked on the platform and stopped Tweeting as soon as I no longer needed to promote myself. I’ve never used Spotify as my primary music library or my means of discovering new music. My partner periodically subscribes to Netflix, and we’ve been known to occasionally bingewatch particular series or short docuseries, but the last one was An American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders back in 2024. I never rely on Yelp or similar to find cafes, or online travel agencies to plan my international vacations. I post to Instagram but am not really invested in comments or hearts or followers. Only posts, no reels, maybe the occasional story. Admittedly, I can get sucked into watching a comedy reel about Philly if the feed finds me in a moment of weakness, but I have no desire to follow those accounts. I do not, and will never, have TikTok. The only thing I will cop to is a YouTube history that is probably wildly schizophrenic, since I use it for background music while I’m working and my tastes run from symphonic to techno to “this song popped into my head when I woke up and now I need to listen to it on repeat all morning or I won’t get any work done.”* And while I never sign into my Google account on either of my work computers, I’m sure that nonetheless the algos have managed to connect my legal person to those dozens, possibly hundred or so plays of “Takin’ Care of Business” that one day last February.

Every time Chayka observed his algorithmic behavior or reactions in a state of what I’d call “vaguely befuddled despair,” I couldn’t help but think, “But you could just…not.” So in the end, when his solution is to, indeed, “just…not,” I didn’t find it much of a revelation.

Chayka has an art history background, so it’s no surprise that what I found most compelling (and what he spends the most time on) is how once again the medium has shaped the message: “BookTok” and the proliferation of autofiction in literary bestsellers, the lack of key changes in pop music, art exhibits so specifically designed for Instagram selfies that they become meaningless otherwise. Chokepoint Capitalism outlines the structural inequities of such recommender systems, but Filterworld also reminds us that they’re also having direct influence on the culture itself—one that exists for all of us, regardless of whether any given one of us subscribes to Spotify, Netflix, etc.

It with immense satisfaction, then, that I can wrap up this post by pointing out that the algorithms weren’t the ones to bring me to this book. A guest on a podcast recommended it; that podcast in turn had been recommended to me by a friend. It was human connections all the way through, made specifically and deliberately by people to make a point. The podcast guest was on to talk about social media generally, and felt it relevant to mention; my friend recommended the podcast because the show often touches on things that he knew we both were interested in. I think Chayka would be happy to hear that.

* Here I have to say that I’m grateful to Chayka for highlighting the streaming service Idagio as a better alternative than Spotify for classical music. The platform detects and counts plays differently, using calculations more appropriate for longer classical pieces than three-minute pop hits, and recommendations are picked by human experts with care and deliberation rather than statistically driven recommenders. I might go ahead and subscribe once I’m back from vacation, since this post is going live while I’m at a cabin in Kiruna.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger,  the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?

 

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.

The House of the Dead

As a rule I generally pack light for my vacations, but this is always in favor of bringing too many books. The prospect of long hours of travel always inspires me to bring a selection, so that if my mood or attention span should shift, I’m more likely to have something suitable on hand. Plus there’s just the fact that I never want to feel like I “only” have one thing to read. Yes, there is Kindle (or the Kindle app, in my case) but sometimes phone battery is at a premium. Inevitably, then, I travel with at least two or three paperbacks, ideally ones without sentimental value so I can leave them behind (to make room for new books). Only sometimes, against my better judgment, do I bring library books or hardbacks that I was desperate to finish at that particular moment.

Nor can these books be just any random unread book off the shelf, either. A mysterious quality guides my hand, the “vibes” if you will. This is how I choose most things, actually—I have to bask in the collective presence of the options and contemplate them until one suddenly just feels right. The decision cannot be rushed or rationalized. Ice cream parlors with miles and miles of flavors were agony for me as a child (and no doubt for the parent accompanying me).

All of that preamble is to say that I can’t for the life of me explain why I chucked Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead into my bag beyond “the vibes.” Crime and Punishment was one of my favorite books out of my entire high school English career and afterwards I set about acquiring, but never actually reading, other works by Dostoyevsky. The next book of his that I read to completion was The Idiot last January—some twenty years later, in other words.

Where I struggled with The Idiot, I deeply enjoyed The House of the Dead. The character studies are more penetrating, more engaging, more revealing. The back of my Dover Thrift edition (ah, yes, Constance Garnett, my old friend!) describes the book as a “semi-autobiographical memoir,” which I take to mean as more or less true. The introduction purporting to be “oh look at these notes I just happened to find among a dead man’s papers” seems to be the plausible deniability cover-your-ass gloss of fiction over the rest of what’s to come.

The various prison personalities are interesting enough that you can overlook the lack of overarching plot or conflict. The narrator relates various observations that roughly correspond to a year, from winter to summer to winter again. Not really a strict chronological year, as such; it’s maybe akin to a thematic grouping, with several summers or winters collapsed into one, with a substantial chunk of time elided: Dostoyevsky himself served four years at a prison camp, and the self-insert narrator (Alexandr Petrovich) claims to have served ten. Petrovich acknowledges this gap and explains that he was the most observant and inquisitive during his first few months at the prison, so those memories are the strongest.

Since The House of the Dead is set in a Siberian prison camp, certain comparisons spring to mind. Not only Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the portraits of the various inmates reminded me a lot of Homeboy. Enough that I might send my Homeboy book buddy a copy of The House of the Dead. Preferably a newer translation than Garnett’s, though. Several have been put out since then, including Pevear & Volokhonsky! My own copy is now residing on the shelves of Što čitaš? in Zagreb, where it will hopefully find a second life.

Wind, Sand and Stars

When I first read Le petit prince, I was in my author-obsessive phase and so immediately decided to find other books by de Saint-Exupéry. The high school library had Wind, Sand and Stars and I gave it a shot, but for one reason or another didn’t get more than a couple pages in before I gave up.

Then, last year on a trip back home, I saw a beat-up old copy at the Little Free Library someone had established on the porch of the post office. Why not try again? I picked it up, along with one or two others, and took them back to Sweden with me.

Now, a year later, I read it! Halfway through the year and this was the first book to qualify for my physical library quota. Oops.

I’m in the process of comparing the translation to the French original (which my local library happened to carry, hooray!). I’m not sure if substantial changes were made for the English translation, or if there are multiple editions available, because there are ten chapters in English and only eight in French, and I’m not sure that all eight of the French are even part of the English. As of writing I sat down and started re-reading one of the chapters that appears in both books, and even between those there are substantial differences. Whole paragraphs appear in the English that are nowhere to be seen in the French. Did Lewis Galantière take huge liberties with his translation? Was the French revised from one edition to the next? Unfortunately at the time of writing I’m practically on my way out the door so I’ll have to leave that question for another time.

As it exists in English, Wind, Sand and Stars doesn’t hit in the same way that Le petit prince does. There’s plenty of adventure and lyricism about the act of flying, the psychology of being a pilot…but there’s also plenty of French imperialism. You can expect or write off certain things as being “of their time” (and the original French came out in 1939), but when you have in your head the sensitivity, curiosity, and nuance of Le petit prince, it’s a bit of a shock to stumble across de Saint-Exupéry’s complete lack of interest in the Bedouins he describes—of its time or otherwise. To the extent he gives them any thought at all, it’s not much more than stereotype; French superiority isn’t ever stated outright but it’s there as background radiation.

That’s the only fly in the ointment, but unfortunately it’s a pretty big one. Big enough to chuck the book into the memory hole? No, of course not. But certainly big enough to detract from the magic of the rest of the book—including the near-fatal crash in the Sahara that led, years later, to Le petit prince, where de Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic were rescued from certain death by a passing Bedouin.

The Dragon’s Village

Numbers are hard. I realized sometime in November that I had miscounted my progress in my “ten books I already own” goal and began scouring my shelves for something short that I could knock out.

Enter the dragon. Or technically: YuanTsung Chen’s The Dragon’s Village.

This is yet another stop on the “selections of bookstores past” tour: I picked it up from What The Book? in Seoul in its glory days, at the airy and well-lit second-floor location overlooking Itaewon-ro. Pour one out. Press F to pay respects.

An image of What The Book's old storefront on Itaewon-ro.
From Derek Versus Lonely Planet

In my mind’s eye, I can still see the shelf where I picked it up, and I can remember that my decision to buy it was because I knew nothing about Chinese history generally, recent or otherwise, and that reading about the land reform and the Great Leap Forward seemed like it would be a good self-improvement project.

It just took a while!

The Dragon’s Village languished unread in my library for over a decade. I started a couple times but couldn’t get into it. Now with my arbitrary deadline looming, I got to work and pushed through my initial resistance to finish the book.

The setting is 1949 China. The 17-year-old narrator, Guan Ling-ling, joins a revolutionary theater group and is sent to the remote village of Longxiang in northwest China to help carry out the land reform. The Dragon’s Village follows her trials and tribulations as she works alongside party cadres and sympathetic villagers to establish what they hope will be a better, more just, more equitable world. Chen frankly describes the misery of peasant life and the bleakness of the landscape, setting the context for why—at least in certain regions—the promise of land and wealth redistribution could gain the foothold it did. She also bluntly chronicles the obstacles and setbacks she and the other party cadres face, and equally sets the context for why the redistribution plans didn’t gain even more of a foothold. Through the novel we become witness to a pivotal moment in time, full of potential, when things might still have been otherwise but yet were not. It ends before anything has truly been settled, on a note of optimism and hope that still carries the weight of historical inevitably, as Ling-ling is speaking to an elderly and utterly destitute village woman:

“Da Niang, come. Come and get your land. It’s time.”

Chen’s style is hard to enjoy for its own sake, and even when I was deep into the story I was reading on despite the prose, not because of it; at best it didn’t get in the way. As far as I can tell, Chen wrote the novel in English, so there’s not a matter of translation at play here (officially, anyway). The phrase I kept thinking of to describe her style was “flat affect,” where the emotional tenor is always subdued almost the point of nonexistence. The other thing that put me off at first, but gets better as the novel progresses (mostly because people just talk less), is the tendency for characters to infodump during dialogue in a way that doesn’t sound like how anyone would actually talk.

Chen is very clear that this is a novel that draws from real life. “The story is fiction, but it is true,” is how she describes it in the foreword: a roman à clef. How real are the peasants we read about? How have their stories been refined, joined together, teased apart to become the people that Ling-ling meets? While the specific character we read about known as “the virgin widow” might not have a one-to-one correspondence with a single person who lived and died on this earth, the circumstances of her life were no doubt real for countless women. As an amalgamation of their biographies, the fictional virgin widow becomes true.

Or, maybe, in this case Chen drew on one very specific person she met in her land reform experience. Who knows!

This kind of blurred line, or overlap, between fiction and true didn’t bother me as much as it did in, say, Ali Smith’s Summer. Actually, it didn’t bother me at all. The Dragon’s Village is a novel but it reads more like a documentary or a diary of historical experiences and events, while Summer is a fictional plot specifically crafted to deliver a rhetorical (dare I say political?) point. “Based on a true story” is a lot easier to swallow if what follows at least gives the appearance of neutral documentation rather than rhetorical posturing.

(The more I reflect on Summer, it seems like the less I like it. Ouch.)

Of course, as an account of one of the major global political events of the twentieth century, The Dragon’s Village can’t really be read non-politically. I don’t know the background to the novel’s publication, or the waters Chen had to navigate to get it published, but I have to assume it was tricky. Ling-ling is presented as an idealist who believes in the revolution and who wants to help the people she sees living in abject poverty, but she also clearly distances herself from the extremes of Maoist cult of personality. At one point she is distressed to see that her elderly hostess Da Niang has replaced an image of the kitchen god on the wall with an image of Chairman Mao. Not because Ling-ling has any allegiance to the folk traditions encompassing the kitchen god—she considers them all superstitions—but because she is wary of what the single-minded adulation of Chairman Mao might lead to.

Zao Jun - The Kitchen God
I went and Googled “Chinese kitchen god” so you don’t have to.

The story is fiction, but it is true. Does this moment in the book reflect an exchange or insight Chen had in the moment? Was it a flourish she was encouraged to add to a novel that might otherwise land as not hostile enough to Maoism?

Chen’s other books also seem to be largely autobiographical (The Secret Listener and Return to the Middle Kingdom), and with The Secret Listener (published in 2021!) the criticism leveraged against her seems to be based in this blending of fact and fiction. I want to have something intelligent to say here about who is criticizing her for what and what any given audience expects out of an account of Maoist China but I’m fresh out of brain. An interview with the New York Times only vaguely mentions that it’s men calling her a “fabulist,” but no names or further details are given, and I’m too tired to research. As it stands, for me The Dragon’s Village is a valuable primary-ish source for a very singular moment in history. When I decided to really sit down and finish the book, I assumed I would toss it on the giveaway pile afterwards. But there is something about it that I want to keep in my library. Warning? Reminder? Enigma?

All three?

Soul Mountain

I picked up Gao Xingjiang’s doorstopper from the “leave a book, take a book” library at a hostel in Beijing in 2010. After a couple of half-hearted starts, I finally read it in 2024.

One more for the reading stats!

I liked the pointlessness of it all, how Soul Mountain is basically a collection of stuff without much of a structure and no plot to speak of. I liked the split of “I”/”you” perspectives, I liked a lot of the descriptions of the landscapes. It’s the kind of book I can easily return to again and again: there’s so much rich imagery, reflections, descriptions to get lost in, without having to keep all the threads of plot or character relationships straight because there are none!

I clearly tilt towards books that are thinky thoughts interspersed with nature and travel writing.

What I liked less was how Gao can’t seem to get beyond objectifying women any time they turn up. Either the male narrator (text makes it very clear that “I” and “you” are both men, so even with death of the author etc. I’m comfortable slotting this into “problems of the male gaze”) finds a woman attractive but childish or otherwise laughable, or he finds her unattractive and morally repugnant. Regardless, her sex appeal or lack thereof never goes unremarked. A recurring “she” who is part of the “you” chapters gets this the worst: she starts out as attractive and charming, but as things progress she turns more and more impulsive, childish, and petulant.

Who hurt you, Gao?

I would love to know how translator Mabel Lee felt about those moments in the text, how she thought about translating them, if she thought about them at all. I wonder if women in Gao’s other work fare any better than they do in Soul Mountain.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Following hot on the heels of Mumbo Jumbo, the next entry on the list of “books I feel like should have been on my literary curriculum but never were” is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart’s intense…novella? multi-part prose poem?…regarding her long-term affair with poet George Barker. Did I know that when I grabbed it at random off the library shelf? Absolutely not. Did I think for a minute that the Elizabeth Smart of my own growing-up had written a novel with a title off a prog rock album? Shamefully, yes, but I was disabused of this notion as soon as I read the back of the book. Considering its light weight and my impending vacation, I figured this was a good contender for a back up English book to have with me and checked it out alongside Ali Smith’s Summer.

The comparison that immediately springs to mind is Requiem över en förlorad stad and Cold Nights of Childhood. We have a nameless woman wandering through the locations of her own memories, though the narrator seems more chronologically bound in Grand Central Station than in either of the other two. While highly surreal throughout, you can still trace a narrative thread that begins with meeting Barker in person, continues through the consummated affair and subsequent periods of separation until it ends sometime after the birth of the narrator’s child, all of which is rendered in evocative and startling metaphor. This will undoubtedly be a re-read for me at some point in the near future, though with my own copy that I can safely mark up and read at my leisure.

I Have Come on a Lonely Path

Seo Choi has put out multiple successful Kickstarter projects, including several books, that highlight various aspects of traditional Korean spiritual practices. The latest one that just went to print was Keum-Hwa Kim’s I Have Come on a Lonely Path: Memoir of a Shaman. (Original Korean: 비단꽃 넘세)

According to Choi’s initial Kickstarter description, the original edition of I Have Come on a Lonely Path published in 2007 was popular enough to be made into a movie, but fell into obscurity (or maybe just “hard to obtain” territory) when the publisher went out of business in 2011. An American friend of Choi’s happened to have a copy and gave it to Choi, who has made it available for the first time in English through her micropublishing company Alpha Sisters. I supported the Kickstarter at the ebook tier and received my copy back in April.

Seo Choi’s copy of the original Korean edition. Read more at the Kickstarter page.

The book isn’t especially long; I read the entire thing on commutes, lunch breaks, and waiting for friends at bars. The chapters are relatively short so you can dip in and out as you have time. Peace Pyunghwa Lee’s translation is excellent, with plenty of explanatory footnotes for historical context and specific cultural or technical terminology—the names of items of clothing, food, or particular rituals and so on.

Through Lee’s translation, Kim presents her story directly, without needless digressions or flowery ornamentation. The introduction to I Have Come on a Lonely Path includes a content warning for “domestic abuse, physical violence, war, mental illness, suicide, poverty, police brutality, and discrimination” but the depictions thereof were rather plain and brief. I’ve read much more unsettling accounts, in fiction as well as non-fiction. Through it all, Kim remains humble, compassionate and empathetic. We follow her from her birth in 1931 in what later became North Korea, through early poverty and her shamanic initiation as a teenager, to her middle years living on the fringes of society in South Korea, until the latter stage of her life as a recognized carrier of intangible cultural property (the Seohaean baeyeonsingut) with performances in the US and on live South Korean television, a feature-length biopic, and the founding of her shrine on Ganghwa-do. She speaks frankly of these accomplishments without any sense of self-aggrandizement, maybe because the struggles of her early years kept her humble. First and foremost for Kim is the preservation of a tradition and living a life of service; those honors seem to be more about that preservation and service than about herself. She also lived through interesting times, as the expression goes. We don’t get any commentary on the titans of twentieth century Korean  history here, however. Kim only mentions events directly impacting her or her clients. This is mostly in the form of ill-tempered Japanese officials or South Korean discrimination against North Koreans, but to my embarrassment her story was also the first I’d heard of the New Village Movement.

In light of the New Village Movement, particularly the less savory aspects that bring to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution, translation projects like I Have Come on a Lonely Path are important for maintaining the traditions and integrity of a culture. The thought struck me sometime afterwards that in some ways it’s comparable to the translation movement in Arabic that preserved so many manuscripts in Greek and Latin for scholars in Medieval Europe to rediscover and to include in the early years of the European academic tradition. Sometimes knowledge, ideas, and stories need to drift from one language or culture to another to ensure their own longevity. Power consolidation, especially within the structure of colonialism, is often based on rendering these ideas forgotten.

Overall this was a quick and fascinating read, at least for any Koreaboo (such as myself) curious about Korean folklore and traditions. The English edition includes an afterword from Kim’s niece, who continues in the same shamanic tradition (she is Kim’s “spirit daughter”—mentee—in addition to being her brother’s daughter) and currently maintains the shrine Kim established on Ganghwa-do. If it’s not your bag, it’s not your bag, but in the informal itinerary I’m building for my next trip to Korea I just added Incheon and Ganghwa-do.