The compelling story of Mike and Songhi, an American GI and a young Korean woman, is recreated in Seasons in the Kingdom with haunting authenticity. The insightful and evocative portrayal of their intimate relationship is skillfully contrasted with detail evoking the banality of military camp life at a small American outpost, the Ascom City Confinement Facility of 1973-74. Surrounded by the uncomp
romising world of human struggle that was the camptown village, itself a cauldron of hope and despair, unwavering descriptions of village life reveal the shadowed world that generations of young American men knew and still remember, merging history and fiction into a memorably poignant love story. Revealing descriptions of the lives of young Korean women demonstrates with great sympathy the transformation of their hopes and dreams while shackled by economic and social bo***ge, victims of their own poverty and the economic weight of America. Deceit, betrayal, prostitution, racism, violence, are intertwined in this absorbing narrative of camptown society. Extraordinarily beautiful and detailed "word paintings" of the land and its people form the background of this drama, rounding out this unforgettable book, which resonates with the experiences of hundreds of thousands of US service men and the Koreans who knew them.
