Draft:Ty Pak

In this Korean name, the family name is Pak.

Ty Pak
Ty Pak in Williamsburg, NY
Born	(1938-06-19) June 19, 1938 South Korea
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American (naturalized)
Education	Seoul National University (Juris Doctor) Bowling Green State University (Ph.D., English)
Notable works	Guilt Payment; Moonbay; Cry Korea Cry

Ty Pak

Ty Pak (born June 19, 1938) is a Korean American writer and former professor of English. He is best known for his short story collection Guilt Payment (1983). His works explore themes of identity, cultural conflict, and the immigrant experience.

Early Life and Education

Pak was born in Korea shortly before World War II. He experienced Japanese colonial rule, Korea’s liberation in 1945, the postwar division of the peninsula, and the Korean War during his early life. He earned a law degree from Seoul National University in 1961. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Bowling Green State University in 1969.

Career

After completing his law degree, Pak worked as a reporter for the English-language newspapers The Korean Republic and The Korea Times. In 1965, he emigrated to the United States, where he pursued graduate studies.

From 1970 to 1987, Pak taught in the Department of English at the University of Hawaii. He also authored the academic monograph ‘‘An Axiomatic Theory of Language: With Applications to English’’ as part of the Edward Sapir Monograph Series.

Books

• A Korean Decameron (1961; reprinted with a grant from Harvard University)
• Guilt Payment (Bamboo Ridge, 1983)
• Moonbay (The Woodhouse, 1999)
• Cry Korea Cry (The Woodhouse, 1999)
• The Polyglot: Union of Korea and Japan (KDP, 2022)
• The Pyre on the Crimean Bridge (KDP, 2023)

Short Fiction in Anthologies

Pak’s short fiction has appeared in various anthologies:

• A Fire, in Asian Pacific Literature (State of Hawaii Department of Education, 1981), pp. 443–450.
• The Court Interpreter, in L.A. Shorts, edited by Wanda Coleman (Heyday Books, 2000), pp. 239–257.
• The Water Tower, in Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction, edited by Heinz Insu Fenkl, (Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 186–208.
• Exile, in Honolulu Stories, edited by Frank Stewart, (Mutual Publishing, 2008), pp. 489–497.
• Guilt Payment, in Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now, edited by Ishmael Reed (Da Capo Press, 2009), pp. 319–329.

Critical Reception

Pak’s work has received attention in literary and cultural journals for its exploration of Korean and Korean American identity. Reviewing Guilt Payment in the Amerasia Journal, S.E. Solberg described the stories as “better than any others written by a Korean American,” highlighting Pak’s use of tightly structured plots and ironic twists to illuminate the trauma of war and displacement.

Publishers Weekly noted the “coolly unruffled prose” of Pak’s first-person narrators in Moonbay, praising the collection for its treatment of memory, migration, survival, and cultural pride.

Charene Luke of The Honolulu Advertiser called Cry Korea Cry a “sensitive portrayal of Korean Americans,” particularly the first generation of immigrants, and noted their idealism and the harsh realities they encounter in American life.

Peter Ong, writing in A. Magazine, praised the novel’s “astonishing vision and force,” describing it as a work that “succeeds in conveying how human lives become expendable in the sinister politics of war,” while emphasizing Pak’s “brutal honesty” in confronting human nature.

In a 2003 article titled "Ty Pak: Korean-American Literature as Guilt Payment" published in the Journal of the IAAS Conference, Kirsten Twelbeck of the University of Augsburg analyzes the short stories in Guilt Payment as case studies reflecting the psychological complexities of Korean American identity. She argues that Pak’s fiction engages with themes of dislocation, guilt, and belonging, situating his work within a broader discourse on diaspora and cultural negotiation. Twelbeck characterizes the stories as resonating with “the search for a home… a fictional site… for shifting identities… between assimilation and exile, between the ethnic and diasporic subject.”

In a 2005 article published in MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), King-Kok Cheung of UCLA offers an in-depth analysis of Pak’s story The Court Interpreter from Moonbay. Cheung describes the story as “both illuminating and troubling, especially in its depiction of the tension between blacks and Koreans,” situating it within the broader context of racial dynamics that contributed to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. She interprets the narrative as both a reflection of Aristotelian tragedy—where the protagonist is undone by his own hubris—and as a critique of racial division in American society. The story, she argues, underscores how structural mistrust among minorities facilitates the persistence of white dominance, as captured in the narrator’s observation that “this was the secret of white success in the US. By default, because the minorities could not trust each other.”

Paul H. Sharar of New York University reviewed The Polyglot: Union of Korea and Japan in the Korean New York Daily on June 22, 2018, coinciding with the start of a two-year bilingual serialization of the novel in the newspaper. Sharar described the novel as having a “salient and imaginative story line” with “clearly drawn characters placed in a revealing history.” He noted the subtitle, Union of Korea and Japan, as a prompt to “think beyond regional geopolitical expedients and look once again at the possibilities for our global community to bring nations, languages, and cultures together,” concluding, “If Koreans and Japanese with their deep historical resentments will try, so might the rest of the world.”

Later Activities

Pak maintains a blog, typakmusings.net, where he publishes commentary on politics, culture, and global issues.

Pak has self-published several politically themed books, including:

• Big Bang of the World Federation: A Sequel to The Pyre on the Crimean Bridge (2023)
• Lucy Wong, the Guardian Angel for the USW: United States of the World (2024)
• A Petition to Supreme Leader of North Korea Jongeun Kim: The Movie Script (2024)
• Korea, the Cradle of Civilization (2025)

Personal Life

Pak resides in Norwood, New Jersey. He is married and has three children and seven grandchildren.