Apr 19, 2010 | Writing
KAMPONG LUONG, Cambodia — Residents of this “floating village,” a spine of stilted shacks and huts crammed atop a tributary of the Mekong River, depend on the water below them for cooking, bathing and gathering fish for meals. Too bad they defecate in that water — a...
Feb 25, 2010 | Writing
Many Americans may remember peering at a famous satellite photograph of the two Koreas – prosperous South Korea lit up by cities and commerce, juxtaposed with the eerie black void of North Korea. The image has become an icon, and at times a cliché, of the disastrous...
Feb 17, 2010 | Writing
Seoul, South Korea — For the thousands of North Korean defectors living in hardship around the world, champion boxer Choi Hyun-mi has become their Mohammad Ali. The young woman who fled from North Korea has become one of South Korea’s most revered faces since winning...
Feb 16, 2010 | Writing
Seoul, South Korea — On a Korean War battlefield in 1950, the young, patriotic Kim Chin-kyung, then just 15, lay limp on the ground, wounded by shrapnel. In the months leading up to that moment, nearly all of the 800 troops in his South Korean Army unit had been wiped...
Jan 1, 2010 | Writing
Anh Nguyen Khanh, a motorbike driver in the mountains outside Da Nang, a city in southern Vietnam, is only fifty-three, but he looks much older. His fourteen-year-old son was born with severe spina bifida and cannot walk; his seventeen-year-old daughter has Downs...
Dec 16, 2009 | Writing
Phnom Penh, Cambodia — • A local, slice-of-life story from Monitor correspondents. Just before the communist Khmer Rouge marched into the capital in 1975, Tea Lim Koun, the director of the classic Cambodian film “The Snake Man” (1972), escaped bloodshed by fleeing to...
