SEOUL, South Korea — In his bag, Park Jae Dong always carries a fine-point ink brush. The mellow, aging artist speaks in few words, preferring to communicate through Korean cartoons, or manhwa, which have gained such popularity across Asia in recent years. When his...

DANANG, Vietnam — At 46, each year of misery seems to have etched new wrinkles around Tran Thanh Dung’s angry gaze. When he was child in the early 1970s, Tran says he witnessed U.S. soldiers shoot his parents — both of whom were communist Viet Cong soldiers during the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...