When a Rooster Crows at Night: A Child's Experience of the Korean War

by Therese Park

One night in June 1950, nine-year-old Jong-ah's rooster crows for no apparent reason. In her horror, she discovers the next morning that her mother has served up the bird as breakfast soup, for in Korea, a rooster crowing at night is a bad omen. Later that day the news of North Korea's surprise attack on the South reaches her hometown Pusan. Through the eyes of a young, inquisitive protagonist, the novel follows the three-year-long war that devours half of South Korea, billions of American dollars, and more than a million lives, including 54,000 Americans. As the story weaves through the narrator's comfortable home in Pusan to the mountains shrouded in Buddhist mysticism and then to the island of Cheju, where she becomes a temporary orphan, readers not only feel for the people in a war-raging country, but also hear a child's lively voice capturing the humor and mystery of everyday life.

196 pages, Paperback

First published February 16, 2004

About the author

Therese Park came to the United States to be a cellist with the Kansas City Philharmonic (now the Kansas City Symphony) in 1966. After 30 years, she retired and began writing. Her first novel A Gift of the Emperor (published in 1997) is about a Korean schoolgirl forced into military prostitution by the Japanese government during World War II. With this book, Park was one of the featured authors at three national bookfairs in 1998: The Los Angeles Bookfair, The Miami Bookfair, The Heartland Bookfair. A Gift of the Emperor was selected in the reference volumes Reading Groups Choices for 1998 and she was mentioned in Contemporary Authors 2001. Her second novel: "When a Rooster Crows at Night" is based on her own experience of the Korean War she lived through as a child. Her third "The Northern Wind: a Forced Journey to North Korea" deals with intense inner war between the two Koreas divided by two extreme ideologies--Communism and Capitalism after WWII.

Her recently published "Returned and Reborn: a Tale of a Korean Orphan Boy" published by Austin Macauley Publishers, LLC. in New York, NY.

Park has written more than 400 essays and articles that have been published in The Kansas City Star, The Sun Publication, The Graybeard, the National Korean War Veterans Magazine, The Best Times, and Our Family (Canada), The Beat Magazine and Korea Bridge (South Korea) and more.