Difficulties in finding "Chinatown" (Penguin, 2025)

[Peter]

:
This Club's November 2025 book is Chinatown (2025), with special focus on the short-story "Chinatown." (The short-story is the 'titular' story of the collection.)

The international publisher Penguin released this as collection of several translated stories by Oh Jung Hee in July 2025 in the UK (later elsewhere). But it is titled, simply and unhelpfully, Chinatown.

It's puzzling that Penguin went with this one-word title (Chinatown), because many previous books even by the same author (!) have been published under the same name. This has led to confusion about which book this is, from many quarters. The 2025 book has a purple cover, which at least is distinctive.

There are also two different translations that have been published. The one we are reading is by translator Bruce Fulton. I've seen the other version, translated by Peggy Cho (2004), and it is holds up quite well.

With all kinds of different versions floating around and the Penguin-2025 edition not in stores in Korea until early November (we think), it may suffice if people at least can get a hold of any Fulton-translation of "Chinatown" at least.

The "Chinatown" story is absolutely not hard to find in some form. There are translations attributed to Bruce Fulton published in book form at least five times since 1989, the first appearing in Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers . One edition easy to find in Korea itself is the Asia Publishers 2012/13 version ("bilingual edition," Korean and English text face-to-face). That 2012 edition has a red cover and the author's face on it.

Anyone having any trouble finding a copy, get in touch.