Svět podle Sison – Čong Serang (2025)

The heroine of the historical novel Sim Sison loses her family under tragic circumstances and manages to escape to the United States. There, however, she is abused by a German painter and, after many trials, returns to the divided peninsula. She dedicates her life to education and women's activism. She leaves behind an extended family and an unusual wish – that after her death, her descendants do not hold the traditional Confucian ceremony to honor their ancestors. However, ten years after Sison's death, her eldest daughter decides to gather the whole family in Hawaii, where Sison once briefly stayed, to perform the ceremony for her. Sison represents a representative of the post-war generation of Korean women who chose the risky path of leaving a war-torn country – emigration on their own. Their life experiences often conflicted with traditional morality, making it difficult for them to reintegrate into society. Women's activism receives a new historical framework through Sison, transcending the borders of the Republic of Korea: much remains unspoken, yet individual threads begin to weave into a fabric. The novel has been compared to the bestseller Pachinko (Czech 2019) – however, unlike this work, The World According to Sison does not utilize romanticized fabrication but adheres to a realistic, almost documentary form.