First Advisor

Tony Wolk

Term of Graduation

Spring 2001

Date of Publication

4-26-2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Writing

Department

English

Language

English

Subjects

Americans -- Korea (South) -- Biography, Women -- Oregon -- Portland -- Biography, Margaret Jane Emerson

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, iii, 308 pages)

Abstract

Eyes of the Mirror is a memoir of transition. Chronologically, it begins with a kind of death in 1996 when the author was forty-eight. Exhausted and disillusioned, she ended her first life as a successful but financially struggling potter, writer, and T'ai Chi instructor. Over the course of twenty-four years, the strain of following a bliss that lay outside of the economy had worn her out. As a first step in the creation of a new life, she earned a certificate in teaching English and accepted a job in South Korea. After two harsh and challenging years there, she returned to the U.S. and chose to live in Portland-a thriving, solvent city-instead of the economically depressed Humboldt County, California where she had lived the last eleven years before Korea. In Portland she began preparing to change careers by training herself as a freelance copyeditor and enrolling in graduate school.

The narrative moves back and forth between the author's first year in Wonju, South Korea (summer 1996 through summer 1997) and her first year in Portland (fall 1998 through fall 1999).

Emerson's observations are a combination of looking inward and outward. Some of it is very personal, including delving into dreams, and some of it is commentary on the surrounding people and societies.

Living in Korea without the buffer of an English-speaking expatriate community afforded unvarnished insights into the everyday lives of ordinary people. The Portland material chronicles the author's contracting of diabetes in March 1999 and her attempts to regain her health.

The two years in two different locations mirror each other in many ways. The breakdown in the author's health is a reflection of the breakdown in her life. The physical and spiritual deprivations of the time in Korea are recapitulated in the wasting disease of diabetes. This is a story about losing one's self and then trying to find it again. It's about the transformative process of coming full circle.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44871

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