In Their Own Words

A free online e-book (available at http://www.andycrown.net), Adoration of the Korea is a short story collection consisting of seven stories and novellas, each of which is set in South Korea in the 1990s and investigates the intricacies--humorous, dark, and beautiful--of cross-cultural relationships between American and other expatriate English teachers and their adult South Korean students. Moonstruck students relentlessly pursue their teachers as often as these teachers, repentant and shameless alike, pursue their students.

Love is sometimes strong enough to surmount formidable barriers to mutual understanding and lasting happiness as the characters in the stories are forced to come to terms with culture clash, the problematic nature of intercultural communication, and the complicated personal problems which impelled not a few of the expatriates to abandon their native lands in the first place. All of the stories feature realistic depictions of a shared reverence for love's purity found by people from different ends of the Earth when they venture beyond the confines of home in search of a common humanity.