Pachinko

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY: “In Another Life”

One of the themes of this novel is resiliency. Beginning with Hoonie, we see each character struggle with their own survival and decisions, and at the end of Pachinko, Sunja reckons with the journey that brought her to Osaka and gave her both children and grandchildren.

• Give each student a sheet of paper and ask them to choose one character. On one side of the sheet, they should write out a brief timeline (with or without the approximate dates) of that character’s life in Pachinko.
• Then, tell students to pick one event in their character’s life and change it somehow. They should think about the following questions:

Which event did you choose to change? Why?

What happens as a result? How does this trickle down through the family?

What would be different about the novel if Lee had made the same choice you did?

Does this change the effect or lesson of Pachinko?

• Ask students to share their changes and discuss these questions.

Teaching Suggestion: This could also be done as a group activity in which each group has one character whose life they change.

Paired Text Extension

Mark Sakamoto’s family memoir Forgiveness begins with the true story of his grandparents, in which his grandfather is captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong during World War II while his grandmother was interned because she was Japanese in Canada. It tells their story, trickling down until it also tells Mark’s story. Like Pachinko, this is a generational story. After completing the “In Another Life” activity, using Forgiveness to touch on themes similar to being multiethnic in a monoethnic society and resiliency can better help students understand the realism of Lee’s story of Sunja and her family in Pachinko.

Teaching Suggestion: This page gives some additional background to the memoir. You can also repeat the activity using the events in the memoir and encourage students to think about how a generational saga like these two books is told.