Pachinko

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. This story is told from multiple perspectives, focusing on a multigenerational story that begins in 1910 and ends in 1989. What other novels can you think of that are told like this, and what themes do they explore across time?

Teaching Suggestion: As students brainstorm ideas, encourage them to think about how these stories move from person to person and how they can keep all the characters straight. Additionally, you can introduce the theme of a mother’s sacrifice by encouraging students to think about how gender roles may have changed over the course of a century.

• The Book Satchel has a list of 9 multigenerational stories, including Pachinko, while this list on Book Riot covering 100 generational and family novels can help students brainstorm.
• The Asia Society’s Center for Global Education published this article on women’s roles in Korea from the late 19th century to the present.

2. The New York Times Book Review wrote that, in Pachinko, “history itself is a character.