Hannah Ban

Writing for Children & Young Adults

2024

Second-Hand—Hannah Ban’s Center supported novel—follows 18-year-old Duri Lee, who creates an online persona to manage an archive of old love letters. Growing up with a single mother and a single grandmother, Duri finds comfort in reading about real-life romance, even if it ended in heartbreak. Set in the United States and South Korea, the novel deals with the prevalence of alcohol abuse and the stigmatization of single parenthood in Korean culture. Through amassing letters, Duri not only unveils the secrecy surrounding her father’s identity, but also her family’s intergenerational trauma stemming from sexual slavery during World War II.

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