Okchundang Candy

by Kevin Wolf

Okchundang Candy by South Korean author Jung-soon Go (translated by Aerin Park) is a very gentle story of the authors’ remembrances of her grandparents (Mr. Go Jadong and Ms. Kim Soonim). Their medical concerns (lung cancer for her grandfather and dementia for her grandmother) are not as important as their loving relationship through Jung-soon’s eyes and colored pencil drawings that move from her childhood to adulthood renditions. Her grandparents were Korean War orphans with three children and their eldest son, Go Sangkwon, being the author’s father. This is a children’s picture book. You won’t learn anything new medically, but this book really isn’t meant for the people reading this review. It’s meant for children to learn about ill grandparents who might be dying soon and what those grandparents might need in the interim and what a child might do to help. The child could draw pictures for them (their grandparents), visit them, stay overnight, keep them company, tell them stories, speak about school, learn from them, and otherwise entertain them. The language of this story is simple and will be easily understood by children. I highly recommend this book for children with ill grandparents (or even healthy grandparents) either reading this book to the youngest children or letting those a bit older who know how, to read it for themselves.

As introduced, “Okchundang, or Okchun, is a traditional Korean sweet made from rice flour and Korean molasses. Its vibrant colors and taste make it a staple of rituals. Until the 1980s, when candy became less scarce in Korea, Okchundang was a special treat for children after honoring their ancestors.” Jung-soon writes, “I loved watching my grandparents being so sweet to each other because my own parents were so busy fighting back home [26].” In a two-page spread from Jung-soon’s childhood vantage point, just outside the rooms, we watch her grandparents on white paper with grandfather giving grandmother a neck rub; countering a saddened Jun Ho on yellowed paper of her parents yelling and turned away from each other.

Okchundang Candy, pages 26 – 27

Her grandmother liked setting rules to live by. In the bathroom to save on toilet paper, Grandmother said, “House rule! Two squares for pee, three for poop [14]!” Some neighbors complained about her grandparents renting to local bar workers. Their solution was to get a streetlight installed; and four rules: avoid littering and loitering, no loud noise, and have their alleyways swept clean weekly with their renters help. This proved to the neighbors that their renters didn’t diminish but enhanced the value of their neighbors’ homes.

The Okchun candy appears for special ancestral memorial days (Jesa) when “…my grandfather put candy into my grandmother’s mouth [49].”

A sad part of this sweetness “for Grandma, Grandpa was her husband and her only friend [31].” This lack of a support system—outside of family—may have made her grandmother’s later dementia, after her grandfather died—soon after his lung cancer diagnosis—a relief or at least not living her remaining years with intolerable loneliness. We watch family coping with Grandmother as Jun Go ages into adulthood. Grandmother silently regresses into complete dependency, as if a child, unable to do activities of daily living and eventually being moved into a nursing home. “When I heard … my grandmother was waiting for someone, of course, I knew who it was [111].” Grandmother lived twenty years longer than Grandfather.

Okchundang Candy won the Special Prize in the 2023 Korea Picture Book Awards and the author is supposed to be at an exhibition of her book in Los Angelos on September 6 (Sat) and September 7 (Sun), 2025. You can find an excerpt of the book here.