It’s been about ten years since the last time I went to the Korean Street Festival in Chicago and not much has changed since then. It’s still small, noisy and dirty. All of the booths seem to have been thrown together pretty haphazardly. Aside from the exhibitions that are scattered throughout the weekend there really isn’t a large display of Korean culture; unless you count the various array of food stalls that make up the majority of the booths lining the street.

I sat down for a telephone interview with David Yoo, the author of Girls for Breakfast, on a Monday evening.

Nick Park is your average teenaged boy. He plays sports, goes to school and is obsessed with girls. David Yoo’s debut, Girls for Breakfast, tells the life of a Korean-American boy stuck in the white suburban hell of Connecticut. At first reading, Nick appears to be nothing more than a colossal pervert with a preternatural precocity for female breasts.

Just a few days before the September edition of Halfway Magazine goes online, a cousin of mine will have attended her first day of school as a freshman at a large public university in a neighboring state.

I was watching a Korean television show with my parents which focused on ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Most of the worship-praise stuff is a bit too dramatic for my tastes and some of the Christian artists seem to be permanently stuck in the 80’s. But most importantly, none of the singers looked like me.

When I was younger, I didn’t question my parents’ faith. Among my earliest memories are those of Sunday school, the church building and the scary bathroom in the basement. I remember frilly dresses on Easter and getting in trouble when my grandmother caught me running through a sprinkler in the dress.

Stereotypes are specific schemas we use in order to save time while processing information. Rather than come up with new schemas whenever we meet someone, we just use the stereotype we have stored in our memories. So, while it is true that stereotypes are sometimes based on fact, they are often distorted by the biases surrounding the individual.

Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps most widely known for his novel, The Remains of the Day. Like this earlier work, Never Let Me Go is narrated from a first-person perspective by a narrator who is looking into her past and trying to make sense of her life, especially her childhood.

I admit it. I’m a fake Chicagoan. For my whole life, I’ve never really lived in the city and yet have always told people I was from Chicago.