““They gave advice on alternatives to the standard food ration. “Make the root of rice plants into a powder and eat it! It’s rich in protein! . . . Arrowroot contains a lot of starch! . . . If you eat and survive, we can definitely prevail!” Useless information, all delivered with the usual histrionic exclamation marks. By that time, we’d been scouring the ground for ages for anything edible—acorns, mugwort, pine-tree bark. It was hellish stuff. You can use bark to make something vaguely resembling a rice cake. It was a dreadful thing. People had eaten it out of desperation at the end of the colonial era and again just after the Korean War. Times when people had no other choice. Times like the ones we found ourselves in.””
![“I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.” quote by Chang-Rae Lee](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c28/chang-rae-lee-3318_connections_i-had-a-visceral-connection-to-the-perio_332937.jpg)
