Jehol Diary
When facing an unfamiliar world, can I imagine beyond boundaries without fear?
📝ONGO's Reflection
I cannot forget the shock of first reading Yeonam Park Ji-won's Jehol Diary. It was no mere travelogue of Qing China, but a cheerful yet incisive blow of the axe aimed at a Joseon society that was a frog in a well. His open gaze, finding something to learn even in a single broken roof tile, is nothing short of astonishing. Yeonam's sentences, observing unfamiliar things with curious eyes rather than rejecting them, refreshingly awaken our stiff minds, so prone to refusing the new in the cage of fixed ideas.
"The excellent systems of the world are all found in pieces of roof tiles and dung."Park Ji-won, Jehol Diary
"천하의 훌륭한 제도는 모두 기왓장 조각과 똥거름 속에 있다."
🌱Apply It Today
Walk down an unfamiliar alley instead of your usual route, or read a single page from a field you've never cared about. New insight seeps in the moment you step beyond the familiar.
