A father killed in the Jeju massacre had wished his eldest girl could read; that girl, now an 85-year-old woman, has learnt her letters and written him a poem.
Practice puzzle. It does not touch your streak or today's stats.
Kept 'read'? That is the strongest wrong word in the sentence. It is what her father wished for, and 'letters' is what she did about it, in the words he used. Kept 'poem' or 'written'? That is the most moving part, and it is what she did with her letters, not the letters themselves. Kept 'father', 'killed' or 'massacre'? That is why she never went to school. Kept 'girl'? That is who she was. The five is who she is now. This one really happened. Ko Bok-ja is 85 and lives on Jeju, the island off the south of Korea. Her father was killed when she was a child, in the killings that began on 3 April 1948, known in Korea as 4.3, and she never went to school. He had said: 'Our eldest girl should learn her letters too.' She spent her life selling things to raise her children and cooking in restaurants and at a temple, and avoided going out because she could not write her own name on a form at the hospital. In 2022 she joined a literacy class for older people at the Yeongrak welfare centre in Jeju. The first letter she wrote to her father is a poem, 'Father, Spring Has Come', in the Jeju dialect, and it quotes his words back to him. Last year it won a prize at Korea's national exhibition of poems by adult learners. Another of hers ends: 'I will study again tomorrow, my name, earned after eighty, so I don't forget it.' Jeju Sori met her for the hundredth Hangul Day, on 9 October.