Rice Paper Window

Christabel Choi enters South Korea as a student in 1989 with a copy of the Communist Manifesto among the books in her bag. She doesn't realize that it could get her-or anyone she might lend it to-arrested or disappeared.

She soon finds herself the only woman in the company of men in a Buddhist temple boarding house: as an honorary little brother. At the university over the mountain, she realizes her classmates lead the dangerous fight to eliminate the remnants of dictatorship and bring a decisive end to martial law.

The next eight months pass in a contrast between the fight for democracy and the peace of the mountain and temple. Every week the campus erupts with demands for political freedom, fair pay for workers, as well as apology and reparations for US and Korean government atrocities like the Gwangju Massacre and the April Uprising.