Rhee Kun-hoo is a psychiatrist who offers nuggets of good advice – the first of which can be found in the title of his latest bestselling book, . His book’s global appeal stems from readers’ curiosity about Korea, he says. “Like travellers wanting to explore different corners of the world, international readers want to meet people from different cultures through books.
My book gives a little journey into Korea, enabling them to see how Koreans live,” the author said at Family Academia, an organisation that Rhee founded in 1995 to promote healthy family life. His book reflects on how to live well in the latter half of one’s life. “A Korean saying goes ‘life is two-crop farming’, drawing a metaphor from the agricultural practice of cultivating two different crops on the same land in one year,” he explains.
“The first half of life is lived in a rush. You don’t even know how to live well. The second half of life is when you can live well because you have the experience from living the first half.
“When you reach your sixties, you look back on how you lived your life in the first half, reflect on it and design how you will live the second half.” His debut collection, (2013), based on his experiences as a psychiatrist over 50 years, has sold around 500,000 copies in Korea. (2019) was translated into English and published in the United Kingdom in May.
Despite his book’s title, Rhee bluntly states there is no inherent happiness in getting older. Instead,.
