If You Live to 100, You Might As Well Be Happy

Rhee Kun Hoo is one of Korea’s most popular, bestselling essayists and a retired psychiatrist with a cult following. Born in 1935, the only son to a former Korean Independence activist, he has lived through such historical milestones as Imperial Japan’s occupation of Korea and the Korean War. In 1960, he was arrested and served time as one of the student leaders of the April Revolution, a democratic movement against the then-dictator that would contribute to the young democracy of South Korea in the following decades. Once released, he went on to change the abusive mental health system in South Korea and was the first to implement an open ward system and patient-friendly treatments such as psychodrama therapy in the Korean asylum system.

Tim Lounibos is a mixed-race Asian American actor and voiceover artist. With over twenty years of experience, he has performed for film, TV, commercials, animated voice over, audiobook narration, and theatre. The co-founder and co-artistic director of the acclaimed Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, he has also worked as the development manager for aMedia inc., the producer of Los Angeles’s Ovation Awards, the producer of the Ammy Awards, and the business administrator for East West Players.

Translator Suphil Lee Park is a bilingual writer, poet, and translator who was born and grew up in South Korea. She knows the author through family and has met with him several times. She received a BA in English from New York University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, and a winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021). Her poetry chapbook, Still Life, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the 2022 Tomaž Šalamun Prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press). She also won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize and received a fiction prize from Writer’s Digest.