A first picture, and a wish to know more

Before explaining the book That’s What Love Was, the writer wants to introduce Han Bi-ya. At first, they say, they knew her only as someone who kicked away a chance of promotion and success in order to keep a promise to her father and travel the world, then by chance came to write a book — they first thought of it as a novel — that caused a sensation in society and made her famous.

After reading this book they wondered whether that was too little to know, and they set out what they had looked up in order to know her better. She first became famous, as they had already known, with a book of world travel.

Thirty-five, seven overland years, and a line she wrote

At thirty-five she left work at the Korea office of the international public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller and set out on seven years of travel. Rather than an ordinary comfortable trip, she almost never used planes and went overland, seeking remote places. Vivid records of incidents while crossing borders, and of dangerous moments in Afghanistan, fascinated readers and were a factor in her books becoming bestsellers.

She chose to stay in local homes, sometimes only about a month, live with people there, and learn their culture bit by bit. In her own writing she revealed that from people in remote places she had rather learned and felt a great deal, and that with that as an occasion her life had completely changed.

A turn to emergency relief

When she later began work as an emergency-relief worker, the occasion, they write, was precisely this travel. And when she was doing that work, travel no longer gave pleasure; what now made her heart beat was devoted relief in regions of disaster and conflict.

The notes leave her at that turn, and do not invent a later list of three practices. For the same Korean report at fuller length, look on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Han Bi-ya and That’s What Love Was: a first picture of someone who left a chance of promotion to keep a promise to her father; leaving Burson-Marsteller Korea at thirty-five; seven overland years, with almost no planes, stays of about a month, and records of Afghanistan; a line that her life was changed by people in remote places; and a later turn to emergency relief, where devoted work in disaster and conflict made her heart beat.

Last updated: 15 November 2026