My Mysterious Rivers: From the Namgang River to the Hudson, a human's time and history Paperback – February 28, 2026

My Mystical Rivers is a memoir written from a Manhattan rehabilitation center by an eighty-year-old Korean immigrant facing lung cancer. Across four parts—letters to family and friends, meditations on faith and mortality, portraits of the extraordinary people he meets in the ward, and essays that weave together his hometown of Jinju, South Korea, and his adopted life in America—Hong Soon-wan traces the arc of a life shaped by two rivers: the Nam, which cradles the ancient city of Jinju, and the Hudson, which flows past his hospital window.What begins as a record of illness becomes something far larger. A ninety-three-year-old blind violinist, a world-class dancer from Juilliard, a Harlem-born aide who sings hymns in the hallway—each encounter in the ward opens into a reflection on what it means to be human. The author's letters to his wife, written at two in the morning after chemotherapy, are at once practical and devastatingly tender. His return to Jinju for a half-marathon along the Nam River, his pilgrimage to family graves, and his final decision about where he wishes to be buried give the book the weight of a life honestly examined.Running through it all is a single, luminous insight: that suffering, if received with gratitude, becomes a river—and that river becomes light. The Nam and the Hudson, mother and father, sorrow and hope, flow together in these pages until they are no longer two rivers but one.Hong Soon-wan was born in 1945 in Jinju, South Korea. He emigrated to the United States in 1977 and built a career in international trade in Chicago. A marathon runner with thirty races behind him, a Vietnam War veteran, and a devoted Catholic, he lives in New Jersey. He is a member of the Chicago Korean Literary Society and the Namgang Literary Society, and the founder of Swanvive LLC. My Mystical Rivers is his second book, following Namgang to Manhattan (남강에서 맨해튼까지). Read more