Note: Please be sure to read the Author's Note at the end of the book.
 

1. Of what significance is the title of the book ("Lost Names")?

2. What difficulties or advantages are there to using this type of autobiographical work in a history class? What is the relationship between Kim in 1970 and the narrator in 1933? 1940? 1945?

3. How does ethnocentrisim affect the narrator and his family?

4. How would you describe the values by which the boy's family lives?

5. Is Kim's viewpoint the Korean viewpoint? In what sense might the narrator and his family be exceptional? (How might a book written by one of the narrator's classmates, like Pumpkin, been different?) Was Japanese colonialism the same everywhere and for every person subject to it?