What is the importance of France in the novel, Winter in Sokcho?

The narrator's father is French, and Yan Kerrand is from Normandy, so France plays a role in the narrator's perception of herself and the people around her. She mentions that she studied French at university, and she becomes fixated on Kerrand because she knows nothing about her father. She remarks that she wished Kerrand to show her her "unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world" (134). She thinks that by understanding Kerrand, she will be able to understand her father and her French roots. In Chapter 16, she asks Kerrand what France is like, and his response is vague: "He couldn't sum it up. It was such a big country, everything about it was so different from here. The food was good. He liked the light in Normandy, gray and dense" (80). Later, the narrator becomes frustrated with Kerrand when he attempts to compare the beach in Normandy to the beach in Sokcho. The former was the site of a historic battle during World War II, but the latter, she insists, is very much a war zone today because of tensions with neighboring North Korea.