As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?
Me: This book was a truly beautiful memoir, interlacing mother-daughter relationships with our experiences with mother tongues. I felt Koh's story to be deeply personal and vulnerable, and the added letters & translations added a fascinating layer to the whole book.
The Ups: This is a book where you can really tell it affected the author to write it as much (if not much more) than the reader to read it. The language of Koh's reflection on her experiences & her relationship with her mother was aesthetically beautiful but also held a lot of hidden pain. In the book, it's clear that both Eun Ji and her mother have a lot of love for each other, it's just that neither love is "perfect." Mothers in this book are grasping at anything to claim their own, at times mourning different lives. Daughters are quietly asking for love while also trying to make something of themselves. I thought these relationships were conveyed in such a complex, full way.
I loved that Koh was able to traverse a lot of time in this book; the book covers almost seven years with her mother, as well as going back in time to tell the story of her grandmothers. The book therefore traverses over modern Korean history as well, from the pain of Japanese occupation to the war. Each female family member reflected and illuminated the others.
Personally, I really loved seeing the actual scanned letters of Koh's mother, as well as Koh's personal translations. I was lucky in that I'm able to read Korean as well as English, so I experienced the letters twice. It brought up something really interesting in me as well: I realized that the language associated with mothering for me (quite literally my mother tongue) is Korean. The letters in Korean read much more personally & emotionally than the translations, even though the translations were accurate.
The Downs: One of the more complicated parts of this book that I think might be slightly harder to pick up on for non-Korean speakers was the dialogue/interactions between the characters. Much of the dialogue was conveyed as the translated/Anglicized version of Korean speaking, and lots of the phrases and idioms were kept the same. I think that did a great job of honoring what the words might have meant in Korean, but it did feel a little strange reading them in English- almost stilted, or disconnected. I felt like the closeness or care of the Korean dialogue was not translated along with the words. But then again, the book is also all about this complicated relationship with language, so maybe this complexity is fitting.
I also felt that though the core of the mother-daughter relationship was conveyed as a kind of distancing, physically (over continents) and also emotionally, I wanted a little bit more intimacy or closeness at some point. The book felt a bit more like one sustained emotion rather than a rise and fall, and especially at the end of the book, I didn't feel an intense sense of satisfaction or closure. I almost wished Koh had been slightly less cryptic about her feelings, less metaphorical, and delved a little deeper into how this period of her life had affected her.
Overall: A beautifully written story of the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, all grounded in a study of writing and language. Incredible concept; I just wanted a little more emotional investment.
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