Essay Database

Ten Thousand Sorrows As a little girl walking with her mother, Elizabeth Kim hears herself called a "honhyol," "a despicable name that meant nonperson, mixed race, animal." Shortly after the end of the Korean War, the mother had returned from Seoul to her native village in shame, pregnant with a GI's child. Mother and daughter live as outcasts in a hut at the edge of town, and from the moment she can walk, the child …

…e possibility "that things could be okay. I believed that healing was just around the corner; wholeness was just a breath away." But she rambles, repeats herself and interrupts her ode to inner peace with painful memories that feel like flashbacks. Her psyche is still a battlefield where bombs fall and grenades go off. Her memoir is the work in progress of an unfinished woman. I have read it so that you won't have to.