Eugenia Kim

Eugenia Kim's new novel is The Kinship of Secrets.

From her Q&A with Brendan Dowling for Publiclibrariesonline.org:

Can you talk about how your own family’s experience during the Korean war served as the inspiration for this story?

My family’s story is very close to that experience and actually it’s probably a little worse. My uncle took his family south to Busan, but rather than doing it in the summer, as portrayed in the book, he did it in January, when the Chinese joined the battle and Seoul was overtaken. He traveled south with an oxcart with his family in the dead of winter, so that was worse. My parents lost touch with him—not just for a couple of days [as in the book], but for six months. I just learned that recently after reviewing some of my father and mother’s papers. I had no idea it was that long. No wonder my mother wrote in her journal how much heartache she was suffering because they couldn’t find them. They eventually found them in a refugee camp after some order was restored in South Korea and the Red Cross was making lists. My mother [in America] managed to dispatch a friend with a truck to pick them up and take them the rest of the way to Busan. But even after that she didn’t know where they were in Busan, as there was no mail service quite yet. It took them that entire six months to get in touch and for my mother to be able to send packages to them.

You mentioned your mother’s journals. In the book, we get to learn about the character of the mother through her journals. Were those inspired by your mother’s journals?

They are her journals. They’re mostly in Korean. My sister, who’s the one who came over, translated them for me.

So the journals in the book are your mother’s writing?

I was able to incorporate them. Of course, it was a judicious picking of what was there. She didn’t write a lot of narrative. Mostly she...[read on]

Visit Eugenia Kim's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Kinship of Secrets.

Writers Read: Eugenia Kim (November 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue