A powerfully understated memoir that offers a glimpse into Korean history and a story of the strength of familial bonds.
A slim memoir about life in Korea from the mid-1930s through the Korean War and beyond.
As a small child, Oh (co-author, The Korean Embassy in America, 2003, etc.) expressed dismay when kids teased her about her masculine-sounding first name, Bongwan, which translates as “Phoenix in a Jade Bowl.” Her father explained that he didn’t want to impose gender restrictions on his eldest daughter; he wished her to be able to rise from the ashes like the legendary phoenix while also remaining grounded in the real world, like a jade vase. Oh’s affecting portrait of her family’s struggles begins in Seoul with Japanese colonialism—she was forced to salute Japan’s “Rising Sun” flag in school—but her father, an intellectual lawyer, retained pride in his heritage, refused to change the family surname and taught his children the Korean language. The author’s laconic, fast-moving prose offers memorably poignant moments, including an account of the death of her younger brother. Her mother eventually had seven children, and the author, barely into puberty, was forced to grow up quickly and act as a surrogate parent to her siblings during tough times. Fear and hunger permeate most of her memories; for example, Oh spent her 11th birthday standing in a rice ration line on V-J Day in 1945, when Korea was liberated from the Japanese. The family’s troubles didn’t end there, however; while they lived under American rule, Oh’s father was unjustly jailed, North Korean occupation ultimately began in the south, and the author was temporarily imprisoned in a North Korean “Volunteer Youth Corps” at a boarding school. One moving section depicts Oh’s migration as a war refugee during the “One-Four Retreat,” in which she and her siblings packed into an overly crowded train during a bitterly cold winter. Despite their hardships, Oh’s parents always emphasized education, and she eventually graduated as a valedictorian and was accepted into a mostly male university, paving the way for her later journey to America.
A powerfully understated memoir that offers a glimpse into Korean history and a story of the strength of familial bonds.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4827-3860-5
Page Count: 170
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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