Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan by Elizabeth Kim (review)

1 9 4 WAL 3 6 .1 S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 as a history of authorship and gendering strategies in Asian American litera­ ture and as a critical companion to readings of Chin, Kingston, Tan, Bulosan, Eaton, and others. Finally, Chu’s contributions are timely. In her coda she alludes to recent publications that “are moving past the assimilation narra­ tives” and asks, “[W]hen will Asian Americans write as assimilated subjects, and when we do, what will it mean to write as an Asian American?” (188-89). Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean W ar Orphan. By Elizabeth Kim. New York: Doubleday, 2000. 228 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by Seiwoong Oh Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey A California-based journalist, Elizabeth Kim shares intimate details of her life in her debut autobiography in plain journalistic prose. Images of death, vomit, sexual abuse, horrid nightmares, and rape can make readers nauseous at times, but the life story successfully portrays her unique life: her subhuman existence as a mixed-blood child in largely mono-racial Korea and the subse­ quent hardship as an adoptee growing up in a racist fundamentalist household in the American West. By doing so, Kim raises important questions about cross-cultural adoption and cultural assimilation. Bom out of wedlock in postwar Korea, Kim is a child of a Korean woman and an American soldier who later abandons the family. Family members hang her mother for shaming the family, a death Kim witnesses when she is about four or five years old. After several months of confinement in a missionary-run orphanage, Kim is brought to America, adopted by a racist, insensitive, and loveless mother and an oppressive fundamentalist Christian minister father. A t seventeen, she attempts to escape from her home by getting married to a deacon in her father’s church. But the husband turns out to be cruel, schizo­ phrenic, and adulterous. When the sexual abuse occurs with her two-year-old daughter nearby, she finally runs away with the child to find a job as a jour­ nalist and to rebuild her life. Except for the identities of her parents and her ex-husband, the author is willing to share minutiae of her life including her sexual habits— so much so that the whole book reads like a transcript of a psychiatric therapy session dur­ ing which the author/patient pours out her anger, resentments, and trauma of being a victim of racial prejudice, religious oppression, and gender inequities. Ironically, what seems to have been intended as the autobiography’s strong appeal turns out to be a problem. The honor-killing of her mother by her family members, an obsolete custom that is supposed to have been practiced in some parts of premodem Korea, is too frequently evoked and described as if it is still common. Her assessment of Korean culture is at best stereotypical and anachronistic. Moreover, although the author admits to having little memory BOOK REVIEW S 1 9 5 of Korea, she seems all too ready to represent its culture as an insider and to condemn it based on her mythic imagination. Kim is much more effective when she describes racial and sexual discrimi­ nation in school, church, and the society at large in both Korea and America. Rather than writing a litany of social ills resulting from such discrimination, she focuses on its devastating impact on her individual psychology. Seedsfrom a Silent Tree, a collection of essays from Korean children adopted into American homes, has given us a glimpse of their lives. Heinz Insu Fenkl depicted a bi-racial child­ hood in Korea in his Memories of My Ghost Brother. Despite its flaws, Kim’s unflinching account adds to our understanding of how the history of the Korean War and the political relationship between Korea and America helped shape the lives of children negotiating between Korean and American identities. Ride South to Purgatory. By James C. Work. Unity, Maine: Five Star Western, 1999. 254 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by D elbert E. Wylder Temple, Texas A t the beginning of this award-deserving novel, we learn that the protag­ onist, a...