A review by liralen
Ten Thousand Sorrows : The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan, by Elizabeth Kim
3.0
In Ten Thousand Sorrows, Kim chronicles one sorrow after another: the murder of her mother in a so-called honour killing in Korea; the alienation she felt in her adopted country, the US; the beatings and indignities her fundamentalist Christian adoptive parents bestowed upon her for failing to bend enough to their interpretation of Christianity; the physical abuse she faced at the hands of the husband those same parents chose for her.
Kim's writing is at its best when showing the reader the actions of the people around her and letting the reader draw conclusions. Unfortunately, as often as not, the actions come with a hefty side of biting descriptions when the narrative might be better served by deeper digging into who people were and why—not to tell 'their side' of the story but to round out the story. I'm not sure how much of her memories of her Korean mother are fact and how much of them are a child's fuzziness mixed with an adult's educated guesses (Kim's mother died when she was five or six, and any chance of family contact died with her), but I'd have been interested in seeing more discussion of that: of what Kim has tried, or not tried, to find out and why; of the reliability of a child's memories (I mean this as less doubtful than it might sound—just that it would be an interesting thing to discuss); of whether she remembers any good moments with her adoptive parents and whether visiting Korea again was ever in the cards and so on.
Kim's writing is at its best when showing the reader the actions of the people around her and letting the reader draw conclusions. Unfortunately, as often as not, the actions come with a hefty side of biting descriptions when the narrative might be better served by deeper digging into who people were and why—not to tell 'their side' of the story but to round out the story. I'm not sure how much of her memories of her Korean mother are fact and how much of them are a child's fuzziness mixed with an adult's educated guesses (Kim's mother died when she was five or six, and any chance of family contact died with her), but I'd have been interested in seeing more discussion of that: of what Kim has tried, or not tried, to find out and why; of the reliability of a child's memories (I mean this as less doubtful than it might sound—just that it would be an interesting thing to discuss); of whether she remembers any good moments with her adoptive parents and whether visiting Korea again was ever in the cards and so on.