by Eugenia Kim
All U.S. military personnel had left Korea by June 1949. By the first half of 1950, DPRK troops numbered 150,000–180,000 men, with 150 Soviet tanks and heavy artillery, and about 150 aircraft. The ROK army consisted of eight combat divisions of about 65,000 men, light artillery, some small sea craft, and no tanks, fighters, or bombers. Communist leaders took these numbers, along with earlier indicators of sympathy to the communist cause, to mean the time was ripe for their own unification of the Korean peninsula.
My mother had her fourth child, a girl, in July 1949 in Los Angeles. Because of their two-year plan, my parents didn’t return to Korea, and they also likely didn’t travel due to their growing family and the cost.
At four A.M. on Sunday, June 25, 1950, in drizzle and heavy fog, about 90,000 Soviet-trained North Korean troops invaded South Korea at several locations across the thirty-eighth parallel, surprising the ROK forces, many of whom were on leave.
My father got a job as translator and broadcaster with the new Voice of America radio’s Korean service, then based in New York City, and my parents and their three children moved from Los Angeles to New York, where, during the three years of the Korean War, two more girls were born, including myself, the last of six. Though I helped send packages to my sister and Korean family in Seoul, I wasn’t truly aware that I had another sister until many years after the war when she was finally able to be brought to America at age eleven, when I was five. It seemed a large family could easily absorb one more, and it was only much later in adulthood that I asked my sister how it was for her to be taken from her Korean family to be “reunited” with an American family, who were all utter strangers, in a country that was equally foreign to her.
This novel is a fiction derived from the facts of my family’s life, and especially my sister’s life, during and after the Korean War, the fifth deadliest war in human history, also known as “the forgotten war.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks foremost to my sister Sun Kim, whose life inspired this story, and who inspires me still. Thanks also to her husband, Kee Lee, who helped vet the Korean elements of this novel.
My gratitude for the detailed work on this manuscript to Helen Atsma, editor extraordinaire, and Judith Weber, amazing agent. To the incredible team of individuals who helped bring this book to fruition, thank you.
Many remote locations were required along the way, and I give thanks to Phyllis Freedman and Tom Glass for sojourns at Woodlawn, and to Susan and Michael Gordon for the Bethany house. Thank you to Hedgebrook, Eastern Frontier Foundation, Ox-Bow School of Art, and for the following: Stanford Calderwood Fellowship at MacDowell Colony, Eli Cantor Fellowship at Corporation of Yaddo, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship at Millay Colony for the Arts, and a pivotal fellowship at I-Park Foundation.
Thank you, Paul and Robbie Hertneky, discerning readers and friends. Special thanks to Di Nicholas, and much gratitude to friends and family, especially Brian, Van, Jeff, and Henry, for constant support and love.
About the Author
Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a 2009 Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick by the Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Asia Literary Review, Raven Chronicles, and elsewhere. She is a DC Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient. A Bennington College MFA graduate, Kim teaches at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. She lives in Washington, DC.
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