asianamlitfans | A Review of Eugenia Kim’s The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018).

A Review of Eugenia Kim’s The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

There is much to praise concerning Eugenia Kim’s second novel The Kinship of Secrets (Houghton Mifflin, 2018), which delves into a complicated family dynamic made unstable in light of the Korean War. Let us let B&N provide us with some basic contexts: “From the author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart. In 1948 Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their infant daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia, under the shadow of the daughter left behind, as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn’t remember. Najin and Calvin desperately seek a reunion with Inja, but are the bonds of love strong enough to reconnect their family over distance, time, and war? And as deep family secrets are revealed, will everything they long for be upended? Told through the alternating perspectives of the distanced sisters, and inspired by a true story, The Kinship of Secrets explores the cruelty of war, the power of hope, and what it means to be a sister.”

This description does a great job of giving the basics. After what is, at least in my opinion, a rather slow build up, the novel moves quite quickly forward, once the sisters are actually reunited. Inja’s acculturation in the United States is rocky at best, but the strong bond that she eventually develops with Miran is absolutely instrumental to her initial survival and her ultimate resilience. What I appreciated about Kim’s depiction is the rather effortless way in which one’s personal ties is set up against the larger dramatic backdrop of the Korean War. And, as my parents, have gotten older, their memories of the war becoming ever more hazy, novels like these remind me of the important work that fictional narratives can produce in continuing to bring to light contexts and situations that, for many, were lived experiences.

In this respect, the novel achieves perhaps its deepest, political textures. Indeed, once I finished the novel, I sought to find out more about the author, especially given the compelling author’s note that reveals how much of the work was actually auto/biographical. Such background information makes one wonder especially why it is that we continue to market narratives so clunkily, by presupposing that the lines between fiction and memoir are ever so clearly demarcated. Perhaps, what is most poignant about this novel is the way in which familial sacrifice is understood. Despite Inja’s tumultuous transnational migration, we know that so much of her life functioned with the prospect that she had multiple families that loved her. A deeply affecting work and a narrative that only grows stronger as it moves toward its conclusion.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu