Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Jenny Heijun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. A Memoir (McLelland & Stewart, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Well, it’s been the year—or two years, more accurately—of the Asian North American memoir and creative nonfiction! Jenny Heijun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. A Memoir (McLelland & Stewart) adds to the immense pile of wonderful new publications (standing tall alongside Julie Yip-Williams’s The Unwinding of a Miracle, Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, T. Kira Madden’s The Lost Tribe of Fatherless Girls, among others) with this stunning lyric memoir.

Let’s let the official page give us some context: “A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.”

This description does a pretty great job of describing the major beats in this particular work. Wills’s prose is absolutely sparking. Each section of the memoir is written in prose blocks that effect something like a prose poem actually, and I would guess I’d teach this text in a similar way. It is a memoir meant to be read aloud, even as the content can be excruciatingly painful. As with most brilliant memoirs, they must plumb the depths of some pretty dark places. Such is the case with Wills’s work, which doesn’t draw back from the complicated and thorny relational dynamics that make for searching for one’s birth family while also retaining connections to one’s adoptive family. What I especially appreciated about this particular work was how it helps carve out a space, however sometimes tenuous and not necessarily harmonious, that the adoptee sustains between multiple families and kinship systems. In this sense, it functions as a necessary corrective to texts that sends the message that poststructural kinships and alternative family structures are impossible. To be sure, Wills’s work also casts a critical lens at the adoption process itself, making it clear that such processes can be understood as a form of human trafficking. Yet, in the ominous shadow of that process, she must find to live her life.

One of the most poignant relationships that Wills explores is the one with her little sister Bora. They do not have the same father, but their connection is perhaps one of the strongest depicted throughout the memoir. Bora will at some point visit Wills in Canada and will study there. It is she who acts as the biggest bridge between Korea and the United States. And this particular sisterhood will resound, especially against the tumultuous journey that Wills so gracefully traces for her ever-growing families. An absolutely astounding work, with incandescent prose and equally luminous content.  

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

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
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu