How would you feel if your parents left you at fifteen, for a different country? Scared? Elated? Ambivalent? Eun Ji is both terrified yet resigned when she discovers that her Korean immigrant parents will be returning to their homeland for her father’s job. They decide to leave Eun Ji, who has grown up a California
girl, with her nineteen-year-old brother in America, convinced that they will be better off, despite being an ocean away.

Through poetic prose, Koh reveals the slow unraveling of her young life, starting with her crumbling new house, the death of her beloved pet bird, and her developing eating disorder. Caught between college life and family life, her brother is given a responsibility beyond his years that often leaves him sullen and antagonistic. Perhaps more interesting than Koh’s visits to Korea are her mother’s letters, which she translates. Affectionate, bubbling letters that express a longing for her daughter and wishes of a happy life that she is seemingly unable to provide; a hypocritical demand for Eun Ji to be happy despite her circumstances while her mother reunites with long-lost siblings.

At first glance, Mrs. Koh is an easily detestable mother figure, another evil woman keeping her children in deprivation. However, as Koh takes a step back, looking first to her mother’s childhood, and then that of her paternal grandmother, it is impossible to unsee the connections, the intergenerational trauma passed on from one woman to the next. It is a vicious cycle that threatens to destroy lives and families.  It is also a shining light on the experiences that parents, particularly mothers, endure in their lifetimes. Parts of them that came before us and perhaps are so well hidden away that we may never see them.

Fast-forwarding to college, Eun Ji’s parents have renewed their contract a staggering three times, and it will not be until she has finished grad school, that they will eventually return to America. Despite this, she has made strides in carving out a life for herself, separate from her family, one that is unremittingly her own. A political science major who is short of the required math, her classes are shuffled and reorganized so that she is given the opportunity to take poetry instead. It is a bold move but one that may just be her saving.

Poetry becomes an outlet, not only for self-expression but as a form of therapy, “of letting go”. Forgiving is a skill that is undeniably one of the most difficult that a person can learn. It is also one that gives the peace of mind to the forgiver.  Ultimately, this powerful art is what allows Eun Ji to make peace with her parents and begin rebuilding their relationship together.