The Kinship of Secrets by Eugenia Kim
Most stories tell us about the hazards of keeping secrets, ones that come back to haunt you. In The Kinship of Secrets, Eugenia Kim shows the generosity of keeping certain secrets.
Inja is a happy schoolgirl who loves her grandparents, and especially her uncle. They have been taking care of her since she was a small child, when her parents and her sister moved to the United States, promising to come back for her in a few years. Except a few years later, in 1950, the Korean war broke out. Because of his ties to the US Army, her father had relocated to California amid early tensions, and now it was impossible for him to reunite his family.
Miran, her sister, grows into being an American teenager, who was too young to remember Inja when she left. Theirs is a paper relationship based on duty letters and parcels. For years, Najin, their mother, tries to assuage her guilt at having to choose one daughter over the other by flooding her family in Korea with emotional letters and extravagant gifts. Little does she know that most of the gift items are sold as a source of income, during the war and during the hard times afterwards.
The Korean family withholds information about their circumstances from love for a mother who had to leave her child. They respect the agony of parents who had to make impossible decisions to preserve life, and they recognize the profound honour of being allowed to raise their child. As she grows older, through carefully edited stories, Inja learns something of her history. In particular, her uncle curates his stories to his interpretation of age-appropriate knowledge. Only in her teens does she learn about the family’s tragic experiences under Japanese occupation in the decades before WWII.
Eventually, it is Inja who travels to the US to be reunited with her family. Only, she is terrified about losing everything important – especially the bond with her fatherly uncle. The strain of living in another language seems unbearable. Schooling in English is daunting, made possible mainly because her other lessons in Korea were more advanced than in the US. Miran helps, even though she is confused by this sudden reality of sisterhood. They begin to share secrets, tailored to their understanding of each other’s needs. That is when kinship forges a family from fractured relationships.
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