Elizabeth Kim: Ten Thousand Sorrows - The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan

(Doubleday)

$24.95

Review: Penelope Bieder*

Do not be dissuaded from reading this book by its somewhat ominous title, which derives from a Buddhist belief that "life is made up of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, all stepping stones to ultimate peace."

There is much to be learned from this heartbreaking tale of a Korean war orphan and her long struggle to rebuild her life.

Not only is it lyrically written, it is suffused with the power of the human spirit to endure, to love and to forgive.

Quite simply, I could not put this book down, until I had finished a story that is more harrowing than any novel.

At a young age (she never knew how old she was, perhaps 6, nor does she know how old she is today) and from her hiding place in a large bamboo basket, Elizabeth Kim watched as her grandfather and uncle hanged her mother, Omma, from the wooden rafter in their small Korean hut.

Omma had committed the sin of sleeping with an American soldier and producing not just a bastard but a "honhyol" - a mixed-race child, considered less than worthless.

According to Kim, in Korean culture bloodline and honour are immensely important, and there has historically been an intolerance for mixed-race children.

National pride is deeply ingrained, and in Korea the intense love for the country's heritage and traditions has its darker side of hatred for anything that taints the purity of that heritage.

This story is a timely reminder of the tragedies of split families still kept apart in the two Koreas. It could serve, too, as an educative allegory for Australians as they grapple with collective denial of their "stolen generation," the Aboriginal children torn from their parents to spend the rest of their lives coming to terms with the cruelty visited upon them. Elizabeth Kim shows us that it is, indeed, a lifelong struggle, an ongoing adaptation to loss.

One cannot help but recognise that the writing of this book was a healing exercise for the author.

It may even have been an essential part of her very survival, so grim was her early life, not only in Korea but in the United States, too. There she was sent as an orphan with no papers. Her parents: unknown; her birth date: unknown.

After the poverty of communication she experienced in her first years in the United States as a member of a fundamentalist Christian family, her discovery of the written word felt like an unbelievable luxury. Not only were her thoughts and feelings never valued by those around her, it was almost as if it was taken for granted that she did not have thoughts and feelings.

In her teenage years she seized upon 19th-century writers and poets with a great hunger, especially Dickens and Edna St Vincent Millay, one of whose poems became a talisman to Kim. They spoke of her pain and gave her a sense of being, for which she felt an enormous, private gratitude.

The literature she discovered colours her writing, and in pouring out the drama that has been her life so far, Kim has written a haunting story, a tribute to the human spirit and to the redemptive nature of writing itself.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.