num_pages: 209
description: The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade Eun Ji Kohs parents return to South Korea for work leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mothers absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and loveletters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.As Eun Ji translates the letters she looks to historyher grandmother Juns years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacreand to poetry as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find wordsin Korean Japanese English or any languageto articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? Eun Ji Koh fearlessly grapples with forgiveness reconciliation legacy and intergenerational trauma arriving at insights that are essential reading for anyone who has ever had to balance love longing heartbreak and joy.The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family place and language introducingin Eun Ji Koha singular incandescent voice.
language: English
title: The Magical Language of Others
publisher: Tin House Books