Elizabeth Kim is the pen name of an American
journalist who authored the book Ten Thousand Sorrows, which is described as a memoir.
Early life
Kim was born in
South Korea to a Korean mother and an American father. She was conceived most likely after the
Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the fighting in the
Korean War.[1] According to Kim's memories, her father abandoned her mother, who was forced to return to her hometown alone and pregnant to seek assistance from her family. After Kim's birth, she lived with her mother in a hut at the edge of town, and worked in the rice fields. When Kim was a child, as she remembers it, her mother was killed by her grandfather and uncle in what she would later describe as an "
honor killing".[2][3] Kim herself was left at a
Seoul orphanage, with no record of her original name or her family.[4] Eventually, she was adopted by a minister and his wife and given the name Elizabeth.
Ten Thousand Sorrows
Writing and reactions
Kim was working as a journalist at the Marin Independent Journal and living in
San Rafael, California, when literary agent Patti Breitman approached her about the possibility of writing a memoir. Kim was initially reluctant, but Breitman slowly convinced her of the idea; Breitman herself says that publishers were quite enthusiastic about the idea, and one even replied to her proposal within a day, simply asking her to "name a price". In the end, Kim received an advance of hundreds of thousands of dollars for her book; when it was published in May 2000, Kim quit her job at the Marin Independent Journal (despite her recent promotion to city editor) to tour in
Canada, the
United Kingdom, and the
United States.[5]
Andrea Behr, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, praised Kim's writing, comparing her book to
Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and stating that "she has the gift of telling her story with such clear-sighted, humble honesty, and such compassion, that it's just as fascinating and compulsively readable as it is devastating".[6] It was also reviewed favorably in O,
Oprah Winfrey's magazine.[citation needed] Others were less positive. Salon reviewer Brigitte Frase described Kim's book as "brutal", "haunting and disturbing", and "an act of revenge", ending her review by stating that "I have read it so that you won't have to".[2]
Some critics suspected Kim's book of being fictional rather than autobiographical, with Hillel Italie of Associated Press expressing concern that Kim's vagueness regarding dates and locations prevented the book's facts from being verifiable.[7] It was particularly controversial in the
Korean American community, some of whose members accused Kim of "exploiting the issue of biraciality" and "trying to take advantage of the [then] current interest in autobiographies, particularly those that involved violence against women".[8] Others objected to the description of her mother's murder as an "honor killing" as being inconsistent with Korean culture.[7] However, Korean American writer Kim Sun-jung defended the book, criticizing
B. R. Myers, who lambasted what he described as the book's "ludicrous inaccuracies" about Korean culture, because Myers himself was not Korean.[9]
Audiobook (read by the author): Elizabeth Kim (2000), Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan, New York: BDD Audio,
ISBN978-0-553-50258-9,
OCLC44062484
It was translated into eleven languages. The below list gives unofficial translations of the foreign-language titles where the original title was not preserved.
Chinese: Elizabeth Kim; 張娟芬 [Chang Chuan-fen, translator] (2000), 昨日不可留 [Yesterday cannot remain], Taipei: 大塊文化出版股份有限公司 [Locos Publishing Company],
ISBN978-957-0316-55-1,
OCLC50140103{{
citation}}: |author2= has generic name (
help)
German: Elizabeth Kim; Maria Mill (translator) (2001), Weniger als nichts: ein Frauenschicksal zwischen Osten und Westen [Less than nothing: a woman's destiny between East and West], RM Buch-und-Medien-Vertriebs-GmbH,
OCLC759469198{{
citation}}: |author2= has generic name (
help)
Polish: Elizabeth Kim; Danuta Górska (translator) (2002), Mniej niż nic [Less than nothing] (in Polish), Warszawa: Świat Ksiażk,
ISBN978-83-7311-320-6,
OCLC62764089{{
citation}}: |author2= has generic name (
help)
Further editions were published in two of those languages:
German paperback: Elizabeth Kim; Maria Mill (translator) (2004), Ungeliebtes Kind: eine koreanische Kriegswaise kämpft um ihr Leben [Unloved Child: A Korean War orphan struggles for her life], München: Goldmann,
ISBN978-3-442-15232-2,
OCLC76488912{{
citation}}: |author2= has generic name (
help)
Hungarian paperback: Elizabeth Kim; Nagy Imre (2006), Tízezer könnycsepp: egy távol-keleti nő emlékiratai, Budapest: Trivium,
ISBN978-963-9367-91-3,
OCLC441102719
^Davis, Rocío G. (2007), Begin here: reading Asian North American autobiographies of childhood, University of Hawaii Press, p.
197,
ISBN978-0-8248-3092-2
^Koji Nnamdi (2000), Elizabeth Kim: "Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan", Washington, D.C.: WAMU,
OCLC426221805
^Seiwoong Oh (2001), "Book Reviews — Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan", Western American Literature, 36 (2),
ISSN0043-3462,
OCLC94147883
^Tracy Dianne Wood (2008), "Chapter 2", Korean American literature: literary orphans and the legacy of Han, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Riverside,
ISBN978-0-549-52376-5,
OCLC744022321