Why a Booktrail?
1990s: The intriguing proverb in the beginning of the book states – How can you claim to know the taste of watermelon when you have only licked the rind? – This is a girl’s search for her Korean heritage.
Somebody’s Daughter
What you need to know before your trail
Nineteen-year-old Sarah Thorson was adopted as a baby by a Lutheran couple in Minneapolis, USA. After dropping out of college, she decides to study in Korea and becomes more and more intrigued by her Korean heritage. Her real dream is to track down her birth mother and to return to Korea in order to find her and about her culture and who she is.
Meanwhile, there is the story of Kyung-sook, who was forced by difficult circumstances into giving up her baby. She has always longed for her lost child. But Korean society does not think well of women like her.
Travel Guide
A powerful portrayal of two cultures and the difficulties that a person can face by being born from one culture and being placed another. What makes a person who they are today has to come from their past and it must be essential if you have no knowledge of your heritage to want to find out more.
In 1993, Sarah writes that when she was eight years old and living in Minneapolis she was told that her mother was murdered. Trying to understand such a shocking revelation must have been chilling and difficult for any age least of all a child. To be told that God called your Korean parents home must have been hard to understand but then something worse –
“I had grown up in a house in which Korea had always been the oddly charged word, never to be mentioned in connection to me, the same way we never said ‘Uncle Henry’ and ‘ alcoholic’ in the same sentence.”
When Sarah goes to such lengths in learning her mother tongue and going to Seoul in order to track down her mother the she also goes on a journey into that country’s culture, history and soul. The story of Kyung-Sook tells the tale of what it must have been like for women at that time and how children were treated by society.
The village of Enduring Pine sounds idyllic but it is not. However it could represent many poor areas of a country where everyday struggles tell of the strength of a country’s people.
Where Next?
