About this item
A tale of deep bonds to family, place, language -- of hard-won selfhood told by a singular, incandescent voice.After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji's parents return to Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in the family's new California home. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself in a world made strange in her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters over the years seeking forgiveness and love -- letters Eun Ji cannot understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.The letters lay bare the impact of her mother's departure, as Eun Ji gets to know the woman who raised her and left her behind. Eun Ji is a student, a traveler, a dancer, a poet, and a daughter coming to terms not only with her parents' prolonged absence, but her family's history: her grandmother's Jun's years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre. Where, Koh asks, do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words -- in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language -- to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?The Magical Language of Others is a fearless and poetic mind grappling with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma -- conjuring an epic saga and love story between mothers and daughters spanning four generations.
About the Author
E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the 2016 Pleiades Editors Prize, called "first-rate, intelligent, pure-gold - a triumph." Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Southeast Review, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Narrative, The Margins, PEN America, and elsewhere. She accepted fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Napa Valley Writers' Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing Poetry & Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington for English Language and Literature in Seattle.
