Retired educator Joanna Choi Kalbus's hauntingly poignant debut memoir, The Boat Not Taken: A North Korean Mother and Her Daughter, started in 1996 as a personal project. Kalbus, born in 1941, pays homage to her late Omai (mother) over a near century of complex history spanning continents and cultures.
The fourth of eight children--nicknamed "Neh-chai," literally meaning fourth--in "a prominent clan," Omai was just five when Japan formally annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. Amid the brutal occupation, Omai married, bore three children, became widowed at 33, and eventually escaped south. She briefly placed her youngest, Kalbus, in a Seoul orphanage, then reclaimed her, with plans to return to her natal village. When mother and daughter attempted to board a northbound boat in 1946, the ticket agent slapped Omai with the warning, "Are you out of your mind.... Most people in North Korea are desperately trying to flee from there!" The pair remained in the South and survived through Omai's courageous ingenuity before miraculously immigrating in 1951 to California to begin again.
Throughout their intertwined lives, Omai was the head, Kalbus the tail. Omai's 1996 death made Kalbus "realize how little I knew about her life and therefore of my own." Traversing three countries, Kalbus's "quest to discover the truth of my mother's life" led her to "discover[ing] my own." Kalbus writes with unadorned honesty, presenting lice, infections, political torture, and shattering betrayal with straightforward, calm prose. Her emotional control on the page bears witness to enduring strength, acknowledging and celebrating Omai's inspiring support and unfaltering determination. --Terry Hong