{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Ten Thousand Sorrows The Extraordinary Journey of a Orphan by Elizabeth Kim Elizabeth Kim. A Korean-American author and journalist, she is best known for her 2000 memoir, Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan. Her autobiographical work was translated into more than ten languages. Before Fame. She lived in San Rafael, California and worked as a journalist at the Marin Independent Journal. It was during this time that literary agent Patti Breitman asked her to write a memoir. Trivia. At one point, she worked in Sweden as a model. Family Life. She was born in to an American father and a Korean mother. Her mother was tragically murdered in 1958 by Kim's uncle and grandfather, at which point Kim was sent to an orphanage. "Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan" by Elizabeth Kim. An immigrant's brutal and disturbing memoir of abuse at the hands of fundamentalist parents and a sadistic husband. By Brigitte Frase. Published May 17, 2000 8:00PM (UTC) Shares. A s a little girl walking with her mother, Elizabeth Kim hears herself called a "honhyol," "a despicable name that meant nonperson, mixed race, animal." Shortly after the end of the Korean War, the mother had returned from to her native village in shame, pregnant with a GI's child. Mother and daughter live as outcasts in a hut at the edge of town, and from the moment she can walk, the child works alongside her "Omma" in the rice fields. When the girl is about 4 -- she will never know the exact year and day of her unrecorded birth -- her grandfather and her uncle demand she be sold as a servant. When her mother refuses, the men string the woman up in her own house. Kim, a witness to this "honor killing," still sees "those milk-white feet" twitch, as if in a dance, then grow still. As a "honhyol, female, nameless, without a birth date," she is a fourfold embodiment of shame. Dumped at an orphanage run by Christian missionaries, she joins the other forgotten children, "the product of brief liaisons between soldiers on their way through and women on their way to hell." The kids are locked for hours at a time into cribs that look more like animal shelters. Occasionally, prospective parents peer into various cribs, looking for a cute specimen to adopt. After hopeless months in her cage, Kim is finally adopted, sight unseen, by a missionary couple in central California. "Mom" and "Dad" are rigid fundamentalist Christians, and the girl they name Elizabeth begins a long sojourn in her own hell. Although she learns English quickly and is bright and docile, a model child, she earns only scorn and an almost unbelievable cruelty. Treated more like a servant than like a daughter, she is punished for having nightmares, for being ill, for not smiling enough. The emotional abuse her parents devise -- all in the name of the Lord, of course -- is ingenious in its variety. They belittle her looks, insult her dead mother, make her sleep in a pitch-dark room to get over her claustrophobia. If she wakes screaming in terror, she is punished again for not trusting God's plan for her. When she gets attached to a toy or a pet, it is immediately taken away. Elizabeth absorbs her lessons well. She comes to hate herself and to believe that she deserves only pain and suffering. At night, she claws at her body, drawing blood with sharp fingernails. At 17 she is married off to a church deacon, and her life goes from bad to unbearable. Her husband is a sadistic bully who, besides regularly beating her, is only aroused by seeing her in pain. He also likes to have sex with other women in the back seat of their car while she's driving it. When she gets pregnant, he stomps on her belly. He would probably have killed her sooner or later. But when he tortures and rapes her in their young daughter's bedroom, she finally gets sufficient hold of herself to run away, realizing that her child is now in danger as well. Living in a shanty at the edge of town, making a meager living as a reporter for a local newspaper, Elizabeth in a sense recapitulates idealized memories of life with a beautiful, strong and loving mother. She tries to create for herself and her daughter Leigh a cocoon of security and love. The two of them do seem to achieve a loving relationship and a stable household, though Leigh must have felt the weight of being her mother's only reason for living. (Leigh contributes some carefully worded paragraphs to her mother's memoir.) She had to cope with Elizabeth's increasingly dangerous sleepwalking, her claustrophobia, depressions and a recurrent longing for death that sharpened into a veritable lust for suicide. This brutal memoir is haunting and disturbing, but for all the wrong reasons. I can understand that Kim had to write it, but it should never have been published. It is the account of a deeply damaged woman who has not been able to escape her traumatized childhood or to make any emotional sense of it. I was fascinated, appalled and finally ashamed, feeling more like a voyeur than like a reader. Kim claims to have forgiven her parents, who in old age do seem to have mellowed. But her bitter account of them is a damning portrait of monsters; it is an act of revenge. In the sections about childhood and marriage, her writing has a matter-of-fact spareness that comes to feel more like numbness than unflinching honesty. The final chapter, in which she describes her continuing efforts to heal, through therapy and the practice of Buddhist meditation, is a stylistic mess. In a fervent childlike voice of belief, she trots out all the therapeutic clichis about "the healing process." She makes declarations of love to herself and considers the possibility "that things could be okay. I believed that healing was just around the corner; wholeness was just a breath away." But she rambles, repeats herself and interrupts her ode to inner peace with painful memories that feel like flashbacks. Her psyche is still a battlefield where bombs fall and grenades go off. Her memoir is the work in progress of an unfinished woman. I have read it so that you won't have to. Brigitte Frase. Brigitte Frase is critic at large for the Hungry Mind Review and an editor at Milkweed Editions. She is working on a family history-memoir about immigration and culture clash. Escaping Her Past / San Rafael author Elizabeth Kim, a Korean War orphan raised by fundamentalist parents in California, tells of her painful upbringing in ahaunting memoir. Elizabeth Kim's house is white, scrubbed and flooded with light. It sits on a crooked, hilly street in San Rafael and looks out on green, green and more green. Inside, Kim props up her bare feet, sips iced tea and cheerily complains about the hot weather. She's wearing a silky jacket and is chatting amiably about the most intimate personal details imaginable. When she talks, her eyes widen. She laughs a lot. "In fact, I'm a lighthearted person in many ways," Kim says. "I like to laugh way more than I like to cry." Kim's sunny home and temperament wouldn't be so remarkable if she hadn't just written a memoir so thick with grief and violence that at moments, it's almost unbearable to read. "Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan," (Doubleday, $22.95), a tersely written page-turner, will eventually be translated into 21 languages. In it, Kim tells how, as a small child in Korea, she watched her uncle and grandfather hang her mother from a wooden rafter in their home. The terrible murder was an "honor killing" -- punishment for the crime of sleeping with an American soldier and giving birth to Kim, a mixed-race child. Stripped of her name and age, Kim was abandoned by relatives at a Christian orphanage in Seoul. Eventually, she was adopted by an American Fundamentalist pastor and his wife who, often in the name of God, treated Kim with astonishing cruelty. They punished her for her confusion, her fears, her appearance. Fear is sinful, they told her. Grieving for her mother is tantamount to blasphemy. "I feel like my mommy's dying," I told my shocked parents. "I feel like I'm going to die too. I want her back. Can't Jesus bring her back . . ." "Dad slapped my face, back and forth, and the sobs diminished, turning into coughs, then gagging hiccups. The pain of forcing them down into my chest was excruciating. 'She is not your mother!' he yelled at me. 'She was a sinful woman who didn't love you at all. She's in hell.' " Without a loving guide or mentor, Kim's life continued a tragic course. In her homogeneous town in the California desert, Kim stood out horribly. At school, she was called "gook" and had few friends. She hated the way she looked. At age 17, Kim's parents pressured her into marrying a deacon at her church. He beat her, for the first time, hours after their wedding. The abuse was routine. One morning, when Kim was pregnant and too sick to get out of bed to make his breakfast, he jumped on her stomach in his work boots. Ultimately, Kim gave birth to a daughter -- the first suggestion of joy in the book -- and, fearing for her child's safety, left her husband. At last, Kim's life began to shift. She took college classes, talked her way into a job at a local newspaper and worked her way up from scrappy papers to larger and larger ones. She made a life for herself and her beloved daughter. Finally, toward the end of the book, Kim described some measure of healing: meditation, Buddhist teachings, therapy. The constant suicidal thoughts subsided. "I still do think about suicide and I occasionally want it. I don't know if that will ever go away," Kim says. But, at least, when a painful memory surfaces, she no longer is subject to the "knee-jerk reaction of wanting to kill myself." "They love me now. I know that for a certainty, even though they don't really know who I am. They tell me that they're proud of me -- words I would have given anything to have heard in my childhood." Kim's parents, now 91 and 82, understand what is in the book, but all agreed it would be better if they did not read it. They're old and frail, Kim says, and it would be emotionally difficult and probably physically impossible. With age, her parents have softened. A few years ago, her father began calling every few months to apologize for different incidents: the harsh household, the physical punishments, the marriage he essentially arranged. "He feels a lot of guilt and he wants expiation over and over and over," Kim says. Sometimes, he cries about the mistakes he made. Kim forgives him, then they move on, she said. Her parents still live in the same town where she grew up. It's rife with dust devils, weeds and unpleasant memories, Kim says, yet she continues to travel there to care for them. "She's an extraordinarily compassionate person," says Patti Breitman, Kim's agent. Breitman and Kim, who met at a Vegetarians in Marin potluck, had no idea at first that they had something to offer each other: an incredible story, encouragement and help selling a book. At first, Kim says, she was reluctant to write a memoir, but Breitman gently talked her into submitting a book proposal. It drew an immediate response. "Virtually every publisher who read it wanted it," Breitman says. "One came back in less than 24 hours and said, 'Name a price.' That was the first time that ever happened to me." Kim, who had recently been named city editor at the Marin Independent Journal, continued working full time and wrote her book at night and on weekends. She sifted through the journals she had kept all her life and started to piece the morbid bits together. "It was pretty much, I'd come home from work, crash, wake up at 3, write for a few hours, roll up in a ball and cry. Then I'd shower and go to work," Kim says. "That entire process of writing the memoir was . . . oh my God, it was awful. So many times I wanted to give up. I thought, 'Is it worth it? Is it too much? Is it too painful?' " She disappeared for six months, says Kathy Hedgecock, a journalism teacher at the College of Marin and a good friend. " 'Stressful' doesn't even say it. She was really freaked out that someone wanted her to write a book. Then she was writing about her life and reliving it in some ways. It was very, very difficult." Kim slogged through, completing the manuscript a year after she began. "I wrote it like a journalist,' she says. "It's pretty spare." In a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, Andrea Behr wrote, "Surely she's a strong contender for the prize for the most miserable American childhood. It would be hard to imagine a worse one. But, like Frank McCourt in 'Angela's Ashes,' 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." Readers have had a visceral reaction to the book. Various adoption groups have shown great interest in Kim's story, despite the unforgiving description of her own adoption. Online, readers have posted reams of comments, peppered with words like "enthralling, touching, moving, fascinating, astonishing, compelling." "Looking back, I'm amazed at how adaptable and eager to please I was. I learned fairly fluent English in less than a week; how to play the piano in less than a month; and how to behave like the proper Christian daughter they wanted almost overnight. I was willing to do anything to win their approval. I desperately wanted to deserve their love." Nested in the overwhelmingly positive reader reviews, are some sharp criticisms. The facts don't seem to add up, a handful of readers complain. How could Kim possibly learn English in a week? Why does she carefully leave out dates? "My initial response is that it hurts me a lot," Kim says, in response. "To write a book in the first place is to hard. To make yourself so vulnerable. Then to be attacked and accused of lying is so painful. "Some people who have criticized the book have taken it personally. It certainly is not intended to be representative of Korean adoption or anything else. It's just my life." A life that some think would make a good movie, but though she has been approached, Kim isn't interested. "I believe in the innate integrity of books and people who read books," she says. "That isn't necessarily there in films. I wouldn't want what happened to my mother and the detritus of my life up on a screen for people to gawk at." In May, when the book was published, Kim quit her job at the Marin Independent Journal. After a book tour through , the and the , she returned to San Rafael to live a writerly life she never thought would be possible: sipping tea in the morning, writing all day. She could return to journalism -- the idea of exposing injustice is still seductive. But for now, she's living off her mid six-figure advance and working on her second book. Fiction this time. "Thank God," Kim says. "I'm never going to write about myself again." Despite the comfy advance, life is still fairly minimalist, Kim says. She's been in a relationship for two years. She's very close to her daughter, now 24 and a Web designer in San Francisco, and spends a large chunk of time with her each week. "I think I'm happy more than I'm sad," she says. "That's a big breakthrough for me. I feel hopeful a lot of times, excited a lot of the time. All that is really cool and new for me." One day, she would like to travel back to Korea. "If nothing else," she says, "I'd like to look at the same mountains I looked at with my mother and say goodbye to her on that same land." The winter of my life is frozen pain; the longing for my mother never dies. A Korean War Orphan Lives to Tell Her Story / A young girl survives a hellish situation in her native land, only to face more horrors in America. This is a photograph of one of the first relatively happy moments the author of this memoir had, after she had watched her grandfather and uncle kill her beloved mother in Korea and she was adopted by a screwed-up fundamentalist Christian couple in the United States. Right after the photo was taken, her adoptive parents got rid of the kittens without telling her. And so it goes in this heartbreaking story; Kim, now a journalist in Marin County, really did have 10,000 sorrows in her young life, and she seems to remember them all vividly. Surely she's a strong contender for the prize for the most miserable American childhood. It would be hard to imagine a worse one. But, like Frank McCourt in "Angela's Ashes," 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. I was in tears by the second page but didn't put it down until I finished it. Kim's mother was a young woman who left her village in Korea in the early '50s, went to the city and had an affair with a white American soldier. She became pregnant, he left, and she was forced to return to her village, where the shame of what she had done and the mixed race of her daughter made them both pariahs. They lived alone in a little hut on the outskirts of the village and scrabbled for subsistence by working in the rice fields. After her mother refused her family's command that she sell her daughter to another family as a servant, she seemed to know that the penalty for her disobedience would be death: "Omma grabbed me fiercely and crushed me to her body, pouring out a torrent of love in whispers. She told me over and over how precious I was, how beautiful and perfect. She told me she valued my life more than her own. She told me I was her beloved." That was the last real love and affection the little girl, who didn't know her own name or perhaps even have one, would get for many years. That night, as she watched from between the slats of a basket where she was hidden, her relatives stormed into their hut and hanged her mother. She wound up in an American missionary orphanage, where for seven months she lived in a cage-like crib that was too small to stretch out in. At one point a newborn orphan was placed in the crib with her and she was told to keep an eye on him. The next morning she awoke to find him dead. "I wept over and over for that baby. I never knew where he came from, but I thought of him as mine. He was unwanted and nameless, like me. He was completely helpless and at the mercy of others, like me. I felt that saving his life would somehow atone for not being able to save my mother's life. And when he died I was sure it was because of something I did or didn't do." She was so lonely that she instantly bonded with the nice man who transported her to America -- just because he looked into her eyes and smiled. "I think that any loving act, even if it's only momentary, has a limitless power for good," she writes. "A big part of the reason I feel that way is the memory I have of him." 8 confirmed dead, along with shooter, in downtown San Jose in VTA rail yard Priest holes and pirate ships: The secrets of Muir Beach's Pelican Inn Tahoe visitors are getting pulled over because of a new traffic rule Mountain lion breaks through window into Bay Area home, no one injured California is seeing a COVID-19 baby bust. What is causing it? Remembering Sublime singer Bradley Nowell 25 years after he died in an SF motel in the Outer Sunset Horoscope for Wednesday, 5/26/21 by Christopher Renstrom. When Kim expresses thoughts like that, they're more than homilies. They're soul-deep truths wrung painfully from suffering. In this case, the little girl was crushed when the nice man handed her over to a strange, loud man and woman -- her new parents -- at the airport and walked away. He never left her thoughts after that. Her new parents -- she always calls them Mom and Dad and never "my mother" or "my father" -- told her that her birth mother was a prostitute who had deserted her and would go to hell because she hadn't accepted Jesus as her savior. When she wept, missing her mother, they told her that weeping and fear were sinful: "(A)ny kind of emotion other than the Joy of the Lord was tantamount to blasphemy." When she did something they thought was wrong, such as not memorizing a Bible verse properly or being afraid of the dark, they would preach at her and spank her until she wept and asked forgiveness. They tape-recorded these sessions and played them back for amusement. "During the scenes where I was screaming or begging, my parents would chuckle and shake their heads at me. . . . as I got older I learned to laugh aloud at my tape-recorded misery." When she grew up, her father had all the tapes transferred to cassettes and gave them to her in a leather- bound portfolio -- as a Christmas gift. At school, although she was brilliant -- she learned the basics of English in a week and was put in a class with older children -- the Asian part of her ancestry made her as much of an outcast as the Caucasian part had in Korea. The one friend she had she lost because her parents insisted that she try to proselytize her. They made her do all the housework, and when her hateful, racist grandmother moved in with them, she had to wash the old woman's body in the bathtub and clean her dentures. At 17, Kim married a man who beat her for the first time a couple of hours after the wedding. He was soon diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, but she left him only after he beat her in front of their baby daughter. She didn't want her baby to see done to her mother what Kim had seen done to hers. Kim's parents accepted the breakup not because of the beatings but because she told them of his constant adultery. It was her love for her daughter, she writes, that kept her going. At a young age, she was more or less re-creating the life she'd led with her mother as a young child -- just the two of them, living for each other in their own tiny, loving world while Kim struggled to support them. The reader's jaw drops at the horrors this woman suffered, and it pretty much stays dropped throughout the book. But there's a lot more than horror here. Kim has managed to create love and beauty by facing her experiences and meditating over them, and she offers what she learned as a gift to any reader who toughs it out with her. TEN THOUSAND SORROWS. There is a Buddhist saying that each life is filled with 10,000 sorrows and 10,000 joys. In Kim’s first book, a grueling memoir of her childhood, one is blinded by the sorrows and left yearning for at least a hint of joy. During the Korean War, Kim's mother committed the ultimate sin of bearing a honhyol (a mixed-race child), who in the eyes of Korean society is worthless. To pay for her crime, Kim’s mother was killed by her own father and brother as little Elizabeth watched from a bamboo basket where she had been hidden. Kim's own life was spared, but she was abandoned at an abysmal Christian orphanage where she had to wait, alone and terrified, to be adopted. Kim was eventually taken in by a childless fundamentalist Christian couple in the US who abused her both mentally and physically. To make matters worse, Kim (with her half-Korean, half-Western features) was rejected by the midwestern community that she was forced to become a part of. Her parents eventually orchestrated her marriage to a man so abusive and controlling that it is a wonder she ever escaped—but Kim finally took control of her life and set off with her newborn daughter to make a fresh start. This did not come easy. She suffered through physical and emotional pain, poverty, depression, and failed relationships. After a while this litany of despair may begin to weigh heavily on the reader. Kim has an undeniably awe-inspiring story of survival to tell, but she tells it in such a reductionist manner that the reader is overwhelmed by events without having time to reflect on their deeper meaning. Kim liberally laces her text with her own poetry, as well as that of writers she admires, but even this does not allow her work to soar with the lyricism she is striving for. A fascinating, tragic tale, hampered by lackluster prose. Pub Date: May 16, 2000. ISBN: 0-385-49633-8. Page Count: 288. Publisher: Doubleday. Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010. Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000. Share your opinion of this book. Did you like this book? Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal. New York Times Bestseller. UNTAMED. by Glennon Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020. More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom. In her third book, Doyle ( Love Warrior , 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections —“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life- altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency. Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.