Ten Thousand Sorrows

Book excerpt: A shocking, moving and beautifully written Korean woman's memoir. "I don't know how old I was when I watched my mother's murder, nor do I know how old I am today." So opens this beautiful, sad and uplifting memoir. The illegitimate daughter of a Korean peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth spent her early years as a social outcast because of the Korean taboo against the mixing of races. Ostracised by her mother's family and village, she and her mother were regularly pelted with stones on their way home from the rice fields. Yet because of her mother's love and calm acceptance of fate, inspired by a deep Buddhist faith, there was a tranquil happiness in the intense and close bond between mother and daughter-until the day Elizabeth's grandfather and uncle came to punish her mother for the dishonour she had brought the family, and hanged her in front of her daughter. Elizabeth was dumped in an orphanage in Seoul where the orphans were neglected, deprived of all affection, and abused. After some time she was adopted by an American couple. Brought to America she found herself surrounded by fanaticism and prejudice: her strict Christian fundamentalist parents forbade her to remember her own mother and the traumas of her past, and she suffered racial discrimination at school. At the age of 18 she was married off by her parents to a man who turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and who continued the abuse. After her own daughter was born, she ran away, living in poverty and isolation with her little daughter and thus mirroring her past life in Korea. Eventually, she made a life for herself, found a career in journalism and returned to her Buddhist faith. Elizabeth's mother had always told her that life was made up of ten thousand joys as well as ten thousand sorrows, and Elizabeth finally found a way to savour these joys, as well as the courage to return to Korea and exorcise the demons of her past. A first-person account, Ten Thousand Sorrows is beautifully written and has an immediacy and power to shock and engage that makes it unforgettable.