About the Book
On the night Janie waits for her sister Hannah to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.
Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.
Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.
About the Author :
Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, Illinois, during one of the worst blizzards on record, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. She was named one of Granta's New Voices and is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award-winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.
Review :
Forgotten Country is often wrenching, but Chung's graceful writing-replete as it is with delicately rendered family affections, snippets of Korean folklore, and an unerring sense of storytelling-lifts the tragedies into the realm of lovely melancholia. The pain Janie feels with all of her discoveries isn't enviable, but the peace that the hard-swallowed wisdom brings her is touching and true.
-- "Minneapolis Star-Tribune"
[A] lovely, elegiac novel...Both heartbreaking and redemptive.
-- "Boston Globe"
A heartbreaking debut novel that will leave you quietly shattered in its wake. Forgotten Country is an exquisitely rendered account of a Korean immigrant family divided by two sisters, two countries, and a curse that spans generations. Catherine Chung has written a haunting meditation on family loyalty and the lingering legacy of war.
-- "Julie Otsuka, author of The Buddha in the Attic"
A spare, haunting tale of loss, yearning, and discovery.
-- "Reuters"
An inexpressibly beautiful story...Chung does a masterful job of weaving the past with the present, incorporating mythology and memory in ways that both captivate and haunt...If you read one novel this spring, let it be Forgotten Country. I cannot overstate the joy this book brings.
-- "Rumpus"
Beautiful...A masterful exploration of generational tensions within a Korean family on two continents...Chung is a remarkable writer, willing to dig fearlessly under her characters' surface motivations. Her style is elegant but never clinical, and her judicious use of Korean folktales amplifies the themes of sacrifice, duty, and expectation.
-- "BookPage"
Chung delves with aching honesty and beauty into large, difficult questions-the strength and limits of family, the definition of home, the boundaries (or lack thereof) between duty and love-within the context of a Korean experience. Chung's limpid prose matches her emotional intelligence.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
Chung indelibly portrays a Korea viciously divided but ever bound to history, myth, and hope.
-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"
Gorgeous...A heartbreaking story about sisters, family, and keeping traditions alive.
-- "People"
In this beautiful debut novel...Woven with tender reflections, sharp renderings of isolation, and beautiful prose...Chung simultaneously shines light on the violence of Korean history, the chill of American xenophobia, and the impossibility of home in either country.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
It is a rare novel-debut or otherwise-that can sing at once with such tenderness and ferocity, with such intense feeling and exquisite restraint. Forgotten Country is just that book, poetically crafted, shimmering with hard-won emotion, and wholly absorbing. A superb performance.
-- "Chang-rae Lee, author of The Surrednered"
Luminous and surprising...[Chung's] voice is fresh, her material rich, and Forgotten Country is an impressive, memorable debut.
-- "San Francisco Chronicle"
Moving among emotions, from reserved to exuberant, and from easy joy all the way to devastating pain and loss, Chung's superb debut examines the twin hearts of cruelty and compassion between sisters in particular and family in general...This elegantly written, stunningly powerful, simply masterful first novel should earn Chung many fans, especially among those who enjoy Amy Tan, Eugenia Kim, Lisa See, and Chang-Rae Lee.
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
The unflinchingly honest examination of grief, anger, familial obligation, and love gives the novel a compelling emotional core.
-- "New Yorker"
