From Publishers Weekly
"One day I was Kim Ji-yun growing up in Seoul, Korea; the next day I was Catherine Jeanne Robinson living in Salt Lake City, Utah." So begins this memoir from first-time author Robinson. Her tireless search for her birth parents is driven by her memories of them and the photo referred to in the title, a snapshot of Kim Ji-yun with her mother and grandmother taken only moments before the seven-year-old boarded a plane bound for Salt Lake City. Even memoir-saturated readers will be drawn in by her description of this devastating leave-taking: "[My grandmother] hands me a roll of my favorite crackers and the folder of paper dolls my mother bought me after our last trip to the bathhouse. She gives me a slight push forward... I do as instructed and follow the blue cap and clicking heels away from my mother and grandmother." When Robinson returns to Seoul as an adult (having spent a happy if monotonous childhood in Utah), she easily reconnects with her father and half-siblings. But the trail to her mother turns cold several times before Robinson realizes that she may never know for sure whether her mother died in a car accident or relocated to Chicago. Meanwhile, she struggles to bridge the massive cultural gap separating her from her father. She ultimately decides that her true family consists of her patient American husband and her spunky adoptive mother. Fortunately, the journey to this unsurprising conclusion is a fascinating labor of love, populated by oddball relatives and fueled by banquets of carefully described Korean food.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
When Robinson was seven years old, her mother and grandmother put her on a plane from Korea to America to be adopted by American parents. Raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Robinson grows up in a caring (though somewhat troubled) family but doesn't learn about her Korean heritage. At the age of 27, Robinson decides to seek out her parents. An initial brief visit is fruitful--she meets her birth father. A year later, Robinson returns to Korea with her husband, hoping to find her mother. But the search for her mother is not nearly as easy, and during their yearlong stay, Robinson discovers disconcerting truths about her father. She also meets her half-siblings and her father's first wife and learns her father has two other children. As her father and brother tell her conflicting stories about her mother's fate, Robinson must contend with the realization that she might never find her mother. Robinson does an excellent job of showing just how difficult the search can be, filled with exhilarating successes and heartbreaking failures, in this moving memoir.
Kristine HuntleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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