The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir Named One of the Best Books by Asian American Writers by Oprah DailyLonglisted for the PEN Open Book AwardThe Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing—in Eun Ji Koh—a singular, incandescent voice. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781951142278 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Tin House Books Publication Date: 01-19-2021 Pages: 224 Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)About the Author E. J. Koh is the author of The Magical Language of Others, a Washington State Book Award Winner, Pacific Northwest Book Award Winner, Association of Asian American Studies Book Award Winner, and PEN Open Book Award Longlist. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, a Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry Winner and the co-translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle. Koh’s poems, stories, and translations have appeared in AGNI, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Koh is a writer for the Pachinko TV series and consultant for the Little America TV series. She lives in Seattle, Washington.