Elizabeth Kim Biography

Unflinching in her narration Elizabeth Kim recounts a story so riveting that her audiences can capture the full power of what it means to transcend terror and overcome sorrow. Chronicled in O Oprah Winfrey’s magazine her best-selling novel beautifully portrays the memoirs of her life as a honhyol a mixed-race child who was subjected to watching her mother murdered at the hands of her grandfather and uncle in a disturbingly common practice referred to as “honor killing.”
As the child of an illicit union between a Korean mother and an American father Kim was born into a culture that didn’t recognize her as a person. Upon refusal to sell this honhyol daughter into a lifetime of servitude Kim peeked out from her hiding place as her sole parent was hung from a rafter: “All I could see through the bamboo slats were her bare feet dangling in midair. I watched those milk-white feet twitch almost with the rhythm of the Hwagwan-mu dance and then grow still.” Left to die in a rice paddy Kim ended up in an orphanage staring through the bars of a crib until she was adopted by a childless Fundamentalist pastor and his wife and transported to the United States.
Unfamiliar with Western customs and language wholly terrified that she would be “sent back” if she wasn’t “good enough” “American enough” Kim was plagued by constant worry. Just as her American features marked her as an unwelcome outsider in rural Korea her Korean features doomed her to be a foreigner in her rural American town. Replacing life in her adoptive parents’ home with a physically abusive marriage Kim found the strength to do what her mother could not do for her. With her newborn daughter in tow Kim ran away.

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