I'm intensely grateful for every fragile instant of contentment.' But because we are ultimately alone, and because life is so hard, every moment of beauty, every belly laugh, and every kiss are powerful and precious. 'We all struggle along through the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows of our lives. The only difference is that children put up for adoption in the past few decades are more likely to be those born out of wedlock than honhyols.īut overall, the book is uplifting. Incidentally, Korea is still 'fertile ground' for 'forgotten children', even till this day. There were so many forgotten children, the product of brief liaisons between soldiers on their way through, and women on their way to hell.' Set in the aftermath of the Korean War, the book is about an orphan - known derogatorily as honhyol (or non-person, mixed race, animal) - who was shunned by society, and later adopted by American parents.Īs Kim pointed out: 'If you were a childless couple and you didn't mind having an Asian son or daughter, Korea was fertile ground at that time.

And I had the book Ten Thousand Sorrows with me to while away the time when it was too depressingly cold to walk, and when we were not jokingly pointing accusatory fingers at each other asking 'whose idea was it to come to Shanxi in winter?'Īnyway, I digress. That had since become a joke among the three of us. Mary was so cold that she stepped on a tiny piece of cardboard in the bus hoping that the flimsy piece of object would provide her foot with extra warmth. The three of us spent Christmas in Taiyuan (太原), Shanxi's provincial capital. A few days before Christmas I set off in the freezing winter from Beijing to Shanxi (山西) with Mary and Ay Shin.

A month earlier, I seemed to have fallen in love. My first introduction to the seven sins of Korean women was when I read Elizabeth Kim's Ten Thousand Sorrows at the end of 2001.

Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim