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What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Historical fiction

What We Kept to Ourselves

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

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Quick take

Follow one Korean-American family moving between ‘70s and ‘90s LA as they grapple with the meaning of home and dreams.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, 400

    400+ pages

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

  • Illustrated icon, Immigration

    Immigration

Synopsis

1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children, Anastasia and Ronald, than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever about the stranger’s history and possible connections to their mother.

1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but their very lives at risk.

Both a riveting page-turner and moving family story, What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores the consequences of secrets between parents and children, hus­bands and wives. It is the story of one unforgettable family’s search for home when all seems lost, and a powerful meditation on identity, migration, and what it means to dream in America.

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Get an early look from the first pages of What We Kept to Ourselves.

What We Kept to Ourselves

1999

The night he found the body behind the loquat tree in his yard, John had driven home from work like on any other evening, weighed down by the usual worries. These troubles had become so familiar that he never questioned them anymore, and because he never shared them with anyone, they would forever go unchallenged. It was his misery after all.

These days his concerns hinged on the apocalyptic flavor of the moment—Y2K, or the Millennium Bug—like a futuristic disease or a line dance at a wedding. How could John protect his two children from something he didn’t understand? Asteroids and floods, all that biblical stuff, made more sense than technology, this internet, which was spooky, invisible, and everywhere at once.

But they weren’t even children anymore. His daughter Ana was already an adult, a college graduate living in Berkeley—leafy streets crunching underfoot like granola in the fall and dimly lit coffee shops with dogs snoozing at people’s feet—less than four hundred miles away, but much too far in his mind. And his son Ronald had already finished half his senior year in high school.

The house was quiet with them no longer on the phone, vaporized by this thing called email and AOL. After John had spent over a year saving up for the Packard Bell PC tower, all he could hear now from his son’s bedroom were the robotic chirps and static fuzz of the dial-up, an occasional burst of laughter, his fingers chicken-pecking the keys. Their thoughts and feelings now traveled in wires, through air, like ghosts.

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Why I love it

“What was love but a ripeness of unexpected feeling, a rush to dedicate oneself, to kneel at the altar of another’s well-being without losing, but in the process, gaining another self?”

How well do we really know the people we’re closest to? This question is deeply explored in Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s What We Kept to Ourselves, a novel that reads as a gripping mystery enfolded within a family drama.

Here, we meet Sunny and John, an isolated Korean-American couple whose marriage has worn thin in the struggles of immigration and parenthood. When Sunny disappears one winter day, leaving behind her teenaged children, Ronald and Ana, John must grapple with his wife’s betrayal, along with his own culpability in their family’s dissolution.

A year after the disappearance, John stumbles upon a dead, unhoused man in the family’s yard bearing a letter with Sunny’s name on it. This discovery prompts a winding search through time, laced with treachery and moments of unexpected tenderness. As the secrets unfurl, we learn about Sunny’s inner life, teeming with rich ambitions beneath her exterior as a housewife and a mother. We begin to piece together a story that spans continents, unexpectedly stitching together two families longing for connection.

What We Kept to Ourselves is an abiding testament to the power of human empathy, even within hurdles of language, age, and race. It’s a story I won’t forget any time soon.

Member ratings (407)

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Historical fiction
View all
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
The Women
The Lion Women of Tehran
Husbands & Lovers
Shelterwood
A Thousand Times Before
All We Were Promised
Spitting Gold
The Seventh Veil of Salome
The Mayor of Maxwell Street
The Great Divide
The Storm We Made
The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard
Lessons in Chemistry
The Frozen River
What We Kept to Ourselves
Take My Hand
The Last Russian Doll
The First Ladies
The House Is On Fire
River Sing Me Home
The Attic Child
Malibu Rising
The Book of Longings
Hester
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
The Nightingale
Daisy Jones & The Six
The Lincoln Highway
The Secret Book of Flora Lea
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
The Circus Train
Peach Blossom Spring
Hang the Moon
Booth
The Good Left Undone
The Perishing
The Postmistress of Paris
The Family
Things We Lost to the Water
The Spectacular
Still Life
Send for Me
The Magnolia Palace
The Bookbinder
China Room
This Tender Land
Atomic Love
All the Light We Cannot See
The Vanishing Half
Outlawed
The Four Winds
Independence
The Fountains of Silence
Libertie
Queen of Thieves
The Great Believers
The Clockmaker's Daughter
A Gentleman in Moscow
The Great Alone
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
Rules of Civility
Circling the Sun
The Moor's Account
Jacqueline in Paris
Don't Cry for Me
The Christie Affair
Bloomsbury Girls
The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle
Bronze Drum