This gorgeous book surprised me with its delicate and aching prose, that hits deep within brain and heart. I loved the ways that Koh examined relationships, kinship, belonging, otherness, etc.

A painful story of trauma, an eating disorder, and much more that I lost track of due to an abundance of pain.

The narration made me place myself in a position of detached involvement. I was detached as if half asleep while reading but also feeling the emotions. I felt this book more than understood it.

To be a teenage girl seems to necessarily mean having tension with your mother. But what if your mom wasn't there to be mad at? What if she was somewhere else entirely? This was the reality of Eun Ji Koh's experience, and (as it turns out), her own mother's as well. When Eun Ji was a teenager, her South Korean parents, despite being financially secure in their lives in California, decide to return to their native country for her father to take a better-paying job. Eun Ji and her brother, technically an adult, remain behind. What was supposed to be a two-year contract is renewed, and then renewed again. Throughout their separation, Eun Ji's mother writes her letters, which the teenager doesn't respond to, but many of which she keeps. These letters form the basis of her memoir, The Magical Language of Others.

It's a slim volume, only just over 200 pages, but it covers a lot of territory. She tells the story of two sets of her grandparents in South Korea, including her own mother's mother, who left home in the face of her husband's flagrant infidelity. And a once-abandoned daughter became a mother who left her own daughter behind. The letters Eun Ji's mother writes her from overseas are often heart-wrenching, her desperation to communicate her love to her daughter shining through. It is easy, though, to see why they might not have been read that way by Eun Ji at the time. She goes to visit her mother occasionally, taking a Japanese class during one of these trips, but the wounds run deep and Eun Ji falls into a depression. It is by winding up in a poetry class that she finally finds the thing that really brings her back to full engagement with the world.

It's obvious very quickly when reading this that Koh is a poet by trade. Her prose is spare and elegant, even as she writes about heartbreak and despair. But for me, I think this made for a book that didn't have the kind of impact it could have had. It was difficult to connect with Eun Ji, despite her very sympathetic perspective. Her pain is held at a remove. On the one hand, I'm not really a fan of narratives that wallow in misery, and expecting someone to write her own story in a way that focuses almost exclusively on unhappiness isn't what I'm after as a reader. On the other, though, if your memoir is about your struggle to reconcile yourself with your mother after she left you behind as a teenager, we have to buy in to the depth of your hurt, which means you have to let it break through every so often.

Sometimes when I'm not quite feeling a book, it's the book's "fault"...it's failed to be executed successfully. There's a little of that here, with Koh withholding the raw emotion that would have helped it take off. But then there are also books where I feel like I'm at fault as a reader for expecting it to be something it wasn't trying to be. And there's some of that here, too. There's no indication Koh is trying and failing to write something visceral, she just decided to go for restraint. It didn't work for me, it might work for others. I appreciated her lovely words, the way she worked with themes of language and translation and generational wounds. But I just never got into it the way I was hoping. I can't either recommend for or against reading this, this is one of those books that will just depend on whether it resonates with you personally.

A heart wrenching memoir a book of family relations heartbreak separation When the authors parents leave America to return to SouthKorea for work they eave the author and her brother behind ,We learn family history mother daughter relations emotions.This is a memoir that will stay with you linger in your thoughts highly recommend.#netgalley#ww.nortonbooks

Nearly every teen girl has probably had their own Home Alone fantasy at least once. As one’s age ticks upward, so does the restlessness for independence, particularly from one’s mother. She’s embarrassing. She’s restrictive. She seems out to make you unhappy. But like Kevin McCallister’s startling realization, it’s only when that figure is truly absent that a child begins to understand the power of a parent’s presence.

E.J. Koh didn’t have much say in the matter when her parents, residents of the United States for a decade, announced they were repatriating to South Korea for a too-good-to-pass-up job opportunity. Sure, our author could have gone with them, but with a life fairly well established in California by age 14, it wasn’t exactly a consideration that stayed too long in her mind. Nor did it seem to be a mandate from her parents, who arranged for her to live with her older brother until she was ready to go off to college.

In 2005, her parents had been gone nineteen months when she began receiving handwritten letters from her mother, all in Korean except for a few English words peppered in. These letters supplemented other communication Koh had with her mother, but seem to have added something different. Translated by the author and collected in her new memoir, The Magical Language of Others, they read like an extended, fussing hand, hoping to hold onto that mother-daughter bond across an ocean of distance. Though we find out immediately that the author never wrote her mother back, we know the letters held immense meaning:

Once a week, a letter came. I heard her voice, closer than it felt over the phone. I read them in my room, sitting at the desk, standing in the doorway, lying on the bed. I folded the letter and slipped it into its envelope. I placed it on my nightstand. I kept her close. I read a letter once or twice. Moving my lips, I read it again. Each time, I hoped to see something new, a word that I had missed. When I put it away, a panic returned. I took out the same letter and, with no thought to what I had read before, started over.

There is no dissection of the letters or of the author’s feelings about the absence of her mother in those critical years of development into womanhood. Indeed, the letters are presented mainly without comment and in between the author’s recollections of those years of physical estrangement. She is not forthright with her feelings, but the selected memories hint at her emotions: an intensive language course in Japan at age seventeen unveils a need for belonging as she bonds with her fellow students; a story of her family background leads to a questioning of identity; finally, her dive into the world of poetry hints at her lingering resentment and feelings of abandonment.

There is a whole shadow self lingering behind the words of this book; it only suggests the true pain and longing that the reader can feel in the pit of their stomach. There is no doubt that a second book’s pages could be filled with all that’s left unsaid here. The absence of such words gives this book a quiet, melancholic tone. Wounds kept hidden in this book do not interrupt its smooth, elegant prose, though it is the literary equivalent of sweeping matters under the rug.

The void left by the absence of such a discussion leads to the consideration of what the mother-daughter pair may have missed out on during those years. As a teenager, a girl may push her mother away, but relies upon her like an anchor, leaving a trail of guide rope as the girl pushes herself further and further outward into the world. The learning of herself comes in the distancing, while knowing she can always come home. For our author, home could not be her mother because her mother was not at home.

Meanwhile, Koh mentions in her introductory passage (which doubles as her translator’s note) that her mother, at times in her letters, dips into the third-person perspective, referring to herself as “Mommy.” As the author notices, “Mommy addresses a child, who remains one in her letters.” She suspects that these moments were her mother’s act of parenting. Perhaps the guilt of leaving behind her children and the loss of the maternal role compelled her mother to put to paper these thoughts and pieces of advice as an attempt to reclaim an identity lost with the move.

The harsh reality that the book exposes is that what is gone is truly gone; as is true in family connections and in sleep, there is no making up for what was lost. The mother-daughter clash that the majority of pairs experience, especially in the teenage years, may be brutal, but it hardens the bond between them and cements their love. As both the author and her mother recognize, she largely raised herself in those years and though she did so admirably, the feelings of floating adrift remains with her as an adult. The loss, like the letters, lingers.

The Magical Language of Others is a beautiful, sorrowful kind of wandering into the past. It is the kind of recollection that has spikes, the ones that, despite the passing years, still tear at us when we pull them out of the proverbial, or even literal, closet.

The Magical Language of Others by EJ Koh Is a beautiful written memoir. Koh’s parents left her and her older brother in California to move back to Korea. Through a series of letters written by her mother in Korean Koh sets out to translate them and gets a better understanding of why this happened, more like needed to happen.

Filled with the actual picture of the letters you won’t walk away from this book with tears in your eyes. Thank you, Tin House and Netgalley for gifting me a darc of this intimate story. over all I gave this book a 4/5 star.

E.J. Koh is a candid writer with a lyrical bent, and while I feel it is quite gracious and courageous of her to share the 49 letters from her mother, I also feel she introduced a lot of tantalizing or provocative inklings of stuff she's been through but then didn't explain what came of it. And most importantly, I think Koh is much too young to be subtitling this a memoir... unless I misunderstood and it's intended to be about her mother? Regardless of which member of this family it's centered on, I love the book for its layers of history and subterfuge that render one particular family member Japanese speaking and the rest Korean, the way that each culture perceives the other differently through generations, and that language and guilt and yearning can all combine to create such a wholly tangible message of love.

I did take issue with her continually translating what is clearly spelled out as "Mom" in these letters she's printed out, as "Mommy," i.e., "For her, she is always Mommy". But, maybe that's in Korean, which I don't read. I did identify with so much Japanese and California in this story, and as a mother, THIS: "Nobody loves you like your mother. Not your father, not your husband, and not your children. While your parents are alive, eat as much of their love as you can, so it can sustain you for the rest of your life."

This ebook is due out in January 2020, I thank NetGalley for the ARC.

It took me a long time to digest and finish this beautiful memoir, mostly because I have a similar experience of having had a long distance relationship with my mother that lasted for years. Author was lucky enough that she was able to communicate with her mother through letters and phone calls. Though she only shows and translates the letters from her mom, readers are able to see how the relationship between the mother and the daughter withstood the distance and time. We also learned the history of her family and the hardship they had gone through in the past and how all those influenced the mother and the daughter as persons they are today.