Family bound in secrets
Family secrets, while often the knotty stuff of talk therapy sessions, comprise the compelling and often uplifting through line of Eugenia Kim’s new novel, The Kinship of Secrets. This is the story of a Korean family before and after the Korean War — the Forgotten War. Kim shows us how this virtually overlooked war catalyses one family’s secret choices, hidden sacrifices, papered-over disappointments, unsayable emotion and untold strength.
Based in part on Kim’s own history, the novel is about a family that is separated for 15 years. Parents Najin and Calvin Cho and young daughter Miran leave Korea for Washington, DC while another young daughter, Inja, stays behind in Seoul to be raised by her grandparents and uncle.
On its face, the book is about the hardships this family endures while the war and then US immigration laws put up obstacle after obstacle to their reunification. But the real story is not so much the family’s separation and attempts at reunion — gripping as those are. What really tugs at us is the way Kim slowly reveals, just as the two young sisters gradually come to realise themselves, that family bonds matter in ways that might not be entirely evident at first glance, and family secrets, while difficult and even heart-rending, can also be conduits for a powerful love and a deeply felt connection.
During desperate times, keeping and sharing secrets becomes a ritual of attachment and a profound expression of love for this family.
The more Inja learns about the choices her family has made, the more she is aware of all that has been left unsaid. And it’s this recognition that opens the sisters’ eyes to what it means to be connected as a family. As Inja is asked to keep secrets, she finds that taking in these barely acknowledged truths opens her up in ways she hadn’t expected: “She thought about all the family secrets they held on this side of the world and wondered what secrets her family in America kept from her, and if she’d ever learn about them. She was aware of a strange kind of power one gained from holding secrets, and how confidences begat a kind of selfconfidence — how the power of secrets required an inner strength and maturity of discernment to keep them hidden.”
As Inja and Miran come to recognise, secrets can, in fact, bring a family closer together, and the truth is not always the most direct route to intimacy or compassion. Often what remains unsaid in this novel is what carries the most weight.
The Kinship of Secrets shows us what life might have been like during a war that has in some ways remained unsayable, even forgotten. Just as the novel writes an often unwritten war, so the novel’s family revises and reframes their personal histories to better understand and acknowledge their abiding love for each other.