The Boat Not Taken: A North Korean Daughter and Her Mom’s Story (Betty; Might 2025) by Joanna Choi Kalbus is among the first titles from WTAW Press’ (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) new imprint, Betty, established by director and editor-in-chief Peg Alford Pursell particularly for books by ladies, with the purpose of showcasing the range of ladies’s voices.

Choi Kalbus’ memoir is a very apt alternative for the fledgling imprint; in her March 2024 Hippocampus Journal interview, Pursell defined, “I named Betty after my mom, who was a prolific reader.” I say apt, and fantastically so, as a result of The Boat Not Taken is the story of a mom and daughter, certain in a decent embrace by their traumatic, usually painful, shared previous—the lack of residence, household, and group, escaping North Korea following the Communist takeover, then leaving South Korea for the US when the narrator was a younger woman.

Within the introduction, Choi Kalbus first touches a theme that echoes all through—the gauzy, patchwork nature of reminiscence and the methods wherein we’re all, at occasions, unreliable narrators of our personal previous. She started writing about her mom, “my life’s historian,” within the aftermath of her loss of life in 1996.

Choi writes, “Solely then did I understand how a lot of my life was a type of folktale. Solely then did I understand how little I knew about her life and subsequently my very own. I started to grasp one thing was lacking from the image I had shaped of our life collectively.” From this realization—one which many who’ve misplaced family members have seemingly skilled—the writer started a journey to find the reality of her mom’s life, and by extension her personal.

Choi Kalbus’ narrative introduced me again to the myriad questions I by no means thought to ask my father earlier than his loss of life in 2011; just like the writer and her mom, he emigrated from the Philippines within the Nineteen Thirties by way of freighter, together with his older sister and Chinese language mom. And, just like the writer’s mom, my grandmother spoke no English, was born into gentility and had by no means labored “jobs” to help a household; she arrived in San Francisco with no husband and two half white kids. Now that it’s too late, I want I had listened extra and requested extra questions, about their lives as immigrants, outsiders; just like the writer, my father’s sister, my Aunt Ruth—older and extra outgoing than my father—seemingly served as translator, middleman and cultural ambassador for his or her mom. I can think about what their household of three could have skilled, but I’ll by no means know—their tales are piecemeal, fragments with big chunks lacking.

In The Boat Not Taken, the writer deftly, truthfully, and vividly items collectively the identified info of her widowed mom’s life, inserting what she discovers by analysis and household interviews, and, alongside the way in which, dissecting and inspecting her personal reminiscences—the recollections and psychological snap photographs captured with a toddler’s perspective and restricted understanding of the experiences and world her mom was pressured to navigate. The writer displays, “Are these reminiscences blended with creativeness and marinated in tales informed over time. My earliest recollections of my life in North Korea resemble a well-worn album of light images composed in a sporadic model.”

Whereas it’s clear that this devoted mom does all in her energy to take care of and shield her daughter, as refugees, their life after fleeing North Korea is certainly one of poverty, privation, threat, and hazard for a single girl—with out the safety of a husband and his household, in a tradition and time the place ladies are outlined and seen by way of their relationships.

When the narrator is 5, her mom is unable to take care of her. She is left at an orphanage. Reminiscences of this lonely, horrifying time are acute and vividly dropped at life. “Within the darkness, I heard a lady singing and the massive woman subsequent to me respiration by her nostril. I held my smooth bundle to my chest and lay on my left aspect, the identical place I had slept in with my mom. I hadn’t suckled her breast for a 12 months now however we nonetheless slept along with her proper arm beneath my head, which confronted her proper breast, and my proper hand pressed on her different breast. I clutched the bag tighter.”

The narrator had two brothers, although their expertise after fleeing North Korea was vastly totally different from hers. Male kids have been extra extremely valued than women. A youthful brother was positioned with family members, the older brother was away in school, whereas mom and daughter subsisted on their very own, sleeping in refugee camps and shacks, sharing a single serving of rice a day, working a number of demeaning jobs. The youthful brother predeceased his mom.

Like most compelling memoirs, and lots of novels, the narrator is on a journey of outer and internal discovery, the reader carried alongside by insights, surprises and discoveries. I received’t present any spoilers right here.

On a visit to Korea to burn her mom’s garments in her homeland (a Confucian ritual), the narrator hopes to reconnect along with her older brother and to search out solutions to the long-standing, hurtful and complicated estrangement between mom and son, brother and sister. This aloof, achieved older brother proves an ideal tour information, skilled and cordial; but he invitations no intimacies. Celebrating his birthday at a karaoke bar, the brother sings a well-recognized music, “. . . one my mom used to sing, a music in an atonal scale with a melody that was so unhappy, so haunting . . . “

“He sang the final stanza, sustaining the ultimate observe. So many birthdays our mom had, and had this son remembered even one? Not one card. Not one phone name. She had saved all of the playing cards she acquired in her lifetime. Just one postcard from her firstborn son. It appeared to have been despatched from Washington, D.C., displaying cherry blossoms in full bloom. There was no deal with or postmark, so it should have been enclosed in an envelope.”

The Boat Not Taken is the story of 1 girl who left Korea with a younger daughter, two arrivals in a brand new world. But Choi Kalbus’ loving tribute to her mom, her Omai, is far more than that; it’s a story of immigrant grit and fortitude, of a mom’s life in service of the subsequent technology, her lifeblood spent uplifting her kids and grandchildren. Like tens of millions of others who’ve sought new lives by emigrating to this nation—usually pushed by desperation, concern and necessity—the household and group, the land they left behind, is not a spot that may be returned to; it doesn’t exist within the ways in which as soon as made it residence. This sense of getting severed deep roots and discovering the soil in a brand new land at occasions unyielding and unwelcoming, is, I sense, true for a lot of immigrants, in generations previous, and at the moment.

The USA is and has lengthy been—for the reason that arrival of the primary missionaries and conquering Europeans—a nation of immigrants; preserving, honoring, by no means forgetting the tales of those American lives, is significant to understanding and appreciating who we’re as a nation and to embracing our basic variety.