Kim was born in South Korea to a Korean mother and an American father. She was conceived most likely after the :wikisource:Korean Armistice Agreement|Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the fighting in the Korean War. According to Kim's memories, her father abandoned her mother, who was forced to return to her hometown alone and pregnant to seek assistance from her family. After Kim's birth, she lived with her mother in a hut at the edge of town, and worked in the rice fields. When Kim was a child, as she recalls it, her mother was killed by her grandfather and uncle in what she would later describe as an "honor killing". Kim herself was left at a Seoul orphanage, with no record of her original name or her family. Eventually, she was adopted by a minister and his wife and given the name Elizabeth. After Kim is adopted, she is held against by racism in San Rafael, California.
''Ten Thousand Sorrows''
Writing and reactions
Kim was working as a journalist at the Marin Independent Journal and living in San Rafael, California, when literary agent Patti Breitman approached her about the possibility of writing a memoir. Kim was initially reluctant, but Breitman slowly convinced her of the idea; Breitman herself says that publishers were quite enthusiastic about the idea, and one even replied to her proposal within a day, simply asking her to "name a price". In the end, Kim received an advance of hundreds of thousands of dollars for her book; when it was published in May 2000, Kim quit her job at the MIJ to tour in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Andrea Behr, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, praised Kim's writing, comparing her book to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and stating that "she has the gift of telling her story with such clear-sighted, humble honesty, and such compassion, that it's just as fascinating and compulsively readable as it is devastating". It was also reviewed favorably in O, Oprah Winfrey's magazine. Others were less positive. Salon reviewer Brigitte Frase described Kim's book as "brutal", "haunting and disturbing", and "an act of revenge", ending her review by stating that "I have read it so that you won't have to". Some critics suspected Kim's book of being fictional rather than autobiographical. It was particularly controversial in the Korean American community, some of whose members accused Kim of "exploiting the issue of biraciality" and "trying to take advantage of the current interest in autobiographies, particularly those that involved violence against women". However, other Korean Americans rose to defend the book, and indeed B. R. Myers, who lambasted what he described as the book's "ludicrous inaccuracies" about Korean culture, found that people often dismissed his assessment of Kim's book because he was not Korean and thus presumed to have no authority to speak about Korean culture. Additional reviews available offline.
Editions and translations
Ten Thousand Sorrows was published in the following editions:
Audiobook :
United Kingdom edition:
It was translated into eleven languages. The below list gives unofficial translations of the foreign-language titles where the original title was not preserved.
Chinese:
Dutch:
Danish:
Finnish:
German:
Hungarian:
Korean:
Turkish:
Italian:
Japanese:
Polish:
Further editions were published in two of those languages:
