Unveiling Secrets Across Borders: A North Korean Daughter’s Heartbreaking Journey in "The Boat Not Taken"
In the introduction, Choi Kalbus first touches a theme that echoes throughout—the gauzy, patchwork nature of memory and the ways in which we are all, at times, unreliable narrators of our own past. She began writing about her mother, “my life’s historian,” in the aftermath of her death in 1996.
Choi writes, “Only then did I realize how much of my life was a sort of folktale. Only then did I realize how little I knew about her life and therefore my own. I began to understand something was missing from the picture I had formed of our life together.” From this realization—one that many who have lost loved ones have likely experienced—the author began a journey to discover the truth of her mother’s life, and by extension her own.
