Unveiling Secrets Across Borders: A North Korean Daughter’s Heartbreaking Journey in "The Boat Not Taken"
“He sang the last stanza, sustaining the final note. So many birthdays our mother had, and had this son remembered even one? Not one card. Not one telephone call. She had kept all the cards she received in her lifetime. Only one postcard from her firstborn son. It appeared to have been sent from Washington, D.C., showing cherry blossoms in full bloom. There was no address or postmark, so it must have been enclosed in an envelope.”
The Boat Not Taken is the story of one woman who left Korea with a young daughter, two arrivals in a new world. Yet Choi Kalbus’ loving tribute to her mother, her Omai, is much more than that; it is a story of immigrant grit and fortitude, of a mother’s life in service of the next generation, her lifeblood spent uplifting her children and grandchildren. Like millions of others who have sought new lives by emigrating to this country—often driven by desperation, fear and necessity—the family and community, the land they left behind, is no longer a place that can be returned to; it doesn’t exist in the ways that once made it home. This sense of having severed deep roots and finding the soil in a new land at times unyielding and unwelcoming, is, I sense, true for many immigrants, in generations past, and today.
