Loved this book so much, I stayed up all night to finish it! It tells a different story of the Korean immigrant experience that so many go through, but aren’t listened to. It reminded me so much of my childhood, esp the swap meets!
Notable lines:
“How many hours had she spent, words stumbling like stones out of her mouth, trying to explain something in Korean to her mother? A utilities bill. How to work the remote control. A car insurance policy. And in those hours, Margot would always slip, somehow yelling at her mother, as her mother had often done to her as a child when she had misbehaved . . . ”
“How joyful, how abundant life could sometimes be-despite the disappointments, the tragedy. Every meal, even a somber one like this, was a celebration of what we had left, what remained on this earth to taste and feel and see.”
“How a book was kind of like a mouth. Did stories keep us alive or kill us with false expectations? It depended on who wrote them perhaps.”
“’We all wish that we could’ve done something differently, right? But it’s not really worth revisiting. We all could’ve done things differently . . . that’s the problem with memory.’”
“How human, how beautiful even our mistakes could be.”