My Mother’s Story, Vol. 2 Chapter 6

Essays Reportage Marginalia Interviews Poetry Fiction Videos Everything

Since the new government promised land reform, the have-nots in your father’s village buckled over with joy, while the landed were bewildered

By Eun Sung Kim, Julie Moon

Eun Sung Kim

Fiction | Land, North Korea, communism, korea, land reform
November 18, 2020

The following is a translated excerpt from Eun Sung Kim’s four-volume graphic novel series My Mother’s Story, translated by Julie Moon.

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Eun Sung Kim was born in 1965, in Nonsan, South Korea. Kim got a BA in psychology and studied graphic design in graduate school. Kim started drawing cartoons for the first time when she was forty years old. In 2004, she published the illustrated children’s book, What Probably Happened While Auntie Was Asleep. Her series My Mother’s Story, based on interviews with her mother, became a national bestseller in 2019, with novelist Young-Ha Kim calling the series a “masterpiece of our time, showing that we are, each of us, modern history itself.”

Julie Moon is a writer and translator. A writing instructor at Columbia University, she is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction and literary translation. Her work was been published in Catapult, The Rumpus, the Brooklyn Rail, and Essay Daily, and she is the winner of a poetry prize from the Missouri Review.