The Boat Not Taken: A North Korean Mother and Her Daughter

Desperate for her daughter's safety during the Communist takeover of North Korea, Joanna Choi's mother left her in a Seoul orphanage. She retrieved her months later to return to their once-tranquil hamlet, but the boatman on the returning ship refused to let the pair board. Joanna and her beloved Omai (mother) became immigrants in mid-twentieth century California, whose streets were supposedly paved with gold, but whose reality was one of hardship, poverty, and anti-Asian discrimination. A lyrical, often humorous memoir, THE BOAT NOT TAKEN is also the story of a divided Korea. Above all it is a love letter to an extraordinary woman: an independent widow fiercely devoted yet destructively deceptive to her child, whose shattering secret, uncovered after her death, shakes the author's sense of identity.