What We Kept to Ourselves

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Genres: Asian American; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

This timely and surprising novel about a family’s search for answers following the disappearance of their mother from the New York Times bestselling author Nancy Jooyoun Kim explores “immigration, identity, love, and loss. A gorgeous, thrilling read” (Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author).

1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever.

1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but their very lives at risk.

Both “an intricately crafted mystery and a heart-wrenching family saga” (Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author), What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores what it means to dream in America.

Release date: October 10, 2023

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

1999
With his girlfriend’s T-shirt draped over his face, Ronald bathed in her favorite scent, Juniper Breeze. The perfection of that evergreen was unlike the seasonal high-school fragrance variations on American desserts—peppermint sticks and gingerbread and sugar cookies.

His parents never baked; ovens were for storing pots and pans. Many of the immigrant kids, or the children of immigrants like himself, who came from predominantly Latino and Asian families, didn’t have homes filled with pies or cupcakes. Yet everyone at school wanted to smell the same way, longed for the comfort of some common nostalgia, whether it belonged to them and their histories or not. But comfort to him smelled of his mother in the kitchen, her hands in plastic gloves, massaging red pepper flakes, salt, a dash of white sugar, garlic, and saeujeot into the chopped leaves of a napa cabbage. He would stand beside her at the counter, and every time she taste-tested the kimchi, she’d place a child’s bite-sized portion in his mouth, careful not to deposit the scarlet paste on his face, her plastic gloves crinkled on his lips. She’d ask, “What do you think?”

But nobody in America celebrated the smell of kimchi. The only non-Korean he knew who actually loved kimchi was his girlfriend Peggy, who was Filipina and stopped at the Korean market every time she was in town, where she’d load up on her favorite banchan—kkakdugi, seasoned spinach, and jangjorim.

A week ago last Friday, Ronald had strummed his fingers against the warmth of Peggy’s stomach, along the bottom edge of her pale pink bra with the tiniest bow between her breasts, as his mouth touched the cup of her perfect navel. At first she flinched at the coldness of his fingers, then smirked, her eyes closed in pleasure. He kissed her lips, which were smooth and small and ripe, the color of berries.

They had met back in middle school in Hancock Park, where her family had lived about two to three miles away from him yet worlds apart, with its distinctive multimillion-dollar residences, formal hedges, country club, and healthy white people. But her family had fled four years ago to La Cañada for the obvious—the lack of crime and homelessness, the better schools, the serene isolation of the foothills by the Angeles National Forest, and the full amenities of neighboring Pasadena and Glendale. Her father was a doctor, and her mother, some kind of manager or administrator at the VA.

And he loved her. Peggy Lee Santos. They loved each other still. Even though he could not follow her to the fancy places she would go, the private universities that she researched with her seemingly infinite hours on AOL, he would drive to the end of the world for her in his father’s beat-up, ugly Eldorado.

Pots and pans clattered like sad cymbals less than ten feet from his door in the kitchen where his father prepared dinner. Frustrated, Ronald pulled Peggy’s T-shirt off his face and switched on his desk lamp, washing in glare the import-car posters—images of shiny modified Hondas flanked by models—around his bed. He didn’t even know why he had these posters anymore. For a little while, before he could actually drive, he had been interested in cars—the speed, the acceleration, the women—but now these images, curling at the corners, functioned only as distractions to cover the emptiness of the dirty white walls.

In a photo that his older sister Ana had framed for him on his desk, Ronald and his mother posed after his middle school graduation. Her face glowed as she clutched him with manicured fingers around his shoulders. She never had the time to do her nails, but she’d painted them that morning in front of her vanity. He remembered how much pride she exuded that day, but he could also sense—because he and his mother always had this way between them—her sadness over his growing up so fast.

How embarrassed he had felt that day beside her, as if he was too grown to be babied by his mother. But what he would give to hold her hand now. How much they could say to each other without words, how much they knew about each other in a squeeze of the shoulder, a quiet observation of one another through an open door, a mirror, a glance. His father, on the other hand, had always been unknowable, opaque, a dull stone worn smooth by time.

He didn’t believe his father’s claim that she was dead. There was no body. There was no proof.

Ronald had the itch to log on to see if he could find Peggy or any of his friends. Although they had already made plans to meet up in Pasadena tonight, he needed an escape now. But his father always got angry when he clogged up the phone line before nine p.m. Who knew who could call the house? They should all be available—just in case. But his father never acknowledged for whom or what they had been waiting.

Instead, their lives were a constant away message.

His father had set the breakfast nook for dinner—paper napkins, metal chopsticks, spoons. They hadn’t used the dining room table since his mother disappeared. Ronald slid onto the bench in front of the oxtail soup, the meat and bone and mu which had simmered for hours last night in a garlicky salt-and-pepper broth. Steam delicately painted the air with the rich and oily smell of gelatin and beef. Even if his father underseasoned and never bothered to brown anything, time and low heat performed most of the work.

“Did you sell all the Christmas stuff at the shop?” Ronald asked.

“What, the garlands?” John set his bowl of rice in front of Ronald, then winced as he bent to sit.

“The poinsettias. The ones you were making such a big deal about.”

“Yeah, yeah. Almost gone. More come in the morning,” his father said.

The soup was too hot, so instead Ronald sampled the baechu kimchi that his father bought. Without his mother, no one bothered to make kimchi at home. His mother would prepare jars and jars that they’d eat from almost every night, which his sister Ana found to be repetitive and dull. Sure, Ronald craved cheeseburgers and fast food too, but Ana claimed to dislike all the spice, and she hated the chopsticks, always using a fork instead. She had to make everything some kind of protest. No wonder why she liked Berkeley.

“Can I take the car out tonight?” Ronald asked.

“How long?”

“Couple hours.” He spooned the tender meat off the knobby bones, which he discarded onto his napkin.

“Your homework?” his father asked.

“It’s Friday.” Ronald hated his father’s voice—the graininess from all his years of smoking, the heaviness of the tone, the accent, which wasn’t quite Korean but distinctly foreign. His sister had once explained that since their father had immigrated in the early sixties, he’d picked up his accent from speaking English with Chinese Americans, Black customers, and Jewish shopkeepers who were then prevalent in the areas of South LA where he’d worked. But whatever the reason, his father’s accent always embarrassed Ronald. He was embarrassed for his father. His mother could hardly speak English, but he preferred her voice to his whenever she tried. She could play off anything through her tact and charm, her sense of humor. Her laugh, a ho, ho, ho, which she covered with her hand.

“And?” his father asked.

“Can I borrow the car?” Ronald said as clearly as possible.

His father sucked the meat from between his teeth. “Bring the car back before midnight.” His purplish lips frowned. “No drink. No smoke. No pregnant, uh, okay?”