Eun Sung Kim

TRans. by Julie Moon

Excerpts from my mother’s story

Julie Moon is a writer and translator. A University Writing Instructor at Columbia University, she is currently a MFA Candidate in Nonfiction and Literary Translation. Her work has been published in Catapult, The Rumpus, The Brooklyn Rail, and EssayDaily, and she is the winner of a Poetry Prize from The Missouri Review.

Eun Sung Kim was born in 1965, in Nonsan, South Korea, to parents from Bukcheong, North Korea. After moving to Seoul in the late 1970s, Kim got a B.A. 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 4-volume 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”.