Title & author
What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Synopsis
What We Kept to Ourselves explores the American Dream and its costs—a question that many choose to not grapple with despite its urgency. Yet Kim’s characters don’t have the choice to ignore the question—they, like so many others, are the victims of that cost.
Who should read this book
Fans of Hala Alyan and Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman
What we’re thinking about
Art as a medium for engaging with and creating change
Trigger warning(s)
Racism, police violence, addiction, homelessness, abortion, loss of a parent (see all)
In an interview with Shondaland, author Nancy Jooyoun Kim said: “I was interested in exploring how [the American] dream intersects with the reality [of] exclusion and erasure…What are we sacrificing for this, and is the cost we’re paying too high? Is the human cost too high?” The question is, as she mentions, explored throughout her second novel, What We Kept to Ourselves, and it's one that most Americans, especially many of our government officials and representatives, have not grappled with, despite its urgency. Yet Kim’s characters don’t have the choice to ignore the question—they, like so many others, are the victims of that cost.
The book follows a dual timeline, flipping between 1999 in the wake of the disappearance of Sunny, mother and wife, and 1977, as Sunny navigates pregnancy and immigration. After immigrating to California from Seoul to be with her new husband John, she longs for purpose, finding companionship in a man named RJ. Their friendship deepens and evolves over the years, the duo developing an understanding of shared experiences and humanity. And we see the impact on Sunny, her relationship with her husband, and her relationship with her children, as she grows to want more for them and for herself, a desire that extends beyond the U.S.’s limiting prescription: The American Dream.
Kim doesn’t shy away from depicting the truth of the so-called dream; she paints it as one that pits historically and systemically marginalized peoples against each other, whether that be because of race, gender, wealth, etc. “He’d prove to his children that RJ, accident or not, deserved his lot in life…Lazy and reckless. [But] John was the hero. This was his story after all” (Kim, 110). The dream has told Sunny and her husband John that to be successful, they simply have to keep their head down and keep working. But Sunny can’t help but question that as she sees her husband’s shift in character, or RJ’s trajectory from an employed former veteran to an unhoused man battling addiction at no fault of his own.
Kim especially shows how Sunny and John’s children struggle to define themselves in their parents’ shadows, and Sunny often reflects on kids that are casually considered byproducts of war: “Children everywhere deserved to laugh and cry and storm, to call the entirety of the planet their home. The borders that divided us meant nothing to them at all” (92). As we near a year of the Israeli government’s current escalated attempt to eradicate Palestine, it’s hard not to see Sunny’s reflections as a mirror image of what’s occurring now. The U.S. once again defends its actions as a need to protect democracy, simply another excuse to send money to a government systemically oppressing an “othered” community. And, as Kim notes in her interview, if not now, when will the cost (ever, finally) be too high?
What We Kept to Ourselves is that rare book that makes you nod and underline on every page, seeing the story reflected all around you in direct and indirect ways. “I’m interested in storytelling and the obligations we have to other people in the stories we tell about ourselves broadly…Art is ultimately an expression of humanity that is worth saving,” Kim continues in her interview. Between the author’s expression, RJ’s quest for journalism, Sunny’s painting, and their children’s attempt to uncover and potentially share their stories, the novel encapsulates humanity at its ugliest, and also at its purest. It’s one that urges its readers to not just absorb what the author has written, but to close its pages and go on to push for change.
““...she still had time to be that person, the woman she had always wanted, or wanted to become.””
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