Tell Me the Dream Again: Reflections on Family, Ethnicity, and the Sacred Work of Belonging

Starred review. “I’ve always been caught between worlds . . . struggling to find a firm place to land,” writes Jun of negotiating a biracial identity in this stirring debut. The daughter of a Korean mother and a white father, Jun recalls how, as a kid, she’d think of purging the fridge of kimchi before her friends came over—“Did we appear to be normal?” she’d wonder self-consciously—while also privately aching for the Korean language and traditions that had never been hers. (Her mother hadn’t spoken Korean at home.) Jun’s long struggle to accept her identity included traveling to Korea, where she was seen as an outsider, and navigating her fraught relationship with her mother, who slowly shared stories about a pain-filled past growing up during and after the Korean War, “bringing food to her dad in a dirt bunker [and] seeing dead bodies in the streets.” In high school, Jun built a devotion to Jesus that helped her find wholeness because of her biracial identity—which she’d once thought of as both “too Asian and not Asian enough”—rather than in spite of it. Jun writes in lyrical prose, with longing simmering below the surface on almost every page—“the [Korean] language has always pulled at me like a map that promises to show the way home.” This mesmerizes.