“Every family story is unique, but world events really change the trajectory,” said Joanna Choi Kalbus. In her family’s case, it was a series of events that started when Japan annexed Korea in 1910.
Kalbus’ book, The Boat Not Taken, follows the trajectory that ensued: her mother’s temporary exile in China, and Kalbus’ own journey with her mother from North Korea to South Korea and ultimately to the United States in 1951, when she was only 10 years old.
The book, Kalbus’ debut memoir first published in 2024, is also the story of the tremendous secret Kalbus’ mother — who she refers to as Omai, a variation on the Korean word for mother — carried with her from the days of Japan’s occupation to her grave.
According to Kalbus, The Boat Not Taken is her mother’s memoir. “I just happened to be with her for 55 years,” she said in an interview with ACoM.
In that vein, Kalbus writes reverently of her mother’s devotion to her only daughter, and of the harrowing decisions she was forced to make to ensure Kalbus’ safety. Yet as witnesses to the same traumatic events, as the narrative reveals, war also made mother and daughter into peers.
It was for her daughter that Omai fled North Korea, but it was with her daughter that the pair survived a late-night escape on a leaky boat, when Omai saw her brother for the very last time. Together they survived the worst of the 1950-53 Korean War, enduring violence, squalor and hunger. Together they sailed to America, eventually settling in Los Angeles where they built a life, together.
“A tremendous bond,” is how Kalbus described their relationship, which forms the core of the narrative. It is, in Kalbus’ telling, a love letter and a thank you to her Omai and all that she gave her, one that says, I did and do see you and all that you lived through.
Yes, Kalbus’ story is rooted in the specifics of Korea’s recent past. But it is just as much a universal story of migration, of building a life from nothing in a place you hadn’t thought would be your home.
The book is peppered with everyday memories, ordinary events that taken together trace the roots that begin to grow beneath them. In one instance, Kalbus recalls a young university student who brings her lab animals to keep as pets. She recounts an ingenious method she devised to afford a second pair of shoes for her mother, as well as Omai’s sweat dripping into unsealed cans of Spanish rice at the food packing plant where she worked.
Kalbus also shares her own journey learning English and how, at one point, she uses a risqué word, loudly and in public, unaware of what she was saying.
“All I wanted [was to] be an American girl,” admitted Kalbus, describing her time as the only Asian student in her school. Despite that isolation, she says, there was this deeply rooted conviction that the American Dream was more than just an empty slogan. That with hard work anything was possible.
For Kalbus, that proved prescient.
She eventually earned a full scholarship to study music at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Los Angeles. She ultimately earned a PhD becoming a regional school superintendent.
“Assimilation and acculturation are very powerful things,” said Kalbus, describing her own experience returning to South Korea for the first time after her mother’s death in 1996. “I felt like I was a foreigner in my own native country.”
For Kalbus, the trip offered a chance to ask about her family members still in North Korea, whom she hadn’t seen since 1950. It’s at this point that Kalbus’ story takes a surprising turn and one that, for Kalbus, proved devastating.
“Empathy is the most important word in the [English] lexicon,” said Kalbus, adding the process of writing her mother’s story was also, in a very real way, one of self-healing. “I walked in my mother’s shoes,” she said, “nearing the person” with whom she had journeyed halfway around the world.
Kalbus’ book began as a journal. “I didn’t know the term vignettes, but I was writing vignettes,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t qualified to try to write a book, and so I went to community adult school to learn how to write.”
Despite its tragedies, Kalbus’ story is filled with humor, her prose vivid with memories, which, as she says, “are all I have left of my childhood in Korea.” She writes in her introduction, “memories are like dreams, like nightmares: they are fragile, fleeting and vague.”
Kalbus takes these vague memories and delivers detailed and evocative stories of the wars she survived, the mother she loved so dearly and her early life in the United States, a country that today even she admits is not the one she arrived in a lifetime ago.
“I can’t be a Pollyanna and say, ‘Well, just come to United States, and everything is going to be fine,” she said, acknowledging the current climate, one defined by an aggressive assault on immigrants and where, for many, the American Dream feels out of reach.
“I finally figured out that most of us, us who are immigrants, we straddle two countries, two cultures,” she noted, adding that if more of us could figure out how to do that, “our world would be much better.”
And for those who, like her and her Omai, do find themselves struggling to make it in a foreign land, she offers this simple, yet timeless piece of advice: “Believe in yourself, look for your purpose in life and work hard.”
Kalbus recently held a series of author talks at Bay Area libraries, including the Moraga, Redwood City and Mill Valley public libraries.
