Review of Kinda Korean: Stories From an American Life by Joan Sung

*Kinda Korean: Stories From an American Life* by Joan Sung (2025). Published by She Writes Press.

At the end of 2024, I was taking a look at all of the books I had read and reflecting on the year, as many of us do when the year comes to pass and we reevaluate what we did. A goal I had made towards the end of 2024 was trying to diversify the kinds of books I read, as I wanted to read from more perspectives in the world and its people.

While I do a decent job of reading widely, I was realizing I had limited myself in some ways. The publisher for Kinda Korean reached out to me and asked if I wanted an advanced copy along with the synopsis, and I realized when reading that I had never read anything from an AAPI woman who had served in the army.

As someone who specialized in Korean colonial and postcolonial history, I was well aware of how in the American context, there were Japanese and Asian units in World War II. But in modern day history and how we talk about the military, the role of AAPI women never comes up, nor do I know of any who served.

That was one of many reasons I wanted to read this memoir. When my copy came in the mail, I put it into my modest to-read pile, then got to it right at the end of December 2024, two months before the book came out officially. This review is scheduled to go live on the day of its release, which is a way to celebrate it!

Anyways, I read this entire book in one sitting, which I did not expect at all. The chapters are very short and digestible, which made it so much easier for me to go through it like that. I was also very compelled by what I was reading to keep going forward.

I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, so let’s get into the review! I’m excited to share what I thought about this book.

Sung reflects on her upbringing in a Korean-American household, as well as how it shaped her adulthood.

As I mentioned before, the chapters in this book are short, with each reflecting on a specific moment in Sung’s life. Her parents immigrated from Korea. Her mother was born in what is now North Korea, but Sung’s grandmother had to make a decision and only took two of her kids down into the South before the borders closed during the war.

Sung’s family consists of her parents, her, and her brother. Her brother tends to pull off a disappearing act throughout most of her life, which adds to the chaotic family dynamic described throughout the book. Sung’s mother is described as a bit of a Tiger Mother, and throughout the memoir there’s quite a bit of tension between the two until there’s kind of a mutual understanding that happens.

When Sung was growing up, she had to deal with quite a bit. Not only was her brother getting in trouble and eventually had to flee down south to Arizona, starting a new life where he wouldn’t include his family, there were many instances of racism throughout her childhood. Back then, people didn’t really understand Korea as a country beyond the war.

If they saw you were East Asian, they would think you were just Japanese or Chinese. There was no in-between, and people would often default to Chinese and use those delegated slurs and whatnot. One of the classic examples of racism that Sung experienced was about being questioned on dog meat, and there’s a moment in there where a kid her age asks if they eat it and she has to explain, in a childish way (because they’re so young), that there was no food.

A lot of trauma is packed into that one experience alone, and that’s just what is at the surface of her experiences. The synopsis of the novel I read compared it to Crying in H Mart, but it was moments like these, where Sung is reflecting on racism and the impact of certain events on her own history, that reminded me more of Grace M. Cho’s Taste Like War.

Cho is an academic who used her knowledge to understand her mixed Korean identity under the context of the Korean war, contextualizing the memoir with history and the hard facts. Kinda Korean doesn’t reflect exactly like that, but it’s very introspective in a way I didn’t get from Crying in H Mart.

That said, Sung ended up being a bit of a wild child herself, and enlisted in the air force after her college years. That forms the crux of her later experiences, as being in the air force has its own set of gendered and racial attitudes she needs to navigate throughout her time there. It will be where she meets her future husband, but when she signed up, it was a way to get away from home and find a missing part of herself.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an even more interesting reflection, especially as Sung becomes an mentor to young AAPI students at her school. I don’t think we’ve gotten many COVID memoirs yet, or at least any that I’ve read, so this was fresh for me. It also is powerful to reclaim the narratives of the pandemic, as we know (and Sung discusses), AAPI hate, especially against women, was at a high.

Overall Thoughts

I really enjoyed this book, hence why I finished it in one sitting. I was really interested from the beginning in what Sung had to say, not knowing much about her or her life, but this was a story (or many stories if we want to get technical) that show us about resilience and how to approach contemporary issues with memoir.

The nonlinear and vignette format really works well for this kind of storytelling, and made it more digestible to break down even when we got into the more difficult parts of Sung’s story. At the core is this trauma with her family, and how it passes through generations, but then there are multiple other traumas (including rape) that appear throughout her youth and adulthood.

The writing itself was quite good as well. It’s clear, honest, and doesn’t tried to hide behind fluff. I found it to be to the point, which is probably how we got these shorter chapters. I liked that style a lot, especially considering it is nonlinear; if it hadn’t been done that way, we might’ve gotten bogged down in the details.

Anyways: if you’re curious about the book—which may be how you stumbled upon this little page on the vast expanse of the Internet!—I say go pick up a copy and give it a chance. There’s a lot to learn and admire from books like these. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Sung’s future work, as well as the press that published this.

Much love to She Writes Press for sending me a copy!

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