A review by mariielise
The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

5.0

This book took my breath away. If you know me, you know that I give 5 stars sparingly... but I knew from almost the first page that it would be a 5 star book. If you know me you also know that the mother-daughter relationship is the holy grail of my literary search. Up there with Annie John (Jamaica Kincaid) and The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) this memoir joins my list of books which have captured the nuance of the life-giving and life-crushing love between mother and daughter. One of my favorite lines came after Eun Ji’s mother just left for Korea and Eun Ji moved in to her brother’s house: “I looked for her in every room. When I could not find her, I felt as if I would die.” More than capturing the mother-daughter bond, though, E.J. Koh teaches us what it means to take everything we think we know about our moms and ourselves, and to let both go. She reminds us that we are composites of our parents, who are composites of theirs, so we are at the mercy of deep histories which told our stories long before we were alive to tell them ourselves. This is a book spanning generations and telling the same story each time: that no matter how old we are or where we are living or which rooms we enter, we never stop looking for our mothers first.