Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. by Jenny Heijun Wills
Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.
JENNY HEIJUN WILLS was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern-Ontario, Canada. In 2008 she reunited with her family in Asia. She's lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Seoul and holds a PhD in English Literary Studies. She currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780771070914 |
| ISBN 10 | 0771070918 |
| Title | Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. |
| Author | Jenny Heijun Wills |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Mcclelland And Stewart |
| Year published | 2021-02-16 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Prizes | Winner of Eileen Sykes McTavish Award 2020, Short-listed for Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize 2019 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |