What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

What We Kept to Ourselves is a knockout family saga that is dark and heavy but always worthwhile. This is the second novel by Kim, following the success of her first, The Last Story of Mina Lee.

In the late 1970s Sunny Kim moves to Los Angeles from Korea with her new husband. The dream of coming to America was exciting and John Kim was handsome, so Sunny’s hopes are high, but nothing ever turns out the way we expect it. John is a difficult man, prone to depression and survivor’s guilt after escaping the Korean war and thinking of those that he left behind. In LA, Sunny is lonely and isolated, pregnant with her first child, unable to speak much English and unsure of what she is supposed to be doing. John works too much and wants Sunny to stay at home and take care of their family. John is not a great father or husband, but we are sympathetic to how hard he tries and how much he carries.

We flash from the 1970s/early 80s into 1999 where Sunny has now been missing for a year and the Kims are falling apart. Her son Ronald still lives at home, her daughter Ana is at college, and John is always at work and angry. Barely hanging together as a family unit, things get worse when John finds the dead body of a seemingly homeless Black man in their backyard. How did he get there and why does he have a letter with his wife’s name on it next to him?

This lets us glimpse into the connection between Sunny and Ronald (RJ), the man who is in the backyard. An odd connection and friendship that spans decades, a late age of age and to terms with who you really are, a mediation on family and belonging, a question of what our parents owe us and what we owe them, this book really does have it all. We piece together their friendship as Ana and Ronald meet up with Rhonda, RJ’s estranged daughter, to try to find out what happened to him. How did RJ and Sunny meet? Why did they remain friends? Does RJ have anything to do with Sunny’s disappearance? Were they in love? Together these three children try to understand their parents, who they realize, they didn’t understand much of at all.

There is a lot to learn and think about regarding the Korean war, the Vietnam war and war in general, and what does it mean to be American? Race plays an important factor as well as the idea of the “ideal immigrant”. Can someone who is an outsider truly ever feel like they fit in?

It is fast paced, but also full of pause and meaning and it kept me highly engaged and guessing until the very end. It has the heart of a classic family saga but the questioning and suspense of a thriller. An engaging and excellent novel.



Nancy Jooyoun Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of What We Kept to Ourselves and The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese’s Book Club pick. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria Books; Canadian Export edition (Oct. 10 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 166804353X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668043530