Narrative Survival and Racial Melancholia: The ‘Affective Truth’ of Trauma in Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows

Abstract

Abstract

This study examines Elizabeth Kim’s Ten Thousand Sorrows as a practice of ‘narrative survival’: a distinct mode of autobiographical self-constitution in which affective truth, rather than archival verification, grounds credibility. Distinguished from scriptotherapy and testimonial witnessing, narrative survival names the act of narrating under conditions in which the structural right to narrate is itself contested. Situating the text within the Korean genre of chajŏn silhwa sosŏl (autobiographical real-story novel) and postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentric trauma paradigm, the study reads Kim’s memoir as a record of the erasure inflicted on mixed-race children orphaned in the aftermath of the Korean War. Drawing on transnational life writing scholarship (Whitlock, Gillian. 2007. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. U of Chicago P; Wills, Jenny Heijun. 2015. “Fictional and Fragmented Truths in Korean Adoptee Life Writing.” Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies 6:45–59. https://doi.org/10.55917/2154-2171.1060) and racial melancholia theory, it argues that Kim’s memoir secures this credibility not through documentary corroboration but through relational witnessing – the process through which affective truth is recognised and held by another – and that reading it justly requires what this study calls ‘hospitable reading’: an ethical reorientation of the evaluative standards through which transnational and diasporic life narratives are adjudicated.