On the night Janie waits for her sister, Hannah, to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's stories, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.
Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.
Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.
Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, Illinois. She grew up in New York, New Jersey and Michigan. She graduated with a mathematics degree from the University of Chicago, and worked at the think tank The RAND Corporation before attending Cornell University to receive her MFA.
Chung's critically acclaimed debut novel, Forgotten Country, was published in 2012 by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Press. She has also published short stories and essays in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta, and was the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in Poetry.
She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, and received support for her writing from The Camargo Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. She was a Picador Guest Professor at The University of Leipzig, and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Adelphi University. Catherine is the recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Granta New Voice, and a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine.
