The Waiting
Translated by Janet Hong
About
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was an adult when her mother revealed a secret: she had been separated from her sister during the Korean War. It's not an uncommon story — millions of families were split when the peninsula was divided — but each family's version is unique, and Gendry-Kim renders her mother's in graphic novel form with the starkness and emotional clarity that made Grass an international sensation. The waiting of the title is literal: decades of hoping for reunification, for a letter, for any sign that the missing person is still alive. Gendry-Kim draws this waiting as both personal grief and national condition — the suspended animation of a country that has never formally ended its war. A graphic novel about the longest goodbye in modern history — and the families who never got to say it.
