The Young Will Remember - Hardcover

Chung, Eve J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059364056X ISBN 13: 9780593640562

Verlag: Berkley, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong

When I found the courage to lift my head, I expected to stare down the barrel of a gun, but instead there was a woman in front of me, the back of her white skirt embroidered with columns of yellow chrysanthemums.

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang is on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down.

As she emerges from the fallen aircraft onto an icy field surrounded by the enemy, Ellie is sure it’s the end, certain she’ll never make it home to her parents...until a woman pushes her way through the crowd and claims Ellie as the lost daughter that she’s been searching for since the last war ended. Never mind that Ellie doesn’t speak a word of Korean.

Ellie is taken in by her rescuer—a woman who calls herself “Emma”—and the Paks, a pastor’s family. She knows she can’t stay and yet there’s no way she’ll survive on her own.

As the war intensifies, the sky alighting with bombs overhead, Ellie convinces Emma and the Paks to travel south towards an elusive promise of safety, and where Ellie insists they are more likely to find Emma’s real daughter, stuck on the other side of the frontlines.

Emma's decision to claim Ellie, and Ellie’s choice to take her hand will connect their lives forever.

Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Touchdown

August 12, 2019

Seoul is unrecognizable.

I press my forehead against the plane's window, my breath fogging the view of this flamboyant metropolis. It is silver, with bridges that leap over rivers and roads that whip into mountains, claiming a horizon that was once viridescent. A few years ago, NASA shared an image of the Korean peninsula from space, its southern half flaring with light while the north lay engulfed in darkness. Though I have seen that iconic photo, I am still unprepared to be here.

My son's fingers graze my hand. "Are you okay, Mom?"

A deluge of emotions converge within me, and I cannot tell what I feel, only that it is overwhelming.

"Do you want some water?" he asks, raising his voice and enunciating each word. "Wah-ter?"

This is our first plane ride together, and he believes that he is my chaperone. Though he has his own years mapped in the wrinkles across his face, I don't want to speak until I am steady. Children get upset when they see their parents cry, no matter how old they are.

I wait for the ache in my throat to go away, but the immensity of everything that I've never told him hardens that knot. While I've known my son for his whole life, he has known me for only part of mine. He tells people that I am terrified of flying, but seventy years ago I was traipsing around airfields with my typewriter tucked under my arm, begging pilots to take me to the front lines. Back then, I was a correspondent for the Global Tribune.

I have seen Seoul from the sky at least a hundred times.

I don't talk much about the war, but since then, I have tried my best to live well. The fear of disappointing her has held me hostage.

A tone dings as the fasten seat belt sign comes on.

"Mom?" My son shakes my arm with urgency.

We are about to touch down.

2

Home by Christmas

"Recently catastrophic events in the Far East suggest strongly that . . . we are on the brink of, if not already involved in, World War III . . ."

-Lt. Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer,
San Francisco, November 16, 1950

December 5, 1950

General MacArthur promised our troops that they would be home for Christmas. If any of them were going back to America, though, it was going to be on a stretcher or in a coffin. The six a.m. sun, already weary from winter, cast lukewarm rays over Tachikawa Airfield, where technicians towed a C-47 onto the runway. Mount Fuji arched in the background, a snow-cloaked spirit serene beneath its crown of clouds. On the tarmac, half a dozen flight nurses gathered, their arms crossed in their thick air force-issued coats. Though they had the day off, they had arrived early, and were stewing as they waited for the next pilot.

Nothing excited me more than angry women who had gotten organized.

In my own corner, I squatted with my back against the wall, balancing my typewriter on my knees. With a biscuit between my teeth and red bean mochi in my pocket, I began typing:

In North Korea's Chosin Reservoir, our haggard survivors are stripping their dead comrades of their clothing and stacking up corpses to block the gales. Though the Soviets aren't formally fighting in Korea, the blizzard blowing down from Siberia is its own horrifying army. At minus 40 degrees, soldiers' blackened toes are breaking off in their boots and carbines are jamming.

Chairman Mao had warned us not to cross into North Korea, but General MacArthur was arrogant.

My fingers slowed to a halt. Was that last sentence too abrasive?

Letting my biscuit fall from my lips, I uncapped my pen and slashed a line through "arrogant," perusing a mental list of synonyms. "Confident," maybe? I started writing in "confident," but I'd barely crossed the "t" before Barbara, one of the flight nurses, yanked the paper from my feed roller.

"We have boys in Korea who still have no winter uniforms!" she exclaimed, flipping her bangs up from her forehead. "It's December. If that's not arrogant, I don't know what is!"

Her chestnut hair, usually back-combed and bombastically curled, hung limp over her freckled cheeks. She pulled out her own pen and scribbled furiously over "confident," her lines as jagged as a lightning bolt. In all capitals, she wrote ARROGANT with so much force that she punctured the paper.

"Give that back!" I cried, surging to my feet. My ankles tingled from squatting. "The Global Tribune already got a warning from MacArthur's office. If I get us another, we might get blocked from the embassy briefings!"

Censorship was supposed to be patriotic, but Barbara wasn't with the press. Unrepentantly, she underlined ARROGANT before returning my article, her thumbprint smudged into the ink. I shooed her away, smoothing the crinkled paper before inserting it back into my typewriter.

Barbara and I had arrived in Japan on the same flight in July 1950, shortly after the North Korean People's Army-KPA for short-invaded South Korea, and the US initiated a "police action" under the United Nations. I'd been covering the Korean War for the past five months, but while every other correspondent was chasing MacArthur's top officers, I had been hanging around with Barbara and the other flight nurses of the Medical Air Evacuation Squadron. Being a female war correspondent was hard enough. It was even harder when you looked like the enemy.

Though I was born and raised in San Francisco, I was ethnically Chinese, with straight black hair and eyes that folded at the corners. My nose was small but broad like my father's, and my lips were plump like my mother's. Despite my perfect English and my Californian slang, American officers often balked when I tried to talk to them, let alone press them for information.

It was annoying, but at twenty-eight I had spent most of my life prying open side doors when the entrance was blocked. Many correspondents can attack a front-page story head-on, shark-style, but some of us can advance only if we get really good at picking the glitter from the dust. I began my career by writing about the Women Air Force Service Pilots, which few other outlets covered in detail. Through that series, I shone enough to get an assignment abroad. Though my bosses were initially reluctant to send a woman to a war zone, no one else at the Global Tribune was fluent in Japanese and Mandarin, as I was. My language skills-and my promise to use them to get scoops like no other-finally tipped the scales in my favor.

Over the past months, I'd made friends. The flight nurses helped me arrange interviews with patients, and the pilots let me hitch rides to Korea. Because of them, I was churning out stories on every major battle. Today, however, was going to be different.

"There he is!" Barbara shrieked when the office door squeaked open. "There's George!"

I snapped my head up so quickly that a joint in my neck popped.

George Miyashita slumped into the hangar, so exhausted that he wobbled, his sparse mustache a stain on his upper lip. Among the pilots, he was my favorite. He spent most of his free time at the pool on base and had the broad shoulders of a swimmer-and washboard abs if you caught him at the right angle.

The technicians who had been loading fuel barrels into the cargo hold slowed to stare. When George saw us, he recoiled. "No!" he yelled. "I told you all no!"

George and the other pilots had been flying nonstop for five days, because our leaders had underestimated a Communist "bandit" and his "peasant army." "We're going all the way to the Yalu," one of the generals had said. "Don't let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you!" Though the police action was supposed to end at the 38th parallel-the line separating the two Koreas-MacArthur had sent our boys surging into the North so quickly that they had had to spread themselves thin...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059364056X
• ISBN 13: 9780593640562
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland