When My Name was Keoko – Linda Sue Park

This month I read When My Name was Keoko by Linda Sue Park. It is a historical-fiction book about World War 2. The book describes the struggles of a small family in Korea when the Japanese were in control there. The main character, a girl named Sun-hee, is forced to change her name to a Japanese name. Her father re-names her Keoko, and their family name, Kim, becomes Kaneyama. Sun-hee’s uncle is part of a large group of Koreans called the Resistance. They secretly go against the laws and rules the Japanese have put on them. The uncle owns a printer shop and makes magazines in Japanese during the day, but creates papers in Korean that are delivered confidentially. However, the Japanese guards trace the papers back to him and he is forced to flee. Soon after, Sun-hee’s brother, Tae-yul, joins the Japanese army with plans to botch a mission that they have desperately thrown together. Within a short time, he is brought to a bunker and has a few roommates. He is determined to excel the tests their commanders throw at him, to prove that the Koreans are not weak-hearted and are, in fact, strong-willed. As a result, he is moved from the bunker to another Japanese base, where he learns the bare minimum and basics of flying a plane. He is assigned a mission with a few other men: kamikaze, a suicide mission. The pilots fly above American warfare planes and dive down, killing themselves and the American pilot. His last letter to his family is sent and he leaves for his mission, but cloudy weather postpones his plans and they are ruined. A few weeks later, Sun-hee, still in Korea, tastes gum from an American ration package for the first time.

I loved that this book was short but crammed with details, making it feel like I was actually there watching it happen. It made me feel so many different emotions, one after the other, and I learned more about World War 2 with it.

My favorite character was Abuji, the father of Tae-yul and Sun-hee. He guards his secrets well, and is a wise man. He thinks through his decisions before making them, and is very logical. When he changed their names, he based them off of their Korean meaning and translated it to Japanese, so they could still keep the same meaning.