Tell Me the Dream Again - by Tasha Jun (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"This mesmerizes." --Publishers Weekly starred review

"I've always felt unfit as a Korean but somehow too Korean everywhere else."

Tasha Jun has always been caught between worlds: American and Korean, faith and doubt, family devotion and fierce independence. As a Korean American, she wandered between seemingly opposing worlds, struggling to find a voice to speak and a firm place for her feet to land.

The world taught Tasha that her Korean normal was a barrier to belonging--that assimilation was the only way she would ever be truly accepted. But if that were true, did that mean God had made a mistake in knitting her together?

Told with tender honesty and compelling prose, Tell Me the Dream Again is a memoir-in-essays exploring

• what it means to be biracial in America today
• the joy and healing that comes with embracing every part of who we are, and
• how our identity in Christ is tightly woven with the unique colors, scents, and culture he's given us.

We are not outsiders to God. When we let all the details of ourselves unfold--when we embrace who we were divinely knit together to be--this is when we'll fully experience his perfect love.

Review Quotes

Starred review. "I've always been caught between worlds . . . struggling to find a firm place to land," writes Jun of negotiating a biracial identity in this stirring debut. The daughter of a Korean mother and a white father, Jun recalls how, as a kid, she'd think of purging the fridge of kimchi before her friends came over--"Did we appear to be normal?" she'd wonder self-consciously--while also privately aching for the Korean language and traditions that had never been hers. (Her mother hadn't spoken Korean at home.) Jun's long struggle to accept her identity included traveling to Korea, where she was seen as an outsider, and navigating her fraught relationship with her mother, who slowly shared stories about a pain-filled past growing up during and after the Korean War, "bringing food to her dad in a dirt bunker [and] seeing dead bodies in the streets." In high school, Jun built a devotion to Jesus that helped her find wholeness because of her biracial identity--which she'd once thought of as both "too Asian and not Asian enough"--rather than in spite of it. Jun writes in lyrical prose, with longing simmering below the surface on almost every page--"the [Korean] language has always pulled at me like a map that promises to show the way home." This mesmerizes.--Publishers Weekly