Product Description

One day she was Kim Ji-yun, growing up in Seoul, Korea. The next day she was Catherine Jeanne Robinson, living with her new American family in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, Katy Robinson returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother-and found herself an American outsider in her native land. What transpired in this world-at once familiar and strange, comforting and sad-left Katy conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined.

A Single Square Picture is a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal, a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world-and had the courage to find the answers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #238919 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-06
• Released on: 2002-08-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"One day I was Kim Ji-yun growing up in Seoul, Korea; the next day I was Catherine Jeanne Robinson living in Salt Lake City, Utah." So begins this memoir from first-time author Robinson. Her tireless search for her birth parents is driven by her memories of them and the photo referred to in the title, a snapshot of Kim Ji-yun with her mother and grandmother taken only moments before the seven-year-old boarded a plane bound for Salt Lake City. Even memoir-saturated readers will be drawn in by her description of this devastating leave-taking: "[My grandmother] hands me a roll of my favorite crackers and the folder of paper dolls my mother bought me after our last trip to the bathhouse. She gives me a slight push forward... I do as instructed and follow the blue cap and clicking heels away from my mother and grandmother." When Robinson returns to Seoul as an adult (having spent a happy if monotonous childhood in Utah), she easily reconnects with her father and half-siblings. But the trail to her mother turns cold several times before Robinson realizes that she may never know for sure whether her mother died in a car accident or relocated to Chicago. Meanwhile, she struggles to bridge the massive cultural gap separating her from her father. She ultimately decides that her true family consists of her patient American husband and her spunky adoptive mother. Fortunately, the journey to this unsurprising conclusion is a fascinating labor of love, populated by oddball relatives and fueled by banquets of carefully described Korean food.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
When Robinson was seven years old, her mother and grandmother put her on a plane from Korea to America to be adopted by American parents. Raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Robinson grows up in a caring (though somewhat troubled) family but doesn't learn about her Korean heritage. At the age of 27, Robinson decides to seek out her parents. An initial brief visit is fruitful--she meets her birth father. A year later, Robinson returns to Korea with her husband, hoping to find her mother. But the search for her mother is not nearly as easy, and during their yearlong stay, Robinson discovers disconcerting truths about her father. She also meets her half-siblings and her father's first wife and learns her father has two other children. As her father and brother tell her conflicting stories about her mother's fate, Robinson must contend with the realization that she might never find her mother. Robinson does an excellent job of showing just how difficult the search can be, filled with exhilarating successes and heartbreaking failures, in this moving memoir. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2002
"Luminously written, sensitively nuanced memoir by Idaho- based journalist Robinson about the rediscovery of her Korean family."

Customer Reviews

Beautifully Written, Peppered With Korean Culture
It was the subtitle of this book that drew me to it initially. "A Korean Adoptee's Search for Her Roots" told me enough about the story that I knew I wanted to read it. But Robinson's story behind her adoptive status was not the story I expected. Being an auntie to three Korean adoptees (one boy and two girls all from the same orphanage and adopted by my sister and her husband), I felt certain this was to be one of those stories where, much like my sister does, the adoptive family had taught the child from a young age about her Korean heritage.

Robinson, however, was not an infant at an orphanage when she was adopted by an American couple. She was seven years old. She was old enough to remember much, yet not enough, of her heritage when she became an adult. Clinging to a photograph of her mother and grandmother at the airport on the day of her departure for America, Robinson spent years wondering about the women in her past, the reason for her being sent to America, and about the people who would take her away from her Korean family.

This is a beautifully written memoir that is peppered with bits and pieces of Korean culture and customs. There is much sadness to Robinson's story. Yet she delivers the story in a sensitive, warm manner.

Readers are treated to a few photographs of Robinson's two families--the American one and the Korean one. These help to bring the people she writes about to life. The sad, almost numb expression on the faces of the grandmother and mother that fateful day at the airport is undeniable. Of this photograph, Robinson writes, "When so many memories fail me, this one stands out as a capsule of my childhood--The precise moment when the direction of my life suddenly and irreversibly changed." The obvious happiness of an American family, including an already grown Katy, says as much about the author's American family as her words say. The haunting photo used by the adoption agency to introduce the seven-year-old Katy to her prospective American family causes this mother's heart to knot up in wonder at how someone could knowingly take a child away from a parent and send her halfway around the world.

Robinson's story is not only the story of an adoptee's search for her birth parents; it is the story of a a woman determined to find her place in both worlds that she can claim as her own. In neither is she totally an insider. At one point, she refers to herself as an "inside-outsider" when she is in Korea and looks Korean, but cannot speak the language and does not know the customs.

Robinson's search brings her both heartache and joy. It provides many of the pieces of the puzzle that is her life. It answers many questions for her but provokes even more in their place. Robinson's search brings her the personal courage to continue to seek answers no matter how painful they may be, to process them in a constructive manner, and to live life as it is handed to her with an extra measure of grace and charm.

by Lee Ambrose
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Changed My Life!
I met Katy Robinson at the KAAN - Korean American Adoptees Network Conference. Although I had glanced at her book at Borders I did not read it until I heard her speak at the conference. It inspired me to also begin the search for my birth family!

Other adoptees ask me for guides and my first choice is this book! One friend remarked how it is uncanny that my reunion parallels her story. As I am asked to write a book about my experience I look to Katy's memoir and continue to share how her story changed my life!

Can't Wait for Katy's Next Book!

This book took me by surprise. I'm not sure why I bought it and then i couldn't put it down. This is a good read for anyone, adopted or not.

Speaking as a domestic adoptee, it felt like the author was reading my mind and heart--and able to articulate what sometimes gets stuck inside. Katy Robinson is incredibly honest and insightful.

Do yourself a favor and buy this book. If you are an adoptive parent then this book is required reading, but it won't feel like it. Reading it will help you to understand your child's experience on a whole new level.