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A Korean-born woman who was abandoned at a market in Seoul when she was three and adopted by an American family has become a successful writer fluent in English, French and Swedish.
The New York Times on Wednesday wrote about Kim Sunee's confessional memoir, "Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home", in its Dining & Wine section. In the book, Sunee poetically describes foods from places she has traveled and lived in, including South Korea, Sweden, and France.
The book is a record of Sunee's craving for food and love. Although she grew up in comfortable circumstances in New Orleans since she was adopted in 1973, she could never erase from her mind the physical and emotional hungers of her childhood.
As a promising poet in the early 1990s, she met and fell in love with a French businessman 17 years her senior, Olivier Baussan, the founder of L'Occitane, the line of natural soaps and cosmetics.
Sunee moved into Baussan's Provencal farmhouse in France, where she appeased her hungers with local gourmet foods. But the food and surroundings weren't enough to help her find her identity.
Five years after moving to France, she left Baussan and returned home. She later met a bartender named Roger and grew to love him while cooking together.
Sunee now can talk about her life with serenity. As the newspaper wrote, "she has come to believe that abandoning a child can be an act of love: 'I survived. More than survived.'"
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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