About the Book.
nspired by the life of Easton’s grandmother, White Mulberry is a rich, deeply moving portrait of a young Korean woman in 1930s Japan who is torn between two worlds and must reclaim her true identity to provide a future for her family.
1928, Japan-occupied Korea. Eleven-year-old Miyoung has dreams too big for her tiny farming village near Pyongyang: to become a teacher, to avoid an arranged marriage, to write her own future. When she is offered the chance to live with her older sister in Japan and continue her education, she is elated, even though it means leaving her sick mother—and her very name—behind.
In Kyoto, anti-Korean sentiment is rising every day, and Miyoung quickly realizes she must pass as Japanese if she expects to survive. Her Japanese name, Miyoko, helps her find a new calling as a nurse, but as the years go by, she fears that her true self is slipping away. She seeks solace in a Korean church group and, within it, finds something she never expected: a romance with an activist that reignites her sense of purpose and gives her a cherished son.
As war looms on a new front and Miyoung feels the constraints of her adopted home tighten, she is faced with a choice that will change her life—and the lives of those she loves—forever.
About the Author.
Rosa Kwon Easton was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up with her extended family in Los Angeles. Easton holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Smith College, a master’s in international and public affairs from Columbia University, and a JD from Boston College Law School. She is a lawyer and an elected trustee of the Palos Verdes Library District. She has two adult children and lives with her husband and Maltipoo in sunny Southern California.
About the Moderator.
HYESEUNG SONG is the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2024. She is an American representational painter best known for large-scale figurative oil paintings and prints whose visual idioms toggle between resolution and fragmentation. Her work explores creativity, psychological incipience, and the life of the artist.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In her mid-twenties, she returned to her childhood passion of art, leaving academia to pursue painting at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City. After completing her studies in 2008, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (again in 2011) and began to exhibit in New York.
Song is a devoted teacher and has instructed at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, during which time she was named among Baltimore Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities in that city. She often addresses high school and college audiences, and was a featured speaker at Princeton University at its TedX Conference in 2016 as well as at the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton’s Leadership Conference in 2021.
She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.
Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.