When Anny Kang was six years old, she was sent by her mother to live in America, where she became Kate Strand. Within the white suburban civility of Minnesota, Kate struggles as a Korean adoptee, her voice capturing the loneliness and sadness of a young girl forced to forget everything she knows in order to navigate a new terrain. Never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry, she comes face to face with her past when her Korean birth family contacts her after more than two decades. How do we inhabit the place between who we are and how others might see us, between our history as it is and the rewritten one we imagine it could be? Only by reconnecting to her birth family in Korea does an adult Kate begin to understand her past as she faces her long-standing inner conflicts with identity, loss and rejection. Given Away is the portrait of a childhood spent in two very different worlds: Korea and America. One forgotten, one remembered. It is in its own right, a story of race, and of belonging, a story that asks the complicated questions of home, family, and self as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny.