The Wanderer's Curse

The debut memoir from National Magazine Award–nominated Bon Appétit editor, Jennifer Hope Choi, The Wanderer's Curse is a hilarious, whip-smart mother-daughter story that explores ideas of belonging, self-determination, and possibility, leaving readers to wonder what we take with us generation to generation, what we wish we could leave behind, and how we move on.

In 2007, Choi’s mother suddenly moved to Alaska without telling anyone and then soon began relocating to a new city every year for the next decade. Choi traces her mother’s emancipation from a life as a “stoic immigrant mother” and rabid churchgoer, to one where she dyes her hair orange, buys a gigantic dog, and travels the world shouting her daughter’s names in various corners.

For much of her adulthood, Choi had fancied herself nothing like her immigrant mother, late-blooming vagabond spirit and all—until life in Brooklyn imploded, spurring her to relocate to South Carolina with her mother and reckon with startling truths. Artmaking had left her in debt, single, and jobless. Questions hovered, gathering ragged like fractus clouds: Was it time to give up writing? Would she ever have a place of her own to call home? Or was she doomed to bunk up with Umma in the Deep South indefinitely?

The story culminates in Seoul, where Choi and her mother consult a fortune teller to determine whether they have yeokmasal, or the wanderer’s curse. According to folk history, those blighted with yeokmasal are destined to roam the world, never settling in one place. Some say yeokmasal is hereditary. Others say one can reverse this burdensome wanderlust by returning
home. Follow Choi in The Wanderer's Curse from a crumbling Chinatown tenement to a Tulsa studio, a haunted museum in Georgia, the home of Carson McCullers (a museum-cum-artist residence), and her grandmother’s Seoul apartment. 

Through her wanderings, connections emerge between her curious trajectory and idiosyncratic Korean identity narratives: a mystical Korean dog breed, pro golfers, modern Korean cults, the four pillars of destiny, and Korean American art. She finds herself alongside fellow cursed wanderers and artists—the evolutionary poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and experimental sculptor Do Ho Suh. Ultimately, Choi learns the journey is not about a destination but about learning to live in residence with uncertainty.