Excerpt from The Sisters K by Maureen Sun, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On the nights when Minah heard Jeonghee wailing, screaming, pleading in the bedroom with her father, she covered her head with a pillow and repeated some of the things Jeonghee had said to her and her alone, including her insistence that Minah never approach the master bedroom.

Jeonghee went into labor during the seventh month of her pregnancy and returned from the hospital without a baby. Within months she was pregnant again with Sarah. 

* * *

Jeonghee was only one of the many women and girls who would look after the sisters. 

During her convalescence and second pregnancy, Jeonghee rarely left her room. Eugene hired a series of babysitters for Minah. Tanya, Erica, Brie, Jennifer, and Jenny were teenagers who quit within weeks. Gail was the exception. She was tough and duplicitous and had no qualms shutting Minah in her room, a chair under the knob to her door, while she met her friends in the yard. She didn't even mind Eugene's leering at first, thinking she could turn his prurience to her advantage. But Eugene fired her after discovering the boys lurking in the alley behind the house. 

"Fucking Oriental perv," she screamed from the street before getting in her car. 

"You don't need a babysitter anymore," Eugene decided. Minah was sitting rigid on the sofa, her fists so tight they were turning white. 

The other girls left their own traces, having introduced Minah to bubblegum, clear nail polish, and the phenomenon of crying, not out of personal grief, but for the plight of a person on the screen. 

Jeonghee, too, sometimes cried now when they watched TV. They were watching a western that bored Minah. A man with flaring nostrils and heavy jowls whom Minah found faintly repellant was holding his hat to his chest and gazing at a woman touching her apron to the corner of her eye.

She asked her mother if she was sad. Jeonghee wiped her tears and said nothing, which not only hurt but frustrated Minah. With high-pitched petulance she asked, in English, "Are you really feeling sad?"

Jeonghee got up and returned to her bedroom. She didn't talk to Minah anymore except as she did in the very beginning. "Let's eat lunch." "Let's watch TV." She referred to herself only to say, "I'm tired. I'm going back to sleep." 

* * *

They brought Sarah home.

Eugene was beaming. "Your mother did very well," he said to Minah. 

Jeonghee was very pale. Around her, vivid flowers were blooming in red and fuchsia, gold and mauve, their petals like the waves of a fever. That morning, Eugene had rushed out to purchase three bouquets for her. She looked at them without, it seemed to Minah, registering that they were something out of the ordinary and crept toward the bedroom leaning on Eugene. 

But Jeonghee had noticed the flowers: the gorgeous, gaudy colors seemed to mock her, and she resolved to see right through them. 

Eugene had also brought home a crate of her favorite Asian pears and boxes of tangerines, apples, and strawberries. Jeonghee loved fruit. He bought her slippers and scented soap, a soft pink robe and hand cream that could also be applied, he said proudly, to her stretch marks. He was proud to know this detail about women's bodies. He neglected to buy supplies for the baby, apart from diapers, but Minah's cradle was still in the garage. At Jeonghee's request he bought soft blankets, bottles, nipples, and formula for Sarah.

Once his second daughter was brought home, Minah, for him, became morally illegitimate. With Sarah's birth, he grew besotted with Jeonghee's frailty, sublimely different from his first wife's willfulness. Though Minah bore his name and blood, he decided that Sarah was his true firstborn. Minah's mother had chosen her daughter's name for its resonance with Korean syllabics; Eugene chose "Sarah" himself, a common Anglophone name among the well-bred Korean girls in whose company he was determined she would belong and whom she would excel in every way. She would be raised with greater devotion and privilege than Minah. The beautiful meekness of her mother assured him that Sarah would grow to be a more prepossessing woman than Minah or Minah's mother. 

Excerpted from The Sisters K by Maureen Sun. Copyright © 2024 by Maureen Sun. Excerpted by permission of The Unnamed Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.