The first and only time I’ve visited Korea was in November 2019, with my father. Although we are Korean American, neither of us speak the language; he is third-generation American-born, I am fourth. As I spent a week surrounded by people with my shared heritage, I wondered: What was the Korea that my great-grandparents knew? What collective histories did they not experience because they immigrated? Who might I have become if my family had never left the homeland?  These questions resurfaced as I read Jiyoung Han’s debut novel, Honey in the Wound , which begins in Korea in 1902, the year before my own great-grandparents left Korea for Hawaii. Moving across time, borders, and generations, the novel chronicles one Korean family’s story of survival against the violence of the Japanese empire. The narrative revolves around Song Young-Ja, who is one among thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the 1930s (euphemistically known as “comfort women”).…