Review: "The South Korean Diplomat's Wife" by Yoon Jeong Kim

The South Korean Diplomat's Wife by Yoon Jeong Kim
Published October 2025
★★★

Kim has had a more adventurous life than many: As the wife of a diplomat (a travelling spouse), her normal life has included a lot more picking up and changing countries than the average person.

These interconnected essays are structured around some of the places Kim has lived—London, Berlin, Brasilia, Chicago, Kampala. (I don't know how diplomatic assignments are set, but some of these seem pretty cushy assignments, so I think her husband must have been doing well for himself within the diplomatic corps?) The book is particularly interesting to me for being by somebody who does not come from an English-speaking country—I've read diplomat memoirs, and diplomat-adjacent memoirs, by people from the US and the UK and Australia, and of course by people who were posted in countries where the lingua franca wasn't English, but Kim simply has a different context based on her own country of upbringing, and that's something I love in memoir.

Ultimately less of the book is about life as a diplomatic spouse specifically than it is about cultural differences that Kim experienced and/or noticed while living abroad. I found some of these discussions interesting and insightful, but I think there was a point at which I wanted a bit more about the diplomatic life, and about daily living in each of these places (what did daily life in Kampala look like after living in Chicago?). Still a quick, engaging read, but not so dramatic as the subtitle would have you think.