Dear Best Friend

Set in the 90s, a Korean single mother raises her young son in the suburbs of Canada determined to provide a better life for him than the one she left behind. Having built up a sense of resilience being an orphan since she was born in 1960 to unknown origins, single Kim So-Young moves from her native Korea to start a new and hopefully better life with her son, Kim Dong-Hyun (who will choose the anglicized name David), in Vancouver, David's father, who he never knew and who So-Young never talks about, having passed before he was born. Two periods in their lives are told as they try to integrate into Canadian life (not always successfully), the first in 1990 when David is just starting school, and the second in 1999 when David is fifteen and going through the awkward teenage years in addition to that integration. Their story shifts when So-Young reaches a crossroads in her life, and, in conjunction with increasing questions by David partly in relation to a school project, feels it's the right time to bring David's father back into their lives. —Huggo