EJ Koh reads from and signs copies of The Magical Language of Others at Elliot Bay Book Company on January 7. JENNY JIMENEZ

"There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most," E.J. Koh writes in her new memoir, The Magical Language of Others. "I was revenge when I was born in 1988 at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, California."

This is the logic that drives Koh's narrative, a cinematic and multigenerational saga about the hard work of repairing past transgressions through present action so that the future can be, hopefully, maybe—so long as we keep working at it—more joyful.

At 15 years old, Koh and her brother were left in the United States when Koh's father took a lucrative, high-powered job in South Korea, and her mom went with him. The parents moved Koh and her 19-year old brother, along with a husky dog and a parakeet named Mieko, into a small house in Davis, California, where they more or less raised each other. At a recent reading from the memoir, someone approached Koh and quipped, "It's like you wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Korean Genius"—riffing on the title of Dave Eggers's 2000 memoir about a couple of siblings basically raising each other.

COURTESY OF TOME PRESS

In "Fecal and Philosophical Matters," one of the many poignant pieces in The Lines That Make Us: Stories from Nathan's Bus, a collection of photos and essays chronicling Vass's 12 years driving the night shift on the 7/49 bus route, Vass tells the tale of a panhandler in a wheelchair who got hit by a bag of shit tossed from the window of a BMW.

When Vass pulled his bus up to the stop on Eastlake and Harvard, the panhandler asked if he could catch a ride to the Urban Rest Stop downtown to get cleaned up. Vass obliged and wheeled him onto the bus himself. The thankful passenger wept with shame and gratitude, telling Vass that four other drivers had turned him away. Vass doesn't blame the other drivers for passing on the man in his condition. He understands that taking on such a passenger could pose a risk. But Vass is just the kind of guy who will take that risk to help the powerless every time.