A record for yourself,
a memory your family keeps.

You answer the questions. Keeper writes the book.

Keeper is where your family's life stories live.

Stories, voices, and photographs, kept together in one book. Keeper asks the questions and writes down the answers, then binds them with the photographs and recordings your family gathers.

Every life is remarkable in its own way, and its story is a gift to the people who love you.

Keeper asks first.

One question at a time, through a secure, private link.

It hears you out, then asks the next question.

You can take as long as you like. What it asks next comes out of what you just said.

Scattered memories become one story.

Every sentence comes from what was said. Keeper tidies the grammar and keeps the way you say things.

The same book, in each reader's language.

Tell it in whichever language comes naturally. The book can be Korean alone, or Korean and English side by side, so a grandchild who grew up speaking English reads the same sentences as the family in Seoul.

When you think of the home you grew up in, what room do you picture first?

We'll wander back to the home you grew up in, its rooms, its smells, the games you played.

Tap to talk Skip this one · Type instead

What was the first work you ever did for money? What do your hands remember about it?

We'll talk about becoming your own person: your first work, your first money, the first time away from home.

Tap to talk Skip this one · Type instead

What work did you spend most of your life doing?

We'll talk about your life's work: what an ordinary day looked like, what you were proud of.

Tap to talk Skip this one · Type instead

If the store opened at six, your mornings must have started long before that. What was the road like at that hour?

I'm listening…

Pause to think whenever you need. I'll listen until you tap the button.

Tap when you're done

In your words

After a few years the market people knew us, and they would set the good produce aside for us. On the truck home the two of us shared a thermos of coffee, and that dawn coffee was so sweet. Well, it was sweet because I put in so much sugar, that's all.

That's rightFix the words · Say it again

Keeper's next question

You really never stopped. Do you remember what a day was like back then?

일과 생계

새벽 네 시면 그이가 트럭에 시동을 걸어 다운타운 청과시장으로 향했어요. 그이는 상자를 어깨에 메어 나르고 저는 뒤에서 물건을 골랐지요. 몇 해를 다니니 시장 사람들이 좋은 물건을 따로 챙겨 주기도 하더라고요. 돌아오는 길, 트럭에서 보온병에 담아 온 커피를 나눠 마셨는데 그 새벽 커피가 어찌나 달던지요.

The page it became

Work & Livelihood

At four in the morning, my husband would start the truck and head to the downtown produce market. He carried the boxes on his shoulder, and I followed behind, picking out the produce. After a few years, the market vendors started setting aside the good items for us. On the way back, we would share coffee from a thermos in the truck, and I remember how sweet that dawn coffee tasted.

A real page from a Keeper book · From A Bright Name, “Work & Livelihood”

Beyond the life story, you can add photographs, your own writing and your voice.

You, or anyone in your family, can add to the book at any time.

A life story

Twelve topics to choose from

The topics run from where you were born to how you spend your days now, and you can start with any of them.

Photographs

Put photos from the family album in the book

Upload as many as 300. Choose the topic each one belongs to, and it's printed beside that story with its caption.

Sample

Appendix

Father's kongguksu

Kept exactly as it was written.

Soak two cups of soybeans overnight. Slip off the skins and boil for twelve minutes, no longer. Boiled too long, they turn flat. Grind fine with three cups of iced water. Salt at the table.

The appendix

Expand on any other topics, in your own words

A recipe, a letter, a note to a grandchild. It is printed at the back of the book as you wrote it.

Sample

Appendix

The song Grandfather used to sing

Point a phone camera at the code to hear the recording.

A voice

Leave voice memos for people you cherish

A verse of a song, or a grandchild's name said out loud. It is printed as a QR code that plays when a phone camera scans it.

The name, printed on the cover.

What you talked about becomes the table of contents.

The questions are left out, so the book reads as one person telling their story.

Watercolours are painted to go with the stories.

Read it together, make any changes, and a printed copy is delivered to your doorstep.

Overcoming Hurdles

It must have been our second year running the market. It was near closing time when a young man came in and shoved a gun over the counter. He couldn't have been more than twenty, and the hand holding the gun was trembling. Before I could feel scared, I saw my children’s faces. My own hands were trembling more, so I had trouble opening the register. That night, my husband said nothing. He just picked his spoon up and put it down at the dinner table. After we turned out the lights and lay down, he took my hand in the darkness. He held it tight all night with his rough, oil-stained hands and didn't let go. The tears I hadn't shed in front of the gun finally came then. A quiet man speaks that way, with his hands. In the morning, he said just one thing: “I’ll go with you today.” And for a whole month after that, he came and sat in the store every evening.

First Earnings

At fifteen, I left home and went to work at a large textile factory in Busan. The dormitory bell would ring at five-thirty in the morning, and we would rush out after just splashing our faces with cold water. It was still dark outside, but the first thing we saw was the white steam pouring from the factory chimney. The area was called ‘Jobang-ap,’ and though the savory smell of pull-bbang, a type of pastry, filled the main street, I could only smell it as I walked past, saving my money. Hundreds of girls like me walked in a silent line, only the sound of our footsteps on the dark road. Inside the factory, the roar of the machines was deafening, and cotton dust fell like snow. After half a day, our hair and eyebrows would be white. We’d look at each other and laugh, saying, ‘You look like a grandma now,’ and since we couldn't hear each other speak, we talked with hand gestures.

A watercolor of two hands clasped in the dark of an unlit room

Prologue

My name is Kim Mi-young. My father gave me that name with the character for 'bright' (yeong), hoping I would grow up bright and radiant like my name. I suppose my life was the path I walked trying not to let that light go out. Naming the cleaners 'Sunshine' after coming to a strange land was also because I wanted to carry on that meaning. I used to think my life was insignificant, but looking back, perhaps it was because of that name that I found the strength to get back up every time I stumbled. This story begins on the day I received that shining name as a gift. For my daughter, and for my children’s children, I now slowly draw up a lifetime of stories from the well of my memory.

A watercolor of teenage girls walking in a silent line toward a steaming mill chimney before dawn

Prologue

My youngest daughter, Mi-gyeong, asked me to tell the story of my life so the family could keep it for a long time. Hearing her voice over the phone, I felt at a loss for what to say. I hesitated for a long while, thinking, what grand story could my life possibly hold? I only ever endured and lived, taking each day as it came. My life was nothing special compared to others. But the thought that my family wanted to hear my story made old pictures, buried in a very deep place, begin to rise to the surface, one by one.

Prologue

I saw the faint light of the kitchen during the time we called boritgogae, the lean weeks before the barley ripened, when our whole family satisfied our hunger with a single bowl of watery porridge. The biting dawn air of my childhood days, walking the ten-ri road to school with a friend over the frozen ground, brushed against my cheeks. I remembered the rough, warm hands of my father, a man of few words. The white thread dust of the Busan textile factory at fifteen, where the sound of machines was deafening, felt sharp in my nose. I recalled my friends' lunchboxes steaming on the briquette stove in the middle of the classroom. And the quiet hand of that man, silently adding three spoonfuls of sugar to my coffee in the Nampo-dong teahouse.