The Liberators by E. J. Koh (Tin House)

“The fog drew rosefinches, like blooms in the low bush, whose cries I mistook for rainfall.” 

Yohan is a man obsessed with words, who can write them in six languages. During his lifetime, he has lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea, survived the horrors of World War Two, and “watched the country divided up as spoils of war.” What puts him into prison is a shadowed mystery with a partial disclosure: “To be a spy was to one day be known.”

Decades later, living in America, his daughter meets a man who draws a tiger on her bare back and tells her “It’s Korea,” “if the country had no stitches” and was reunified as a single nation. Although he knows “The South doesn’t want to rebuild the North. And the North doesn’t trust the South,” he is devoted to bringing the two divisions back together once more. His dream is rejected by the Korean men who come to his meetings in a local pool hall and when he returns to Korea, he’s imprisoned “for crimes of moral turpitude.”

Although politics is a hopeless quagmire that gobbles up idealism, Yohan’s daughter erases divisions in her own family by nurturing  her North Korean daughter-in-law. When she dresses the mother of her grandchild in the green hanbok that was once worn by her own mother, “the fabric folded smoothly..,the ribbon falling down the front, a new verdant path.”

Like Yohan, E.J. Koh is dominated by words. In her memoir, The Magical Language of Others (Asia by the Book, November 2020), she describes her life, lived in four languages, English, Korean, Japanese, and poetry. “Languages,” she says, “as they open you, can also allow you to close.” 

In her first novel, Koh lets the language of poetry open windows and then it slams them shut. Six characters are partially revealed in The Liberators but none of them are as fully realized as the images that surround them. In a gorgeous section entitled Animal Kingdom, Yohan’s grandson is given a dog, “a bright and curious joy,”  that’s “joined to the boy like a wish.” Later the boy is united with the woman he will marry in “the elaborate braid of our bodies.” Trapped in poetry, he and the other five characters that fill these pages remain “shadows that flew up and shattered across the ceiling.” Each of them is truncated by subtlety, as if they were created to convey Koh’s language rather than the reversal that would have given them life. They are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, given just enough definition to merge into a whole pattern.

Mixed with Koh’s poetry is the harshness of political realities in which a country with millennia of history and tradition becomes sacrificed to global economic interests. When Koreans gather together in America to watch the TV coverage of the Olympic ceremony in Seoul, the doves that symbolize world peace perch on the flaming cauldron and are burned alive, “a memory that had to be erased…that had to be forgotten in our soft, closed palms.” 

“Why visit the past,  why go digging up its grave?” asks the man who dreams of Korea as a tiger, complete and undivided. Yohan’s daughter answers him by embracing the present in another country, unified with her North Korean daughter-in-law, a conclusion that escapes cliche because Koh has clothed it in poetry.~Janet Brown

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon (Sarabande Books)

Floating across the landscape of Solla, one of the many islands lying off the coast of Korea in the East China Sea, are eight enigmatic stories. The characters within them are as mysterious and evanescent as rain-drenched spiderwebs, each embodying a different part of the island’s history and each one of them abandoned in mid-moment. The ends of their stories are left for the reader to imagine, based upon the hints that were strewn through each of their narratives. 

An aging American widow comes to a resort on Solla, searching for traces of the man her husband once might have been. An elderly couple in 1947 take their ancient trawler to the site of U.S bomb tests that destroyed twenty Korean fishing boats, one of which held their only son. A woman who owns a shop in a Solla tourist town has her past return to confront and betray her. A sixty-year-old “sea woman” dives into the depths of the ocean as she has every day since she was thirteen, her only friend a boy who lost his arm to a shark and who longs for her to bring him a sea turtle. An American deserter upsets the peace of a Solla mountain village by overstaying his welcome and befriending a young crippled village girl. A farmer sells his land to a developer with “fingers clean as polished silver” and plans to turn it into a hotel that will overlook a golf course, while his young daughter, haunted by a ghost who wears the dress of her dead mother, furiously opposes his decision. An orphan girl who has been employed by an “American hospital” watches cargo trucks deliver men on stretchers, soldiers who have come from Australia, France, Greece, to fill a thousand beds in a place that had once been a vocational school run by the Japanese. A young married couple live in a highrise building among the tourist businesses of Solla City, making their living through tourism in a world of hotels and markets that sell souvenirs.

Through the kaleidoscope of these stories, the history of Solla island is made tangible and the island itself takes on a substance that eludes the lives of the people who pass over it like clouds. Solla, with its caves and forested hills and Tamra Mountain rising above it all, is described so meticulously that it comes as a shock when Yoon admits it has never existed at all. Its alluring beauty can be visited only in these pages.

The eerie shadow-lives of the characters in Once the Shore exist as faded silhouettes against an island whose history is being devoured by war and international businesses. The young couple in the final story exist in a different universe from the old woman who dove for fish. They visit parts of their island as tourists, divorced from what exists beneath the commercial facade. When they go to Tamra Mountain, they hire a guide. Solla no longer belongs to them, unlike the sea woman who took possession of the ocean every day. Within its depths “the world consisted of light towers, sunlit, and she swam among them,” every day for more than half a century, knowing she is one of the last to have “carried seawater within them.”

The young couple whose lives are consumed by tourism are unaware of how Solla’s “winds, like great birds, came in from the sea” or the majesty of its “trees, slow moving and wide as ships.”  They are unable to see the beauty of its twilight, with the sea’s “silver reflections folding over one another like the linking of fingers.” When they buy a platter of abalone from a sea woman in a tourist market, they have no idea they’re in the company of the island’s fading history.

Through Yoon’s stories, the glory of an imaginary place becomes real and its gradual loss becomes a sharp and bitter grief.~Janet Brown

Nuclear Blues by Bradley K. Martin (Great Leader Books)

Martin K. Bradley worked for decades as a foreign correspondent. He was mainly based in Asia. When he worked for Bloomberg News he was chief North Korea watcher. He gained his reputation on being a North Korea expert after writing the nonfiction bestseller Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader : North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. It was a comprehensive history of the country under the leadership of  Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

In Nuclear Blues Bradley has now turned to the world of fiction and has created a unique murder-mystery set in the Hermit Kingdom under the new leadership of Kim Jong-un. Included in his story is a Korean-American journalist-turned blues musician, suspicious men from the Middle East, and a Christian college in North Korea, credit-default swaps, Russia, nuclear missiles, and a mysterious woman who may or may not be related to the current leader. 

Heck Davis is a photo-journalist but has decided to give up the profession and become a blues musician. He still takes on the occasional story and finds himself at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ. It is a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula separating the countries of North Korea and South Korea and was established as a buffer zone between the two warring countries.

Davis was on assignment for an Internet-based news agency called AsiaIntel. He was with three other cameramen visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA) located in Panmunjom. His journalist friend Joe Hammond was also scheduled to show up at the JSA. But because Pyongyang has a strong distaste for foreign journalists, Joe had come to North Korea as a member of an ordinary sightseeing tourist. Davis timed his schedule to coincide with the tour group so he could see his friend. 

Davis’ current assignment was to take video for AsiaIntel. His editors want him to “gather military-themed footage from the southern side of the Cold War border relic.” Heck spotted his friend Joe but he felt there was something not quite right about him. “There was something wild in his eyes, something coiled and edgy about his posture.” 

Davis focuses his camera on the friend when said friend crouched, bent forward and rammed his head into one of the North Korean guards. As Joe was making a run toward the South Korean side of the J.S.A., he flashed his passport and yelled, “U.S. Citizen! U.S. Citizen” and looked at Davis and shouted “Sixty-seven twenty” before he was shot down and killed. Davis also noticed three letters scrawled on the palm of his friend’s hand - “CDs”. 

With the death of his friend, Heck Davis journalist instincts take over. He is determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Joe. He also needs to know what “Sixty-seven twenty” and “CDs” mean. But first, he must find a way to get back into North Korea. 

Thus begins one of the most original stories involving Kim Jong-un and a host of other characters. The further the story takes you inside North Korea, the more interesting and surreal the plot. Highly implausible but extremely entertaining, I for one couldn’t put this book down. It may not be the true essence of North Korea but with Martin’s background as a North Korea watcher, he makes it as real as it can possibly get. You may even want to visit the world’s most isolated country just to see for yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Curse of Kim's Daughters by Park Kyong-ni, translated by Choonwan Knag, Myung-hee Lee, Kay Ho Lee, and S. Keyron McDermott (Homa & Sekey Books)

Park Kyong-ni is one of South Korea’s most prominent writers. Her best known work is her ten-volume epic Land which started as a serial publication in a literary magazine called Modern Literature. The story debuted in the September 1969 issue. It took her twenty-five years to complete. The theme focuses on ordinary Korean people’s lives spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth-century, through Japan’s occupation and up until the division of the country into North and South Korea. It has been made into a television series, a movie, an opera, and has been translated into several different languages, including English. 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters was first published in 1962 in the Korean language as Kim Yakkuke Ttadeul. The book was translated into English by a four member team of translators including three Koreans and one American and published in 2004 by Homa & Sekey Books, an American publisher that specializes in fine books on Asia, focusing mainly on China and Korea.  The translation was made possible by a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Institute (LTI Korea). 

The Curse of Kim’s Daughters is set in the town of Tongyong, a small fishing village near Tadohae Seashore National Park. It sits halfway between Pusan and Yosu. It is the story of one family’s struggle to live and survive in a rapidly-changing world. The Kim family’s patriarch is Songsu Kim. A man who was orphaned after his mother committed suicide and his father ran away from home after killing a man.

Songsu Kim was raised by his uncle and grew up to inherit the family pharmacy. He later sells the company and invests in a small fishing fleet. He marries a woman named Punshi who was chosen to be his bride by his uncle. Although Punshi gives birth to a son, the boy dies at an early age. Punshi then gives birth to five daughters - Yongsook, Yongbin, Yongnan, Yongok, and Yonghay.

We follow the lives of Songsu Kim, his wife and his daughters as they all deal with their own troubles. There does seem to be a curse set upon the Kim family’s daughter. The eldest became a widow, got pregnant and was accused of killing her own baby after giving birth to it, the second daughter despairs in not being able to find a suitable husband, the third has a mental breakdown and goes insane, while the youngest meets with misfortune while at sea. 

I’m sure there are some aspects of Korean culture that I just cannot understand which may have biased my opinion on praising this novel. I can understand arranged marriages, respecting your parents and your elders, and not shaming one's family but the abuse and neglect fostered upon the daughters of Songsu Kim by their various spouses can only be described as abuse and domestic violence. 

The most heart-wrenching incident involves the third daughter. She fell in love with one of the family’s servants. They eloped but were caught. The servant was made to leave town and because their daughter was no longer a virgin, the parents forced her to marry a rich man’s daughter who was not only abusive but was an opium-addict as well. Whenever she tried to come back home, her mother would force her own daughter to go back to her abusive husband because that is her duty as a woman. 

Although well-written, the story is sad and depressing and doesn’t seem to leave any room for hope. The parents attitude towards their own children borders on child abuse. If you want to be depressed and believe that living life is a curse, then perhaps you will be able to enjoy this story. As for me, I believe in the pursuit of happiness and that all relationships should be based on love and trust. ~Ernie Hoyt

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin (Knopf)

None of Mom’s children give her much thought until the day she goes missing in a busy Seoul subway station. One minute she’s clutching her husband’s hand as he’s forcing his way down the stairs and then she’s gone. Before he realizes her absence, he’s already packed into a crowded car, unable to leave. When he returns to the spot where he last saw his wife, she has vanished. 

As they begin to search for her, her children realize they barely remember the date of her birthday.  Mom had submerged her celebrations into those of her husband’s, for the sake of convenience. In fact they don’t know her true age, their father tells them, because she’s older than her birth certificate indicates. They don’t have a recent photograph of her because Mom hated having her picture taken and nobody ever pressed the issue. 

When they think of the 69-year-old woman named Park So-nyo who turned out to be really 71, all they can think of is Mom, whose “house was like a factory,” filled with juices and sauces and pastes and fermented fish made by her own hands. All they remember at first when they think of Mom is how she perpetually worried that her children might go hungry and how she always made sure they were fed.

Their search is for a woman whom they barely know, one whose reported sightings are ghostly, in neighborhoods her children left long before.  As they try to understand the mystery of why she didn’t call any of them or why she hasn’t gone to a police station to ask for help, they begin to turn up fragments of memory--the unspoken knowledge that Mom is unable to read, the ignored signs of her ill health, the way she cared for her family unaided when their father temporarily abandoned his household.

As Mom gradually takes shape while still remaining elusive, each member of her family sees dimensions of her that they have constantly overlooked--her curiosity about one daughter’s trips abroad, her longing to read the books written by a child with whom she constantly battles, her hidden devotion to a brother-in-law who killed himself before her children were born, and her connection to “that man,” who is linked to her in a way that always remained a secret.

Mom slowly unfolds like a budding flower, in a shadowed fashion through the eyes of others. Only at the end of her story does she emerge with her own voice, and by then she’s taken on another shape, an unrecognizable form. 

In the relentlessly urban world of modern-day Korea, Mom is embarrassingly rural, only recognized for what she gives and how she nourishes once she has disappeared. Kyung-Sook Shin has created a delicate allegory, a fable built with spiderwebs, carefully and gracefully constructed. Her opening sentence echoes the stark lack of sentiment that characterizes the beginning of Camus’ The Stranger.  The famous “Mother died today. Or was it yesterday,” is matched by “It’s been one week since Mom went missing.” But unlike the narrator of the French classic, Mom’s children find their way into the compassion and tenderness of Shin’s final sentence, voiced to the Pieta, “Please, please look after Mom.”~Janet Brown

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller (Viking)

Nora Okja Keller is a Korean-American writer and Comfort Woman is her first novel. It was the winner of the American Book Award in 1998. The term “comfort woman” is a term used for women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Army of Japan during World War 2. It remains a sensitive subject between the nations of Japan and South Korea. However, the author doesn’t focus on the conflict between the countries.

Comfort Woman is the story of a woman and her daughter, Akiko and Beccah and is narrated throughout, by the two women who currently live together in Hawaii.  The story opens with the line, “On the fifth anniversary of my father’s death, my mother confessed to his murder.” Beccah’s father died when she was five years old.  Beccah doesn’t recall how she felt about her mother when she was told that it was her who killed her father. “Maybe anger, or fear. Not because I believed she killed him, but because I thought she was slipping into one of her trances.” 

Beccah realized at a young age that there was something different about her mother. Most of the time, she was like any other mother. She would laugh and sing songs with her daughter. She would tell Beccah stories about her father when he was in Korea. It didn’t matter how hard Beccah prayed or left offerings to the gods, her Aunt Reno (not a blood relative) would say “the spirits claimed your mother”. 

It was during these times that Beccah felt she could not understand her mother. When the spirits called to her, Beccah felt, “My mother would leave me and slip inside herself, to somewhere I could not and did not want to follow. It was as if my mother turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space.”

Akiko starts off her narrative with “The baby I could keep came when I was already dead.” She says she was twelve when she was murdered, fourteen when she died. Even twenty years after leaving one of the “recreation camps”, Akiko was able to have a baby. A half-white, half-Korean girl who would be called a tweggi in her home village, but here where she was born, “she was American”. 

Akiko was saved by missionaries. They had assumed she was Japanese because of her name as it was sewn onto “the sack that was my dress”. “The number, 41, they weren’t sure about.” She could hear them talk amongst themselves saying she is “like the wild child raised by tigers”. Akiko responded to the simple commands they gave in Japanese -sit, eat, sleep. She said she would have responded to “close mouth” and “open legs” as well. In the camps where women like her were called Jungun Iyanfu, military comfort women, they were taught “whatever was necessary to service the soldier.” They were not “expected to understand, and were forbidden to speak any language at all.” 

When Beccah’s father died, they were living in Miami. Beccah’s mother sold whatever assets he had and tried to make their way to Korea but only got as far as Hawaii. It wouldn’t be until after Beccah’s mother's death that Beccah would learn the truth about her mother’s past. 

Can you imagine not knowing anything about your mother, the person who gave you life? Can you imagine not knowing what their real names were, thinking that the name you had been calling them all your life was a lie? 

The ordeal that the “comfort woman” had to go through boggles the imagination. Nora Okja Keller once again sheds light on a piece of history that Japan would like to forget and refuses to apologize for. Keller does not focus on the politics of the situation but weaves a story that could ring true for a number of women who were forced into sexual slavery. ~Ernie Hoyt

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballantine Books)

The quest for beauty and the hunger for family dominate the lives of five young women who live within the same building in Seoul’s famous Gangnam neighborhood. 

Ajuri, who lost her voice in a childhood fight with schoolmates, earns her living  in a hair salon, making other women beautiful. Her roommate and childhood friend, Sujin, calls her “the little mermaid,” who communicates solely with pen, paper, and the gift of touch. Without speech, Ajuri has sharpened her other senses beyond what they had been before she became mute;  “the wind,” she says, “I don’t remember it having so many shades of sound.” 

Sujin and Miho grew up together in the same orphanage. Their lives diverged when Miho’s artistic talent took her to live for years in Manhattan. When she returns to Seoul, Sujin urges her to live in the “office-tel” building,” with its desirable zip code and proximity to the subway. Miho, seeing this as a place “for the unfettered”, becomes roommates with a stranger, Kyuri.

Kyuri works in one of Seoul’s most prestigious “room salons,” one that is known as a “10 percent,” employing only the prettiest 10 percent of the girls who make conversation and pour drinks for men who “pay to act as bloated kings.” “Electrically beautiful,” Ajuri describes her neighbor, while Miho sees her as “painfully plastic.” Kyuri has paid a borrowed fortune for her skin that “gleams like pure glass” and her features that have been sculpted into a replica of a popular Korean singer. Trapped in debt, she is haunted by her “expiration date” and thinks of moving to Hong Kong or New York, where beauty is measured by a less demanding standard.

Sujin yearns for Kyuri’s face and the chance it will give her to become a room salon girl, even though she knows it will take at least six months for her to recover from the surgery. The reshaping is a brutal process that makes Sujin mask her lower face to hide the swelling and the numbness that makes her drool as though she was shot up with novocain. But when her beauty begins to bloom, she claims the happiness that eludes Kyuri.

These girls are the reason why a young wife decides to move into the office-tel. She’s magnetized by the glimpses she sees of their closeness and their freedom, an intimacy and mobility that she’s never had. Wonna, after a long series of miscarriages, guards her most recent pregnancy with fierce possessiveness, yearning for the daughter who will give her a family of her own.

Within the framework of these lives, Frances Cha gives a view of modern Korean life with the perspective of an American outsider and the trained eye of a professional journalist. She shows the extraordinary wealth and power of Korea’s upper class in a single sentence, when an heiress approached by a stranger on the street, says to her companion, “Maybe I can have him killed.” “Korea is the size of a fishbowl,” Miho observes, “Someone is always looking down on someone else.” Economic class is difficult to transcend, which makes beauty a necessity. 

But beauty gives a fleeting advantage, accompanied by a crippling loan that’s taken on with little thought. “It is easy to leap when you have no choice,” Kyuri remarks. 

Many women face the prospect of old age without children who will provide emotional and financial support. Korean firms offer maternity leaves that can last at least for three months and as long as a year, something they do their best to avoid providing. The cost of bringing up a child can be astronomical.  Parents who don’t qualify for free government daycare can end up paying huge amounts for child care. Peer pressure makes them buy budget-draining robots who read aloud to children from books that come in sets of 30-50, air purifiers for gigantic baby-strollers, and “pastel bumper beds with tents.” “All these ob-gyns and birthing centers and post-partum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children.” Kyuri says. Meanwhile hospitals devoted to cosmetic surgery attract patients from all over the world and a never-ending supply of room salon girls.

Artifice, for Cha’s characters, is an established fact of life. Elaborate weddings with hundreds of guests confer a fragile status upon wives who wait for husbands to come home from the girls in room salons. Cha strips away myths that proclaim the strength of family and the privileges of beauty,  revealing a glittering, lonely world where women learn to support each other.~Janet Brown

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

“Am I even Korean anymore,” Michelle Zauner asks herself after the death of her Korean mother. She finds her answer when she goes to H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain that is found across the U.S. “I hardly speak any Korean but in H Mart it feels like I’m fluent.”

As she views the food of her childhood on the grocery shelves, Zauner’s fluency extends to her grief and she wanders the aisles in tears. In the supermarket’s food court she watches mothers feeding their children the choicest morsels of their meals and feels waves of anger when she sees women of her mother’s age and those who are older, still enjoying their food,  their lives. 

Her mother was never a “Mommy-mom,” as Zauner called the mothers of her friends. “My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself...Hers was tougher than tough love.” But the two of them had a common ground in food. From early childhood Zauner learned that being an adventurous eater gained her mother’s approval and happily consumed delicacies like live octopus tentacles. It took much longer to realize that the way her mother revealed her love was through the food she cooked for her daughter.

Half-Korean, Zauner and her mother make many trips to Seoul to visit family. The differences that make Zauner’s life difficult in rural Oregon become enviable assets in Korea. Her small face, the double-fold of her eyelids, and her pale skin earn her the praise of yeppeu, pretty, and the attention of a K-drama director. When she finds that her mother has discouraged what Zauner sees as her one chance at fame, she’s outraged. Her mother looks at her and tells her “You could never be anyone’s doll.”

The truth of this statement becomes clear as Zauner leaves home for the artistic life of the East Coast, independent, unconventional, and pursuing a career in music. She returns home when her mother is diagnosed with cancer and the two of them embark on an agonizing journey, in which love becomes the keynote, expressed through food. But now it’s Zauner who makes the  gifts of sustenance while her mother expresses her affection by eating as much as she is able to swallow.

After her mother’s death, Zauner opens the “kimchi fridge” and discovers instead of jars filled with pungent fermented vegetables, her mother has stocked the shelves with old family photographs. Strengthened by the memories contained in the photos, Zauner begins to make kimchi for the first time.

Food is the underpinning of Zauner’s tribute to her mother. As well as being a stunning look at pain, grief, and devotion, Crying in H Mart is a guide to the food that can be found in that supermarket, a glossary that should be carried on trips to Korean restaurants. Zauner generously names and describes the dishes her mother made for her, translating and illuminating the different forms of love that nourished her and are integral parts of her life.~Janet Brown

A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim (St. Martin's)

Patti Kim was born in 1970 in Pusan, Korea. Her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was four years old. She wrote A Cab Called Reliable as her Master’s Thesis at the University of Maryland where she earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree. Her thesis was then published in 1997 and became her debut novel and opened the path for her to become a writer. She says her books “aren’t autobiographical and yet they are, if you know what I mean.”

The story is set in the early seventies. Ahn Joo and her family are from Pusan, Korea where they used to live in a small room behind a grocery store. They moved to the States when Ahn Joo was seven years old and settled down in Arlington, Virginia. They currently live in an apartment complex called Burning Rock Court.

Ahn Joon is in the third grade and was on her way home from school when she heard her younger brother crying. She remembers her mother saying “it was wicked for a child to cry in public” and yet she would not scold her son, Min-Joo, who often cried in public. She was told that Min Joo was special.

Ahn Joo saw her mother carrying her crying brother get into a taxi. She decided to hide behind a tree and when the car passed by, she saw her mother’s face through the window in a blue cab that had “Reliable” written on the door. When Ahn Joo got home, she found a note her mother left her along with a box filled with four small cakes with white frosting.  In the note which was written in Korean, her mother said the cakes were for Ahn Joo, to eat them and enjoy them. She would come back later to pick up Ahn Joo. That was the last time Ahn Joo saw her mother. 

We follow Ahn Joo’s life as the years pass, from grade to the fourth, from the fourth grade to the fifth and on up until high school, sharing in her failures and successes. She still believes her mother may one day come back and get her but life goes on with just her and her Dad.

Her father sums up the life of the Korean immigrant. Even though it is just him and his daughter, he squeaks a living with a welding job. He saves up enough money to buy a food truck then progresses to becoming the owner of a grocery store in a mostly African-American neighborhood and makes sure his daughter gets the education she needs. 

Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable brings to life what it is like for a Korean-American girl to grow up in the U.S. The struggle for identity and adjusting to a new environment and culture. The family dynamics may not be the same for every Asian immigrant family, but many of the problems they face are easily recognizable - the prejudice, the language barrier, family ties (both good and bad) and wanting the best for their children.~Ernie Hoyt

The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler (Counterpoint)

“News of the deaths moved fast that week,” but soon fatalities from another calamity spawned by the natural will supplant this current crop of corpses. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes--”Disaster lay dormant, in every corner,” and a travel agency called Jungle has learned how to profit from that universal truth. As soon as destruction arrives, be it fire, flood, or some other natural horror, Jungle puts together a travel package to that area and disaster tourists, prompted by a voyeuristic altruism, sign up to witness other people’s suffering.

Yona, young and pretty, has spent ten years working for Jungle. Suddenly her manager threatens her job security by making persistent sexual advances and Yona eagerly takes an opportunity to escape his unwanted attentions. 

She’s sent to Mui, a small country off the coast of Vietnam. For years it has profited from a desert sinkhole that once swallowed up a substantial number of its residents. Unsure that Mui is still pulling its weight as a disaster destination, Jungle wants Yona to evaluate its profitability.

Through a series of comic travel misadventures, Yona finds herself stranded in this country and is drawn into a local plot to capitalize upon its flagging natural disaster. The ground near the original sinkhole is deliberately being weakened by an ambitious building project. A long series of oddly coincidental traffic accidents involving construction trucks and pedestrians provide a generous number of dead bodies that, Yona is told, will be the only “victims'' of the revived and expanded sinkhole. This new horror, which is being carefully scripted by an imported screenwriter, will revive Mui’s flagging disaster tourism and enrich the country’s leading citizens. 

But Yona falls in love with the man who’s been hired as her guide and he shows her life among the less privileged citizens, scorned by the more fortunate as “crocodiles.” When by chance she reads a finished copy of the script, she realizes the true horror of the scheme she’s been part of and puts herself among the threatened population of “crocodiles.” Then nature intervenes…

Beginning as a comic satire, The Disaster Tourist skillfully expands into a thriller, a horror story, and finally a threatening fable for our time that strikes hard and deep. Seoul novelist Yun Ko-eun says in her afterword, “Sometimes I imagine scenes so euphoric that they grow absurd.” While her invention of Jungle is far from euphoric, except for those reaping its financial success, the absurdities come quickly: the ill-fated use of a train’s toilet at the wrong time, the loss of a passport (every traveler’s nightmare), the fortuitous events that bring Yona back to Mui and into a job she thinks will be her way out of a difficult situation at Jungle. Then the tension begins to ratchet up and when disaster strikes, it holds both tragedy and a strange salvation.

Winner of three Korean literary awards and author of previous novels and short story collections, Yun Ko-eun sees the publication of her first English-translated novel as being “a constellation of coincidences,” that came into being because her translator and her writing “exchanged cosmic winks with one another.” Here’s hoping for many more of those winks to take place--hers is a voice we need to hear at this point in our history.~Janet Brown

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Isolation is a state that many of us have found ourselves in during this period of history. Whether we’re going though it alone or with our families, we’ve been sealed off from activities that in the past have made us happy—going to a library, roaming through a museum, meeting a friend for lunch, or even getting on public transit without feeling apprehensive.  

Some of us have also known the isolation that comes from spending long periods of time in another country where we don’t speak the language and where we sometimes take refuge in memories of a world where once we were understood. But what happens if we find our memories too painful to revisit for more than a moment or two? Where to go then?

When Yohan disembarks from a ship on which he was the only passenger, he leaves behind the sailors from his country with whom he exchanges goodbyes in Korean, “not knowing when he would ever hear it again.” He enters a place that’s filled with a warmth he’s never felt in his life, bringing with him only a letter of introduction to a man he’s never met, and an umbrella tossed to him by a girl he’s never seen before, a gift of silent welcome as he walks into a new world.

Yohan, still young, has come from two years spent in an American prison camp in South Korea, leaving it a year after the war ended. Refusing repatriation to the Northern mountain village that once was his home, he’s sent to Brazil with the basic skills he learned while he was imprisoned, “mending the clothes of the dead.”. 

Working with Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor who has already gone through the process of “adjusting to a foreign rhythm...pretending to understand,” Yohan is quiet, doing simple tasks and exploring his new city while running errands for the tailor shop. He avoids memories--of finding his childhood friend Peng on a military train, of guiding him through the prison camp after Peng is blinded in battle, of watching his only friend release his hold on life and float away while the two of them are taking baths in a treacherous campside river. 

He vividly sees himself on the train with Peng, glimpsing a family who rummages through devastated houses, burrows into a field of frozen wreckage and emerges with their hands cold, glistening, and seemingly empty. “Snow hunters,” Peng says, as the train carries the boys away from a world that will never belong to them again.

Slowly Yohan gains his footing in this new country, learning enough words to guide him into friendships where he can exist with minimal speech: with Kiyoshi, with Peixe,a crippled man who tends the city’s cemetery, and with a boy and a girl, Santi and Bia, two youthful nomads who have only each other, who vanish without explanation but always return.  Bia is the girl who tossed him “the gift of an umbrella in the morning rain,” a present that Yohan keeps while slowly becoming part of this foreign place through the companionship of other outsiders. With one question of three short syllables, he finally abandons his memories of empty snow, his life lived in the present tense, and “enters the future.”

Snow Hunters is a gift that shows how isolation can melt away through the acceptance of a new way of life. Its quiet poetic language and delicate celebration of small pleasures are enhanced by an unlikely and tentative love story, giving hope to anyone lucky enough to read Paul Yoon’s wise and reassuring masterpiece.~Janet Brown

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh (Tin House Books)

Eun Ji Koh, California-born with Korean parents, is steeped in different languages from the very beginning of her life. Her father’s mother, who cared for her when she was small, came from Korea but had been born in Japan and lived there for her first decade. Although Koh hears her grandmother speak Japanese when they’re at a Japanese shopping center, she herself learns only a smattering of words in that language; her grandmother wants to “secure me with English.” Much later, long after that grandmother died, Koh learns from a DNA test that she herself is part Japanese, a fact to which her parents claim ignorance, speculating that perhaps this came from “a violence we didn’t know about.” But Koh, even before discovering this part of her heritage, plunges into total immersion at an international language program in Japan. At seventeen, she absorbs Japanese as though she’s trying to reclaim the grandmother who loved her. By the end of the summer, her teacher is in tears. “Who will talk to you in Japanese again...you will look for it everywhere, anywhere you go. Your hunger will teach you what you’ve lost.”

But Koh has already learned the language of loss and hunger, cloaked in letters written in Korean, the simple version that’s all she understands. When she is fourteen, her father takes a high-paying job in Seoul. He finds a comfortable house for his children to live in and then flies away with his wife, believing “it was better to pay for your children than to stay with them.” Koh, who just recently has entered adolescence is now under the care of her nineteen-year-old brother. Her parents would not return to the US. for seven years.

Every week Koh’s mother sends her a letter, using the Korean that she hopes her daughter will understand, “kiddie diction,” flecked with bits of English to help clarify her messages. They veer from the maternal to the childlike and in them Koh is addressed as a daughter and as her mother’s parent, reflecting the “Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.” Koh’s way of delivering pain is silence. Although she speaks to her mother on the phone, she never replies to these letters.

In college at a poetry workshop, Koh discovers another language. On her second class she hands her teacher forty poems that she had written the night before, poetry about her mother. Her teacher responds with “I wish I could do that,” and then after reading them, “There’s no magnanimity.” Another poet tells her to be “relentlessly forgiving...choose love” in her poetry and in acquiring this new language, Koh’s life takes on a deeper dimension. She learns the “difference between having a life and being a life.” She translates her mother’s letters into English, faces the truth of her abandonment, and then faces her parents when they finally return to the U.S.

Koh’s poetry breaches the surface of her memoir in stunning sentences and her blazing honesty vouchsafes details that are both painful and evocative. This is a book that will break hearts and then put them back together, piece by piece. 

“Languages, as they open you, can also allow you to close,” Koh says. In this beautiful book, she proves that language can also reopen its users after it has closed them, and lead them into gleaming new landscapes of pleasure and clarity.~Janet Brown

Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim (Broadway Books)

Imagine being “in a prison disguised as a campus,” constantly under guard and on guard, in the company of “thirty missionaries disguised as teachers,“ as “a writer disguised as a missionary disguised as a teacher.” Imagine living without freedom of movement, without the ability to call friends and family, without writing uncensored letters or emails, without heat in the winter or the privacy that comes with closing a bedroom door and knowing there is no surveillance waiting there. Imagine living this way for almost five months, teaching young men from the highest social class of their nation who have never used the Internet, rarely leave the campus and then only under tight supervision, who have been trained all of their lives to be unswerving soldiers in the service of their revered leader.

Suki Kim chooses this. Her life has been shadowed by North Korea from the time she can first remember. Living in Seoul until her family came to the US when she was fifteen, she grows up hearing stories of her mother’s older brother who was captured and taken to the north when the country was first divided and about her father’s teenage cousins, young nursing students who disappeared during the war and were never seen again. Division and separation is a common thread that is always present; unification of the country is a prevailing hope among Kim’s family and other members of the Korean diaspora. 

Kim comes to adulthood with a feeling of homelessness, one that oddly disappears during her initial visits to the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang. From the privileged, cushioned viewpoint of being part of a delegation and then as a journalist, Kim is comforted by the “sense of recognition” that she finds there, the feeling that she’s in touch with her past. When she’s given the opportunity in 2011 to teach English in Pyongyang, at a university recently established by Korean evangelical Christians, she grabs it.

Kim enters as the spy that her employers and the North Korean government vigilantly guard themselves against. Gathering material for a book is her goal and she comes equipped with unobtrusive, easily concealed thumb drives on which she puts her notes. To her colleagues, she’s a good Christian girl and Kim, through the way she dresses and the way she speaks, maintains that illusion. Even when she encounters a man who had been her guide when she had come to Pyongyang as a journalist, even when a reporter she had worked with shows up at the university on assignment and immediately recognizes her, even when the man she is in love with writes indiscreetly in his letters to her, Kim remains undetected.

What makes her dangerous charade bearable is her students.  She falls in love with them all, while always being aware that she must watch every word she speaks to them. Any deviation from the curriculum approved by “the counterparts,” English-speaking academics who scrutinize her lesson plans, can open cracks in the wall of isolation that’s been imposed on these young men and could possibly endanger their futures. Even the idea of showing a Harry Potter movie, something they’ve all heard of but have never come in contact with, is shot down as a danger, not by the counterparts but by the missionaries and  Kim comes to realize that slavish devotion to the Leader is quite similar to her fellow-teachers’ devotion to God.

“They’re beautiful” is her first impression of her students, which is rapidly followed by learning they’re all talented and well-practiced liars. They tell her about one man who managed to hack his university’s computer system and raised his grades in all of his courses. When this was discovered by the authorities, the student wasn’t disgraced  for his dishonesty but was rewarded for his expertise.

The Leader dies unexpectedly at the end of the semester when Kim is on the verge of going home. Overnight her students are transformed from begging her to return to ignoring that she’s still there. In their grief and uncertainty about the future, they’ve erased her--but she will soon betray them. Even though she’s changed their names in her stories about them, the confidences they have written to her in class assignments and that she discloses may well ruin their lives. Her book is both a horror thriller and a love story that ends badly, with Kim as the villain in the relationship. She’s the one who has cheated--and quite possibly has been destructive--for her own benefit, to advance her career.~Janet Brown

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (Catapult)

One of the first stories Nicole Chung begged to hear when she was a little girl was the story of her adoption. Born premature to parents who had recently moved to the U.S. from Korea, Chung was told that her birth parents gave her up for adoption because they knew that would give her a better life. The people who brought her home were her mother and father from the time she was two and a half months old, still an infant who, at under six pounds, weighed less than many newborn babies. From that beginning, Chung was bathed in love that came from parents “who had chosen her,” she explained to friends when they asked why she didn’t look like her mother and father.

But in the small Oregon town where Chung grew up, there was nobody who looked like her, and once she was in school, a boy on the playground cruelly made this an issue by squinting his eyes at her and chanting “Me Chinee, me can’t see.” When Chung told her parents, they told her if she ignored her tormentor, he would stop. Instead his friends joined him in taunting her and her classmates pulled back from the child who was different. Chung’s Second Grade teacher remarked on her report card that she seemed unhappy but since Chung’s torture only took place on the playground when no adults were around, nothing was done about it. 

Suddenly Chung felt a deep separation, not only from her classmates but from her parents. At family gatherings, when she heard her cousins being singled out as resembling other relatives, she knew she was an outsider, loved and cherished but not one of the clan. Not until she was ten, on vacation with her parents in Seattle’s International District, did Chung see people who looked like her; she “couldn’t count all the Asians.”

Still she was loved, she made good grades, and she learned to find a refuge in books and in her own writing. But in the books she read and in her own stories, the heroines were always white girls. 

When Chung left her hometown to go to college, she found a world in which she was one of many Asian girls. The man she married was Irish and Lebanese. Being different was no longer a burden and a stigma. But when Chung learns that she’s pregnant and her doctor asks for her family medical history, she believes that, if only from a health standpoint, it’s time to find her birth parents.

Her quest is as emotionally difficult as her lack of knowledge ever was. Chung discovers she has two sisters, sharing a mother with one and both parents with the other, and she learns that her birth parents had told her sisters that she had died when she was born. Rapidly she and her full sister forge a connection through letters and Chung learns the dark secrets of her birth family--the cruelty and the violence that her birth mother inflicted upon the sister who is becoming her closest friend.

Life rarely provides fully happy endings and the story of Chung’s search is no exception. There are questions for which she will never have answers and she learns that although she’s in the nineteenth generation of her father’s family, she will never be included in the family history. In Korea she simply doesn’t exist.

Her memoir is a piercing look at the racism directed toward America’s model minority and the double-edged sword of bi-racial families formed by adoption. Chung shows the importance of blood relatives as well as the happiness that can come from parents who have chosen their child. “Being adopted,” Chung concludes, “probably saved my life.”~Janet Brown

The Plotters by Un-Su Kim (4th Estate)

When his job gets him down, Reseng knows it’s time for Beer Week. He orders ten boxes of beer, clears out his refrigerator,  and replaces the food with beer cans. He takes peanuts and dried anchovies out of his freezer for nourishment and opens his first beer. By the time he crushes the last can, he’s ready to get back to work.

Found in a garbage can when he was a baby, Reseng is adopted when he turns four by a man called Old Raccoon and grows up in a place called the Doghouse Library. Surrounded by books, he teaches himself to read, a skill that will do nothing to enhance the career path Old Raccoon has waiting for him. Reseng is fated to become an assassin, one of many who are directed by plotters and owned by contractors. Reseng is owned by Old Raccoon.

After his first kill, Reseng asks “Am I going to end up killing more and more people?” “No,” Old Raccoon tells him, “You’ll kill fewer and fewer. But you’ll make more and more money.”

And as Reseng’s targets become increasingly valuable, the money increases too. He’s good at his job. But the morning that he finds a small ceramic bomb in his toilet, a delicate but deadly item, sends him off into Beer Week. 

In Reseng’s line of work, a man doesn’t have friends; he has associates and one of his associates is a tracker. Jeongan is a man who cultivates the art of being so ordinary that nobody will ever notice him or remember him. He can find anyone and he finds the person who put the bomb in Reseng’s toilet. 

Mito works in a convenience store, a puzzling occupation considering that she studied medicine and is fully qualified to be a doctor. Too small to be an assassin, too young to be a plotter, she is, Jeongan says, “one disturbingly complex woman,” who is obsessed with Reseng. But why?

The Plotters is no ordinary thriller. Each one of its characters is unique and none of them are who they seem. The cross-eyed librarian who works for Old Raccoon; the “grumbling orangutan-size man” who “looked like Winnie the Pooh” and runs a pet crematorium that also burns the corpses brought to him by assassins; the polished, Stanford-educated contractor who also grew up in Old Raccoon’s Doghouse Library; the old man with a mastiff who cultivates his garden far out in the woods and is one of Reseng’s targets--all of them are walking riddles, and all of them are intertwined in a morass that includes government officials.

Un-Su Kim has constructed an eerie, dreamlike world for his characters, one that’s revealed in chapters that appear to be stand-alone short stories. Then their common thread begins to surface: in the library with 200,000 books that nobody ever borrows, the knitting shop run by Mito’s crippled sister where the attic is filled with photos of Reseng, the high-rise insurance building that holds “the luxurious digs of an assassination provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea.” 

The biggest puzzle of all is Reseng, a man moving down a dead-end street who never went to school but who grasps the essence of the world he was brought up to inhabit. “There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parceled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace.” These words resonate with a horrible meaning ten years after they were written. They give The Plotters a dimension that seems to have been written for the time we face in 2020. ~Janet Brown

Three Tigers, One Mountain by Michael Booth (St. Martin's Press, April 2020)

“Two tigers cannot share the same mountain, “ is the Chinese proverb that Michael Booth choose as the epigraph to his latest book. Booth expands the proverb to include three tigers, China, Korea, and Japan. None of the three seem willing to share territory, historically there’s been animosity between them, and Booth wants to know why. When much of the world has put the crimes of war behind them and reconciled with their adversaries, why are these countries still at odds with each other? 

To find answers to this question, Booth sets off on a geopolitical odyssey that takes him through Japan, across the sea to Korea, embarking on another small voyage to China, and traveling from Harbin to Hong Kong.  He begins with a firmly held conviction that any regional trouble began with Matthew Perry’s Black Ships forcing Japan into a diplomatic relationship with the West and upsetting “the Confucian geopolitical hierarchy that had held in the region for most of the last two millennia.” China, with its predominate culture, technology, and education, was the leader, Korea “was the primary tributary land,” and Japan was “the vaguely barbaric little brother.” 

Suddenly Japan was the beneficiary of Western technology and weaponry as America brought its new ally into the modern world. Perry arrived in 1853. By 1876 Japan had defeated Korea and established a protectorate over that country after winning the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, a victory that also forced China to cede Taiwan to Japanese control. In 1905, Japan defeated Russia in a battle for the northern portion of Korea and in 1910 took over the entire country, and then moved onto Manchuria in 1931. Within a little more than half a century, Japan had gone from little brother status to the dominant Asian power, a position that it lost by force only 75 years ago. In countries that measure their existence by thousands of years, 75 years is a heartbeat of time, not long enough to heal wounds, let alone replace scar tissue.

In Japan Booth discovers a strong right wing presence that focuses its prejudice against the Korean residents, Zainichi, who came as laborers before 1945 and never left. Stereotyped as lowclass and unskilled criminals, the Koreans who haven’t assimilated into Japanese culture are easy scapegoats who are attacked with racist slogans, not only by conservative extremists but by mainstream society in general, Booth is told by a Japanese journalist. Meanwhile China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy ten years ago, which exacerbates old tensions between these two countries. Japanese revisionist history teaches that Japanese expansion into Korea and China was benign and that the Nanjing Massacre and Korean slave labor is nothing more than fake news.

Korea sees its 35-year occupation by Japan as far from benign. It went from being a kingdom to a colony, with its language, culture, and even the names of its people being replaced by that of Japan. Its natural resources were drained for Japanese benefit and  beginning in the early 1930s, thousands of its women were commandered as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

Estimates of their number range from 20,000 to to 100,000, and only forty of them are still alive today. 

Although Japan paid 900 million dollars to Korea in reparations from the war, and a fund set up by private Japanese citizens offered 3.5 million dollars directly to the surviving comfort women in 1995, many of them refused to take the money. What they want, along with many of their compatriots, is a direct apology from the Japanese government, if not the emperor himself.

As for China? They’re held responsible for the division of Korea and are considered the major obstacle to its unification. 

Booth begins his Chinese journey in Harbin, where the Japanese perfected weapons of germ warfare, using prisoners of war and local Chinese as their guinea pigs. More than six hundred people a year died from experiments, including live vivisection and lethal injections of bubonic plague, cholera, and anthrax. Although a museum holds testimony from eyewitnesses to the atrocities committed in Harbin, few residents know about it according to a UNESCO survey. 

Nanjing however is deeply alive in the Chinese consciousness, and is kept that way by the use of television dramas depicting the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and the heroism of China’s defenders. As Booth points out, even the lowest estimate of Nanjing’s civilian deaths between December 1937 and January 1938, which is 50,000, compares horribly with “the 61,000 British civilians and 108,000 French civilians during the entirety of World War Two.” 

But to counteract the horrors of the past, Booth finds hope in the pop culture of the present. The youth of China are attracted to the energy of Japanese manga, anime, cosplay, and pornigraphy. Nanjing, he says, “has more Japanese restaurants here than in any other Chinese city,” and over 8 million Chinese tourists visited Japan in 2018. Korean boy bands, films, and Gangnam Style have captivated young hipsters in Japan and in China. Perhaps, he speculates,  as the aging populations of the three tigers increase, the countries will experience a “geriatric peace,” as old wounds fade within failing memories and the young find no reason to revive them.

His theory is a slick and easy one, bolstered by his slick and easy observations. Even so, his book, written in a breezy travelogue style, will attract the attention and enlarge the focus of readers who are looking for entertainment, served up with a helping of forgotten history.~Janet Brown

The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (Penguin Books)

This psychological mystery and suspense novel by Korean author You-Jeong Jeong is one of the most disturbing books I've read in quite a while. The story starts with twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin waking up to the smell of blood. He has been off his medication and thinks he may have passed out after having an epileptic seizure. But that smell of blood...

He is also covered in what he thinks is mud, his clothes are crusty, and his hair is matted. He wonders if he fell in the mud on the way home the night before.  As he slowly tries to remember the details of what happened, the phone rings. It is Hae-jin, his good friend and adopted brother. Hae-jin asks about their mother who had called Hae-jin in the middle of the night. This is so out of character for her that it makes Yu-jin a bit worried. He seems to recall his mother calling his name but wonders was she calling for help? Or was she begging for her life?

He thought he had heard the voice of his brother as well. Yu-jin had a brother named Yu-min. When they were children, they would play a game called “Survival” with their BB guns that shot small plastic pellets. They would shoot each other and the one who got hit the most would win. He remembers a time when he almost lost his BB gun along the bridge of a railway track. He bumped his elbow and dropped his gun. At the same time he could see the train coming towards him, but he didn't want to lose his gun and ran back for it. Although he managed to get his gun, his uniform was torn and his face covered in dirt. He remembers how Yu-Min covered for him at school and he wishes Yu-min were here now to help him. However Yu-min has been dead for a long time.

Yu-jin comes to realize that his clothes and his body aren't covered in mud--he’s covered in blood! He knows he has to deal with the situation himself. He is still unsure of what happened. But he finally has the strength to check on his mother. He finds her lying on the floor with her throat cut from ear to ear. The shock is overwhelming. What to do now? He believes that maybe he should call the police. He think she may have tried to fight off a burglar in the night. He dials the emergency number only to come to realize what the police would think--“a dead woman with her throat cut, lying in a pool of blood next to her dazed, bloodied son.”

This is only the beginning of the mystery as we learn of another murder. A young woman was found with her throat cut, dumped into the sea. She was found in an area where Yu-jin would run at night.

The deeper you read, the deeper you are pulled into the mind of Yu-jin. More mysteries begin to unfold. Why was Hae-jin adopted? Exactly how did Yu-jin's brother Yu-min and his father die? And if he doesn't have epilepsy, what is he suffering from? Fast-paced and at times more graphic than any slasher film, this book makes it impossible for you to do anything more than read it to get to the bottom of its mystery.~Ernie Hoyt

Kimchi & Calamari by Rose Kent (Harper)

This is a title for all those kids who were adoptees and may have faced having an identity crisis at one time or another from not knowing their biological parents.  Although I’m not an adoptee, I couldn’t pass up this book with its interesting title.  However, on a personal note, I met a friend of my sister’s who was going on her own around-the-world solo tour; one of her destinations was a small town in Korea.  Like the protagonist of this book, she also was an adoptee from Korea and decided to go in search of her roots.

Drummer Joseph Calderaro is one mixed-up kid!  Why is that you ask?  Because he has one serious problem.  Joseph is fourteen and is in the 8th grade and his social studies teacher has just handed out an assignment to the class – to write an essay about your ancestors.

Since Joseph has an Italian-American family, this wouldn’t seem to be too much of a problem.  But he was adopted.  The only thing he knows about his biological parents is that “they shipped his diapered butt on a plane from Korea and he landed in New Jersey.”  How is an adopted Korean boy going to write about his family or ancestors he’s never met?

At home, for Joseph’s fourteenth birthday, his father has given him a Corno, a goat horn that Italian men wear for good luck.  His father explains that it’s to protect against malocchio, the “Evil Eye”.  However, Joseph shows no excitement and refuses to wear it.  He makes up some excuse for his father but really he feels that the guys in his class would think it’s weird. If they knew what a cornois, it probably meant that they’re Italian and would wonder why some Korean kid would be wearing this around his neck.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of adolescence.

Joseph’s friend Nash has a great idea.  He suggests to Joseph to look up his ancestors on the internet.  Joseph thought that might be easier than asking his parents for help.  His dad is not pleased with Joseph’s reaction to the corno and when he tries to talk with this mother about his adoption, she always breaks down in tears.  His parents had told him about the day he became part of the Calderaro family.  But what they never told him, was his “MBA – Me Before America”.  His mother had only told him, back when he was in the third grade, that his biological mother had named him Duk-kee and Park was added by the adoption agency.

While Joseph is still worried about writing his essay, the only thing his friend Nash discovers is that Pusan had a record rain fall on the day that Joseph was born.  Thinking of ways to expand his report to 1500 words, Joseph decides to head to his local library.  At the same time, he runs an errand for his mother, taking towels from his mother’s business, a hair salon called Shear Impressions, to the Jiffy Wash Laundry.  Joseph is surprised to find out the owners of Jiffy Wash have sold their business and will be moving to Florida.  He gets another surprise when the current owner mentions that the new owners are Korean!

There is also a new student at school who is in Joseph’s band class.  One look at the new boy and Joseph just knows that he is Korean too.  The following day Joseph is once again the “towel boy” for his mother and heads to Jiffy Wash.  As he opens the door there he runs into the new kid.  Joseph introduces himself and says that they’re in the same band class.  New Kid says his name is Yongsu Han.

When Yongsu calls his “Uhmma” and a Korean lady comes into the room, Joseph figures that “Uhmma” must mean Mom.  When Yongsu’s mother greets Joseph with “Ahn nyong has seh yoh?”, not only does it make Joseph feel a little insecure, he suddenly feels totally out of place.  It doesn’t help matters any when he’s asked if his mother is Korean.  Once he explains that he was adopted he feels like Yongsu’s mother sees him in a different light – a fake Korean who doesn’t speak or understand the language.  The only thing Joseph wants is to get the heck out of Jiffy Wash as fast as he can, but it also makes him want to know more about his Korean heritage.

Back home, Joseph looks through a book on Korean history that he borrowed from the library.  Although he becomes familiar with Korean history from the Yi Dynasty up until the Korean War, he can’t figure a way to making the history a part of his heritage.  Then he comes upon a picture of a man wearing a Gold Medal.  The caption says his name was Sohn Kee Chung who represented Japan during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

A light bulb goes off in Joseph’s head.  He now knows who and how he is  going to write that essay.  Joseph titles his essay “A Medal for Speed and a Life of Honor: My Grandpa Sohn”.  Little does he know, this little white lie will lead to an even bigger problem.  His teacher announces to the class that his essay was chosen to be entered in a National Essay contest!  What is Joseph going to do now?

But I wouldn’t want to spoil the entire story for those who may have had a similar experience.  I think this would be a great story for anyone who was adopted and suffers from having an identity crisis at one point in their life.  Joseph was lucky enough to become part of a loving family and yet, not knowing his heritage seems to have left a little hole in his life.  Although I am not an adoptee, I am the product of a mixed marriage and was brought up bi-culturally, so I can understand wanting to know my own family’s heritage.  Even if you are not an adoptee, it’s a very heartwarming story and you can’t help but feel for Joseph and his growing pains.