Korean American Women Negotiating Confucianism, Christianity, and Immigration in Free Food for Millionaires

Free Food for Millionaires 559

Chapter 22 Korean American Women Negotiating Confucianism, Christianity, and Immigration in Free Food for Millionaires

Kimberly McKee

Min Jin Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, introduces Casey Han, a second-generation Korean American, who grew up in a small apartment with her immigrant parents, Joseph and Leah, and sister Tina in Queens, New York. The novel follows Casey as she strives to attain success in Manhattan in the finance world upon graduating from Princeton. Korean cultural values and American norms are often in conflict causing readers to witness the complexi- ties of intergenerational conflict between immigrants and their children. The chasm between the generations is reflected in Casey’s ruminations over her father’s stories of the Korean War and life in Busan, a port-city on South Korea’s southwest coast, after escaping from his family estate near Pyongyang and leaving his yangban (civil servant) family behind at the age of sixteen. These families were typically considered to be buja (wealthy), which made the down- ward economic mobility even harder for Joseph than for his wife, who grew up in poverty in South Korea. Discussing Casey’s disinterest in Joseph’s Korean War experience, Lee writes: “His losses weren’t hers, and she didn’t want to hold them. She was in Queens, and it was 1993. But at the table it was 1953, and the Korean War refused to end.”1 Casey claims Queens as home, creating a stark contrast between South Korea as the past and the United States as the present. As a whole, the novel juxtaposes the traditional as represented by South Korea to the modern as located in America. We first meet the Han family in their apartment kitchen as Leah prepares dinner and hopes that, given their mercurial relationship, Casey and her hus- band will get through the meal quietly without argument. According to Leah, this dynamic is due to their similar temperaments. Her younger sister, Tina, is also on edge, recognizing a fight brewing. Both attempt to mitigate any argument and try to distract Joseph from Casey as she drinks water to fill herself up before dinner, a habit that enrages her father.

1 Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires (New York: Warner Books, 2007), 8.

Joseph is in a vexed position as he wants his children to succeed academi- cally and professionally, but he resents what he feels is their condescension towards him. He wishes Casey understood the struggles that led him to the United States. This tension evokes conflicts that have occurred within families between immigrant parents and their offspring since immigrants first arrived in the United States.2 During the violent encounter, Casey decides that she’s had enough of her father:

As her father, he deserved respect and obedience—this Confucian crap was bred in her bones. But this ritual where he cut her down to size had happened so many times before, and it was always the same: He hit her, and she let him. She couldn’t shut up, although it made sense to do so; certainly, Tina never talked back, and she was never hit. Then, as if a switch clicked on, Casey decided that she’d no longer consider his side of the argument. His intentions were no longer relevant. She couldn’t stand there anymore getting smacked.3

And yet in this moment of clarity, when she decides to assert her agency, Joseph promptly hits her a second time. It’s a different type of blow; Joseph gives her no warning and her glasses fly off her face as she falls to the ground. Growing up, violence occurred regularly within the household. Casey recalls, “When she was a girl, her mother warned her and Tina that in America, if your parents disciplined you and the teachers at school found out, the state would put you in an orphanage.”4 The Han girls stayed quiet and this silence contin- ued into adulthood. While familial violence is not a central theme of the text, it is a narrative device that prompts Casey’s search for self as she leaves Queens for Manhattan to start her journey as an ostensibly independent young woman in her twenties, yet she is never able to escape the shame that comes from the strife within her home. In many ways, the Han family is emblematic of Korean Americans who migrated in the 1970s and 1980s. Given the restrictions to Korean migra- tion to the United States prior to 1965, the majority of individuals are recent immigrants and their descendants (see Shelley Lee, Chapter 2 in this vol- ume). Following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act,

2 An early example of how daughters negotiate their relationship with their immigrant parents is Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925); Gay Wilentz, “Cultural Mediation and the Immigrant’s Daughter: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers,” MELUS 17, no. 3 (1991): 33–41. 3 Lee, Free Food for Millionaires, 15. 4 Ibid., 31.