Situations Vol. 5 (Winter 2011) © 2011 by Yonsei University
Sybil Baker1 Professor of English (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
Surrendering to the Demands
of Place
ABSTRACT
This essay reviews and discusses three recent works that take place in South Korea and are written by Korean American authors: The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee, Once the Shore by Paul Yoon, and Long for This World by Sonya Chung. Lee’s The Surrendered conveys a post- Korean War world with verisimilitude and emotional resonance but relies on conventional narrative elements that ultimately make the story feel over-determined. In Once the Shore, a collection of stories set in a fictional place inspired by Jeju Island, Yoon privileges his own imagination over historical or cultural accuracy. As a result, the stories are successful as beautifully written dreamscapes but not necessarily as accurate representations of Korea. Yoon pre-emptively undermines readers and critics who might discover these cultural or historical misrepresentations by stating that not only are the stories not accurate, but that they are not required to be. In Long for This World, Chung displays her narrative prowess by employing several points of view among a host of characters, weaving present tense with past tense, and using flashbacks with present action in assured and often poetic prose. However,
1 Sybil Baker is the author of The Life Plan and Talismans. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she is the Assistant Director of the Meacham Writers' Workshop. She is currently on faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and the Yale Writers’ Conference. She is Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat, an online international journal of art and literature. Her novel Into This World, set in Korea, will be published in May 2012. 1 several inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the novel’s timeline and naming conventions undermine the narrative authority of the text. This essay mostly raises the question of responsibility: if the intended audience is a literary reader who may not know much about Korea, does the author have a responsibility to portray Korean culture accurately?
Keywords: Korean American literature, Chang-Rae Lee, Paul Yoon, Sonya Chung, realism, authorial responsibility
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Published in 1995 by Riverhead Books when Chang-Rae Lee was twenty-nine-years old, Native Speaker was a breakout for Asian immigrant literature. In a sophisticated first-person narrative, Henry Park chronicles his personal recovery after his son’s accidental death and the consequent unraveling of his marriage against the backdrop of the fall of a Korean-American politician Henry is spying on. By examining his own complex relationship to race and identity, Henry’s narrative in Native Speaker set the bar for Asian-American immigrant fiction. As a modern classic, the “anxiety of influence” Native Speaker engenders is palpable: what other Korean-American writers write will be considered in the shadow of that novel. To that end, Korean-American writers have several possible responses to that predicament.
A first response is to approach the Korean-American immigrant experience differently. After the success of Native Speaker, for example, Chang-Rae Lee himself chose to cast his net wider. A Gesture Life (1999), his second novel, is a quieter story of an aging Japanese- American (although of Korean race) who as part of the Japanese Army in World War II participated in and witnessed the “comfort women” atrocities. Another novel that falls into this category is Min Jin Lee’s over-long debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007), which focuses, with mixed results, on a female Princeton graduate New Yorker.
A second response is to background Asian-immigrant experience altogether in order to focus on other literary concerns. In his third novel Aloft (2004), this is what Chang-Rae Lee chose to do, focusing on an Italian-American in the suburbs. Lee’s Aloft is more of an ode to Cheever and Updike, in which the upper middle class problems of an uncommunicative and isolated aging man are explored. Writer Don Lee said of Chang-Rae Lee’s decision to write from the point of view of an older white man, “Because of that book, all of us feel freer to slip away from writing about identity and ethnicity, moving on to whatever captures our fancy” (“Interview with Don Lee”). Don Lee himself gives an example of “moving on” in his farcical third book Wrack and Ruin (2008). In an interview, Lee explains his decision to background his two main characters’ Korean-Chinese heritage. “Race figures only peripherally, in that several characters in the book are Asian-American artists, and they lament that their work is always defined by the issues of identity and ethnicity, and they’re tired of it. I think this is what a lot of writers of color feel these days, and we’re all trying to move beyond the immigrant/assimilation experience. It’s really been done to death, and
3 everyone’s bored with the subject” (“An Interview with Don Lee”).
In her debut Miles from Nowhere (2008) Nami Mun also chose not to write explicitly about the “immigrant/assimilation” experience. Perhaps as a result, Miles from Nowhere has more in common in language, theme, and structure with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son than with Native Speaker. Mun’s novel, which won the Whiting Award, is the story of the teenage daughter of Korean immigrant parents, Joon, who flees a broken home in the Bronx in the 1980s. While her Korean background is sometimes referred to, the work focuses more on Joon’s journey from a marginal life as a drug-addicted runaway to an ending that focuses on redemption and inclusion.
A third possibility is to shift creative attention back to Korea. In The Surrendered (Riverhead 2010), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Chang-Rae Lee himself for the first time sets much of the novel in Korea—in this case, during and right after the Korean War. Also, for the first time Lee broadens his narrative range by using the third-person point-of-view to explore three characters, two of whom are female. In interviews, Lee has said that the novel, which had been a draft of disparate narrative threads, finally came together for him when he remembered the story of his father’s brother, who died after falling off a train during the war.
The Surrendered focuses on three characters scarred by trauma and loss—June Han, an orphan of the Korean War; Hector Brennan, the American GI who saves her life, and who is named after the Greek mythological hero; and the woman they both love, Sylvie Tanner, a woman haunted by the murder of her parents in Manchuria in the 1930s.
In Native Speaker, Lee was able to expertly weave together disparate plot elements, including a politician’s downfall, the death of Henry’s son, Henry’s job as an industrial spy, and his reconciliation with his wife. The Surrendered also begins with distinct plot elements that span continents and decades; but unfortunately, Lee is not as successful in artfully bringing them to a satisfying conclusion.
Part of the reason the end does not satisfy lies in the problem of realism itself. In his New Yorker essay, “Keeping It Real”, James Wood argues, the realist novel has become dependent
4 on a one-hundred-year-old set of story conventions, making it hard for plot-driven novels to feel fresh or unexpected. Wood notes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction”, suggesting that “even if it’s hard to decide whether the novel can really progress it’s easy to see that it can congeal—that certain novelistic conventions grow steadily more conventional, and lose some of their original power.”
The Surrendered often employs the conventions of the plot-driven realist novel. After Hector marries June and brings her to the US so she can get her citizenship, June becomes pregnant. She leaves and they divorce, but Hector does not learn he is the father of June’s child until she tells him more than twenty years later, during the last stages of June’s terminal cancer. Deciding he must accompany her to Italy to find her son, June hires a driver to take her to Hector. Conveniently (and unnecessarily in my opinion), Hector’s girlfriend is run over and killed by June’s driver, an event that provides the deus ex machina for a resistant Hector to take June to Italy.
What puts The Surrendered in the “good novel” category is an emotionally resonant ending which connects to the beginning of the novel as an image of survival and one person’s desire to live. For me, the details of Korea during the war and at the orphanage soon after were accurate and compelling. These details were in service of the story, which was about surviving the tragedy of loss caused by historic circumstances.
As Wood says, “Lee is a gifted chronicler of war, but ‘The Surrendered’ also squanders those gifts, in a misguided attempt to choreograph a satisfyingly ‘good read’—what David Shields calls ‘the moves the traditional novel makes.’” In a Barnes and Noble interview, Lee almost admits as much: “I would definitely say that this is my most 19th-century novel” (“Interview: a conversation with James Mustich”). Yet the details do not come together cohesively, and the novel’s overall arc feels forced. In the same interview, Lee admitted that what became The Surrendered had started as separate threads that he was unsure how to weave together (“Interview: a conversation with James Mustich”). Despite the success of certain individual scenes, the novel never quite recovers from this original structural problem. The employment of these over-determined conventions keeps a good novel from being a great one.
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For second and third generation Korean-Americans who have more ties to the US, placing a work in Korea can represent an opportunity for artistic exploration and discovery. They can write about Korea from a place of defamiliarization, a term first defined by Victor Shklovsky, and expanded on by Charles Baxter in his essay “On Defamiliarization.” Defamiliarization refers to the writer’s task of making the familiar strange or, inversely, make the strange familiar.
Two recent debuts by Korean-Americans reflect this engagement with defamiliarization. Paul Yoon’s short story collection Once the Shore (Sarabande 2009) and Sonya Chung’s Long for This World (Scribner 2010) eschew exploring the shifting identity of the hyphenated American experience in their debuts, and instead work on making the “strange” (Korea) familiar to them.
Yoon’s Once the Shore spans fifty years of a fictional island modeled on Jeju, from before the Korean War to the present. In one of the back jacket blurbs, Yoon’s stories are compared to Chekhov’s, and this comparison is accurate. Even though many of the stories arise out of the trauma of World War II, the Korean War, and the poverty of the island, the focus is more on a Chekhovian “theatre of mood” and “submerged life”. Yoon privileges the internal emotional changes and relationships of his characters over the external conditions of their lives. He is skilled at repeating images, using the snow and the landscape as links. The effect is that these stories are arranged more by image than chronology, with the overall mood being one of loneliness and loss, of ghosts real and imagined.
In the acknowledgments section, Yoon says that while Jeju was the inspiration for his fictional island named Solla, and that some of the stories were derived from actual historical events, Korean myths, and folk songs, he had “altered history, geography, custom, and culture to suit the purposes of fiction” (267-268). Yoon admits that he was not really concerned with technical accuracy. In an interview on Sarabande’s website, Yoon says, “I did very little research—I used a handful of sources that I happened to read, most of them by chance, as jumping-off points for the stories (noted at the end of the book)—but once the stories began to progress I let my imagination roam. Worrying over every little historical and cultural accuracy would’ve consumed me and hindered my work; I would have written a book of
6 nonfiction if I wanted to present a South Korean island with one-hundred-percent accuracy.” While Yoon’s defense of his artistic process is understandable, one wonders what the “purposes of fiction” are in this context. What grates is the assumption that any move toward cultural accuracy is constraining and not to be bothered with if those accuracies “hinder” the creative mind of the artist.
Yoon’s position pre-emptively undermines readers and critics who might discover cultural or historical misrepresentations by stating that not only are the stories not accurate, but that cultural accuracy is required. In doing this, Yoon effectively shuts down an important conversation by suggesting that more research would have cramped his literary style. If I thought Yoon’s project was to question and play with the notions of literary realism and representation instead of writing a series of stories “about” Korea, I might be a little more sympathetic. Instead I can’t help but wonder if his position is one taken for reasons of artistic convenience than vision.
Nonetheless, the rules of the fictional world of Once the Shore are consistent. For example, most Korean words are translated into English without italics. This serves to create a unified world that is not jarring. By recreating Jeju as a fictional island, Yoon has chosen to privilege the emotional territory of his characters over the “real” world of specific facts and history. For example, in many of the stories, it is snowing in Solla, often, heavy, and hard. Snow becomes an important motif in the stories, a necessary part of the Solla landscape—even if it is infrequently a part of Jeju’s. Yoon’s Solla is a dreamscape of a Korea, imagined for him, just as for the reader.
“Look for Me in the Camphor Tree” is a representative text. A quietly and delicately wrought story about an older widower and his nine-year-old daughter who has not yet recovered from her mother’s unexpected death, “Look for Me” takes place on a farm during a long snowy winter. The time period is not specified, but the daughter’s western-bed, sleeveless dress, and combative and disrespectful attitude toward an adult stranger suggest the contemporary. Yet with repeated images of a possible ghost-mother, heavy snow, and ultimately a pony that saves the daughter from freezing to death, the story is less realism than it is fairy tale. When the father finds his daughter with the pony in the woods, he picks her up. “And then she
7 spoke. About nighttime and its noises. About castles and corridors. About foxes and maidens. About a woman in a pale blue dress” (197). By portraying a finely drawn fictional world that is more dreamscape than Korea itself, Yoon reveals the positive and negative effects of his decision to use Jeju as inspiration rather than source material.
As beautifully rendered as it was, I could never completely enter Yoon’s world: it did not feel authentic. Because Yoon has admitted that establishing an emotional connection to his characters is more important than researching the “real” Korean world, he underestimates the effect cultural differences have on his character’s relationships. As a result, many of the stories seem to be more about conflicts in Western relationships, and could have as easily been set in North America. Yoon says in the Sarabande interview “I do think the foundations of my work are certainly connected to my own emotional experience.” This privileging of his own emotional experience over research may explain why many of the characters seem to have Western sensibilities.
For example, “And We Will Be There” is about Miya, a Korean orphaned in Japan and brought to an orphanage on Solla during the Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, she volunteers at the local hospital, helping wounded soldiers. She drinks water from her tea cup instead of tea because she’s afraid to ask for it. This detail reflects Miya’s low standing, but I couldn’t help think that plain water would be more precious than the barley tea Koreans drank as a way to show that the water had been clean or treated. Later, a blind boy asks her what the sky looks like and she responds, “like fireworks”. Again, would a girl in an orphanage on a tiny island during that time have seen fireworks? And if so, is her response alluding to the Chinese belief that fireworks were a good omen that dispersed evil spirits? Each time something like this happens, I get pulled out of the story, even though Yoon has already warned the reader that his pieces have little fidelity to Korean history or culture.
In “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido,” a well-off couple, childless in their thirties, must deal with the increasing distance in their marriage. The couple’s childlessness is not mentioned overtly in the story, so we never know if the couple is childless by choice. Nonetheless, childlessness would have ramifications for a Korean marriage, especially since the couple are living on an island, a more conservative place than the mainland. In this story, the wife, Insu, calls her
8 husband by his name “Tae ho” several times in dialogue. Usually Koreans don’t use first names for almost any relationship, and spouses usually call each other common endearment terms like yo-bo, and chag-gi.
As Yoon suggests, the targeted audience is not necessarily Koreans who might not find anything special (and perhaps only irritating) about a Korean island where it often snows. To that end, Yoon’s debut might also not be so suited to someone like me who lived in Korea for twelve years, visited Jeju several times, and traveled extensively.
Before reading Long for This World, I had admired (and continue to admire) Sonya Chung’s work as a reviewer and essayist for The Millions. I was, therefore, looking forward to her novel. Unfortunately, the novel’s narrative authority is undermined because of a few missteps that call into question Chung’s painstakingly-described Korean world. Before the novel begins, a page of “The Main List of Characters” focuses on those related to or involved with the Korean and American Han families. Oddly, Han Jung-joo is listed as married to Han Jae- kyu, implying she’d taken his name after marrying. The housekeeper who works for the Hans, Cho Jin-sook, also shares her husband’s last name Cho. Yet, Korean women when marrying keep their own family name and do not usually take their husband’s. Since Korean children generally do take the father’s last name, the rest of the naming family tree seemed reasonable. This misrepresentation of the Korean naming system, without explanation or qualification, undermines the novel’s authority as a realistic representation of Korean culture. However, most readers would probably not even notice the blunder, and one might argue that it was simply a convention used for Western audiences. If this were the case, I wish Chung had been more explicit about her decision instead of presenting the family lineage without reference to the Korean naming system. Because of Chung’s silence, it’s not clear to me whether she even knew Korean wives don’t usually take their husband’s name. Perhaps Chung felt this naming was not important to the story, that she did not want to get too bogged down in the admittedly complex intricacies of the culture, and instead wanted to focus on the family dynamics. Perhaps the readers, too, would not be bothered by knowing that she did not reveal this information about Korea’s naming system. Yet, the question of what is Chung’s responsibility to these readers who expect her to represent this unknown world accurately remains.
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Because of Chung’s opening gambit, I began the novel warily, looking for other “mistakes” in the portrayal of Korean family life and culture that I may normally have overlooked. Not too far into the novel, I noticed that Korean words are used somewhat arbitrarily and inconsistently. While Yoon (or his editor) chose to translate Korean words into English consitently, Chung peppers her text with untranslated Korean words, even when an English word would have sufficed. For example, when Dr. Han asks his wife about Min-yung, he says, “Make sure she has some guk later” (Chung 22). And later in the conversation, “You should take her to the oncheon, it may do her some good” (Chung 22). Since the reader knows the couple is speaking in Korean, the use of Korean words in the dialogue in this case seems unnecessary. “Soup” could easily be used instead of guk and “hot spring” instead of oncheon. Readers unfamiliar with Korean would be unable to guess the meaning of the words because there isn’t enough context in the sentences. Korean words appear inconsistently in the text, with no internal logic or rules for when they are used. While sometimes Korean address (ajjumma, hyŏn-nim, nu-na, ŏhni) is used or referred to, the full-time housekeeper Cho Jin- sook never calls Han Jung-joo the typical address for her employer, sa mo nim, meaning “wife of boss” and instead thinks of her as Mrs. Han. This slip might be more easily forgiven if other Korean types of address were not scattered haphazardly about the text. There seems to be no set pattern for the use of Korean words and phrases in the novel.
There are other missteps. At a dinner with friends, the Hans are asked if they know the sex of their daughter Min-yŏng’s baby from her latest ultrasound. Mrs. Han “answers that it is too early, they do not know yet—which is untrue” (Chung 179). The rest of the passage focuses on Dr. Han being upset that his wife replied when he should have answered the question— something she usually would not do. But in Korea it is technically illegal for a doctor to explicitly tell parents the sex of the baby before that bay is born (because of the culture’s preference for boys), even if most parents do manage to learn the sex of their baby from the ultrasounds. From the passage in the novel, it appears that the characters are not aware of, or at least not concerned with, this law. They do not discuss the issue in an indirect or circumspect manner which would indicate a legal sensitivity, especially in front of a doctor. In another example, we are told that in 2005 the two brothers didn’t call each other from the US and America because phone calls are so expensive (Chung 103). But while this was true up until the late 1990s, by 2005, phone cards were readily available, allowing for cheap
10 international communication. When Han Hyun-kyu, the elder brother, arrives at Pohang airport for a visit after almost forty years away, the Korean Hans do not pick him up. Instead they instruct him to take a taxi for the ninety-minute trip to the house (Chung 54). Considering an older brother is returning after a long time, it’s hard to imagine the Korean family would not have been at the airport to pick him up. There are other examples like this. I point them out not because these inaccuracies will ruin the reading experience for the targeted reader, but instead to return to the question of Chung’s responsibility to represent the culture accurately in a work of realistic fiction.
Appropriately described as a pointillist painting for its employment of multiple time periods, settings, narrators and points of view, Chung’s novel does not negotiate the landscapes between the real and the imagined worlds very well. While most of Long for This World takes place in a small Korean town, the protagonist Jane also relates her experiences as a war photographer in Paris, Darfur, New York, Iraq, and Syria. In this way, the novel becomes a meditation on the photographer’s role in situations involving trauma, violence, and death. Interestingly, however, the trauma of Korea’s own war and its social and economic aftermath is not directly examined. The first chapter “Flight” chronicles the Han brothers’ leaving “the island” for a better life on the mainland in 1953. By 2005, when most of the novel takes place, Korea is depicted, like the Korean Hans themselves, as rich and stable, far from the war zones Jane documents with her photographs. This modern Korea is a place of refuge and renewal for Jane’s father, Han Hyun-kyu, who immigrated to the US as a young man.
At the start the American Hans appear to be more fragmented and isolated than the Korean Hans. Jane’s mother, Dr. Lee, has sacrificed her family for her career; Jane is thirty nine, single and emotionally numb; her brother Henry is a recovering alcoholic, still fragile; and their father is a disappointed doctor who wants to reconnect with the Korean world he left behind. In Korea, Mrs. Han runs an efficient household; her husband Han Jae-kyu is a respected doctor; they have built a new house that blends the Oriental with the Occidental, and their children are settled—except for their youngest daughter who, although married, is pregnant and has moved back home. Later in the novel, not too surprisingly, the cracks begin to show. Mrs. Han’s youngest daughter is mentally ill, but the family chooses to ignore her plight. The elder brother Han Hyun-kyu’s arrival complicates matters even further, eventually
11 shattering their carefully cultivated stability. Toward the end of the novel, Han Hyun-kyu has a brief sexual encounter with Mrs. Han, while Jane has an encounter with Mrs. Han’s younger brother, a successful painter.
Chung displays her narrative prowess, employing several points of view among a host of characters, weaving present tense with past tense, flashbacks with present action, in assured and often poetic prose. Mrs. Han’s careful and efficient way of running her household and the husband and wife’s inability to deal with their pregnant daughter’s physical and mental illness are portrayed with nuance and verisimilitude. However, like The Surrendered, the plot points fall prey to novelistic convention. The emotionally ill and pregnant Min-yung foretells her own death and suggests her unborn child will be reborn as Jane’s. Fulfilling that prophesy, Jane gets pregnant after having sex once and decides to raise the child on her own. Quite suddenly and conveniently for the plot (it gets the American Hans out of Korea at just the right moment) Jane’s brother Henry kills himself.
But an even greater problem with Long for This World is its faulty timeline. Here is an annotated timeline of the main character, Jane/Ah Jin Han. She is born in 1966 (56-57), in her sophomore year of college she meets her long-term boyfriend Paul (68), she graduates two years later at the age of twenty, which means she graduates in 1984 (71). In 1984, at the end of her senior year, Jane writes to a French photographer who is going to be her mentor and sends her some photos. She doesn’t hear back “for a long time” (the implication is months, not years) (72). And then, “When finally I did hear from her, it was an e-mail and not much to go on" (72) (italics mine). Jane then goes to France to become a war photographer. The next few pages are a series of emails she writes Paul, who is still Stateside, over the next few years. Her email address is [email protected] (73). Any reader doing the math knows that Chung is more than a decade off here, as Hotmail was actually only launched in 1996 and acquired in 1997 by Microsoft (Craddock). In her last email to Paul, Jane mentions she’s been “out” for two years. Adding another year for the time before Jane was in the field, we can assume her last email was sent sometime around 1987 as there are no dates on the emails. Jane also mentions emailing from Kosovo; as a war photographer that means that she was probably there in the late 1990s, not mid 1980s as suggested. An unspecified amount of time passes in which Jane’s and Paul’s relationship has deteriorated. In a section from his point of
12 view, Paul mentions that he and Jane have been together for six years (86), which means that if they met in 1982, then it’s now 1988. At that time they almost break up, but instead, Jane gets pregnant when Paul visits her in Paris and returns to the US to be with Paul. After four months, she miscarries, and a few months after her miscarriage returns to work, this time in Darfur. She mentions that she’s been away for about a year (93), so it should be 1988 or 1989, not 2003, which is when Darfur’s genocide attracted the attention of the press. Fourteen months later she’s wounded by shrapnel from a bomb in Baghdad. She recovers in a hospital, returns to the US and stays with her brother Henry before going to Korea to check on her father in 2005. Several times Jane’s age, thirty-nine, is mentioned in the present day scenes. In other words, Jane’s timeline is not only a mess, it’s just plain impossible, and why other reviewers have not commented on this is a head scratcher, especially when many of the problems could have easily been fixed before publication by Chung and her editor. Responsibilities to representation of Korean culture aside, Chung, in writing a realistic novel, dropped the ball in creating a narrative timeline, which then undermines all other aspects of the novel. Strangely, it seems that, judging from the comments and reviews on Amazon.com, no readers or reviewers even noticed the timeline anomaly, and therefore, were not pulled out of the fictive dream Chung created. It’s as if her prose and characterization were so spellbinding that readers and reviewers also “forgot” that ten years of Jane’s life were not accounted for. In fact, many readers and reviewers praise the novel’s intricate structure and delicate plotting. If no one is calling Chung out on this, then perhaps we have only the critic and reader to blame for the results: caveat emptor. These problems with Chung’s novel are disturbing because they appear not to be part of a stated literary aesthetic, but rather are issues of research and editing.
It is true that if writers’ feet are held to the fire by some kind of cultural or historical police, if their work is considered not worthy because of a perceived error or misrepresentation, then much of fiction would be doomed. Still, even with fiction, some kind of accountability is necessary, especially when place is a featured aspect of the text. While Yoon and Chung might feel necessary to defend the importance of their imagination over maintaining accuracy, the research required to address the problems in their work would have been minimal; they probably only needed to ask someone more familiar with Korea to review their work. Neither author adequately explains why they did not take that step.
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In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner argues that realistic fiction “does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind (31). If the reader becomes unintentionally pulled out of the dream, the work loses its narrative authority. This poses an interesting question: if a work of fiction aims to be a vivid and continuous dream for the reader, is there an intended reader who receives the dream, and might different readers engage the fictive dream world differently? What is the author’s fidelity to the fictional world that he or she constructs? Is there a responsibility for the writer to be upfront about his decision to create an imagined landscape that privileges his emotional connection with his characters over an accurate portrayal of time and place?
Lee’s novel, for its faults with plotting, seems to have made an effort to portray Korea and Koreans during and after the war with verisimilitude. Lee was also forthright that his goal for this novel was to write an old fashioned tragedy, which often does rely on more obviously artificial plot points.
Yoon’s decision works to a degree, giving him more space to inhabit his created world. In the end, though, his choice to rely on his own emotional experience ironically limits the possibilities of his work.
Chung, whose work is beset by more obvious problems, should have been clearer about her artistic goals for her novel—perhaps she could have provided an adequate explanation for why the Korean families all shared the same last name, or why a decade was skipped but not accounted for in Jane’s life. These little moments that threw me out of the story might have been overlooked if the egregious errors with the timeline and the puzzling single-name family tree had been at least addressed. Or, if like Yoon, Chung in her acknowledgements or an interview more clearly stated her artistic goals which might have given me a framework with which to read the text.
For Chung and Yoon, their book’s intended audience seems to be primarily North American readers interested in international literary fiction, which is made explicit in the descriptions and praise for both works. The back jacket blurb for Once the Shore, for example, ends with “Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a
14 remarkable new voice in international fiction.” In a starred review for Long for This World, Library Journal says, “readers who enjoyed superbly crafted, globe-trotting family sagas such as Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, Naeem Murr’s The Perfect Man, or Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life will swoon over Chung’s breathtaking debut.” Interestingly, both Yoon and Chung are compared to Chekhov in some of the reviews, perhaps indicating the emphasis on the emotional mood of their work.
If the intended audience is a literary reader interested in global fiction in English, but who may not know much about Korea, what responsibility, if any, does the author have to that audience as well as the culture they are setting their books in? For example, Chinese writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li immigrated to the US as adults and write about China in their second language, English, for a North American audience. Because they write about a world they experienced directly and intimately, as a reader I trust they will authentically portray what I cannot directly experience. By writing about China for an English-speaking Western audience, Jin and Li endeavor to make what is familiar to them but strange to us familiar to us. As a reader, I enter their fictive dream willingly because I trust their authority. Unlike Jin and Li who create fictional worlds drawn from their known world, Yoon and Chung, American-born citizens whose first language is English, are writing about a South Korea they did not directly experience. However, the implied contract with the North American reader is that Yoon and Chung are guides through a world that, while possibly strange to them as well, is one they have seen, heard about, researched, and imagined.
Not surprisingly, Lee is moving on and full circle with his work in progress, which he describes as “a different kind of immigrant story, where the immigrant is in fact the one who is knowing and ‘at the helm’” (“Interview: a conversation with James Mustich”). Yoon, on the other hand, seems a step behind Lee. In a New York Times interview, Yoon says he is working on a novel set in Korea about orphans during the Korean war (“Stray Questions”). One wonders if Yoon will be able to resist the research that such a novel might require and that Lee seemed to have done with The Surrendered, or if he again will choose to inhabit the interior world of his characters instead. Chung is more cryptic about her current project, only saying she’s working on a novel that is “big and far-reaching and polyphonous like Long for This World, but also very different” (“An Interview with Sonya Chung”). One hopes that
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Chung will continue to build on the strengths of her first novel, its assured prose and multiple narratives, while being more mindful of the pitfalls that complex plots can engender. Either way, it does not seem that neither Chung nor Yoon are yet interested in challenging or responding to Native Speaker by writing their own immigrant novel, although Lee aptly explains his reasons for refocusing on the immigrant novel. “I thought it would be an interesting way to retell an immigrant story, and maybe to make it a global story: this is a character who has expertise and skill and knowledge that the natives don’t have, a different sense of possibility” (“Interview: a conversation with James Mustich”). Only time will tell if Lee is not only describing his new immigrant protagonist, but describing debut authors Chung and Yoon as well.
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WORKS CITED
Baxter, Charles. “On Defamiliarization.” Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1997. 27-50. Print. Chung, Sonya. “An Interview with Sonya Chung.” Terry Hong. Bookslut. Apr. 2010. Web. 15 May 2011. < http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_04_016074.php>. ______. Long for This World. New York: Scribner, 2010. Print. Craddock, Dick. “A Short History of Hotmail.” Windowssteam Blog. Windows Live. 5 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Aug. 2011.
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