Surrendering to the Demands of Place

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 2 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”).

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