Tag: Korea

The Liberators: A Novel by E.J. Koh

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The Liberators: A Novel by E.J. Koh

The Liberators is a powerful punch of a novel packed into a mere 240 pages. With an economy of words, almost bordering on stinginess, Koh delivers full fleshed characters and a tragedy of relationships and history. This is a masterful work of historical fiction.

The novel revolves around two intertwined narratives, one historical and the other intimate. The division between North and South Korea is the constant thread of grief and loss that plays against a more personal tragedy in the form of a young couple’s romance, marriage, and slow death thereof as the husband and wife are separated through migration and tradition. Nation here becomes an actor itself; the North and the South, like siblings or lovers torn apart by foreign forces, growing in ever divergent directions. This parting is mimicked by the husband and wife, until at last reconciliation seems impossible.

Here is a complex interweaving of expectations and desires that become thwarted by forces of history and culture in ways that are beyond any individual’s control.

A Ricepaper Airplane: A Novel by Gary Pak

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A Ricepaper Airplane: A Novel
by Gary Pak

Unlike my usual reviews, this is an older book, published in 1998. I found it on sale from the University of Hawai’i Press and since I enjoyed Pak’s other novel, Children of a Fireland by Gary Pak I had to read it. Like Pak’s other works, A Rice Paper Airplane is set in Hawai’i and revolves around one of its communities. In this case, the story centers of Koreans who migrated to the islands to seek better employment or escape from Japanese persecution during the period of the latter’s occupation of the former’s country.

The novel unfolds like origami, turning backwards and forward in time according to the scattered memories of an old man, Uncle, as he recounts his life for his nephew. Threaded through his memories are histories of Hawai’i and its many residents, Korean, Japanese, White, Indigenous. The novel also folds across geography, taking place in both Hawai’i and Korea. This is a novel about conflict, both cultural and political; desires, both of the individual kind and the ambitions of states; resistance and fighting spirit, in body and mind, through success and failure.

This is an emotional novel. Readers should expect to feel grief and sorrow. But also the hope and resilience of Korean migrants in cultures, circumstances, and places not of their own making and wholly according to history and fate.

For these reasons alone, this is a very worthwhile read. It is little known, but ought to rank with the best sellers of today in the vein of intergenerational, multi-generational historical fiction: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing for example.

But that is not the only reason to read A Ricepaper Airplane: Pak’s prose is also an appeal. The novel’s dialogue is written in Hawai’ian pidgin, a creole language that is unique to the islands, lending authentic voice and substance to the characters and the story itself. The exposition is unfussy, straightforward, yet also flowing. Pak leaves the reader with poetic silences that fill with organic emotion.

This is an incredible novel, one which deserves greater recognition.

The Picture Bride: A Novel by Lee Geum-Yi

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The Picture Bride: A Novel by Lee Geum-Yi

The Picture Bride is a historical novel that transcends its unique historical moment to touch on experiences and themes the reader will find familiar: the significance of family, the trials of marriage and love, loss and grief of loved ones lost to death or distance. The novel revolves around the migration of picture brides from East Asia to Hawai’i and the Western United States, a practice that was rampant in the early few decades of the twentieth century. Japanese and Korean men left their homelands to find work on Hawai’ian plantations, and as they accrued a little bit of wealth they found themselves in a primarily homosocial world, absent of East Asian women. To find love and fulfill their duty to wed, they would engage the services of a matchmaker and seek out a bride from their home country. The technology of the day limited the contact between potential bride and groom to correspondence and a photograph, hence the name given to this marital transaction: both the bride and groom would have nothing to more than a photograph to base their physical attraction on.

Many men who sought wives in this way were long past the typical marriage age of men in their home countries. Aware of their advanced age and how this might deter a young woman from wanting to marry them, they often used a fake photograph of someone else or a photograph from their youth. Picture brides discovered the deception on their arrival, too late to turn back — if they had the money to do so — without suffering humiliation or possible repudiation by their families.

Of course, such arrangements also resulted in personality mismatches and other deceptions of character, on both sides. In the end, all the migrants have no choice but to set those differences and loyalties aside; the people on the plantation and scattered across the islands become the only family they can have.

This is a story of the pain and joy of being an immigrant, of what lengths we have to go through to find our place in the world. The novel focuses on loss of family and the gaining of new ones. How these young women adapted, thrived, or wilted in their new homes so far away from their homelands is what unfolds in the novel. I won’t spoil it for you so I will stop my review here.

The Picture Bride is a novel about what it takes to live one’s life as best they can, with what they have and what they have lost.