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.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 