Hello, I’m back after another long absence! Despite it being summer break, I haven’t made posts any more frequently than during the school semester (to be fair, I just survived taking summer Chinese language classes—don’t think it will actually help me in my research, but it was actually a lot of fun!). I want to focus on Asian American literature this summer and have a lot of reading suggestions I hope to make, but I thought I would start with the two books I read right at the beginning of the summer (because I feel like my brain cells are aging and want to talk about them before I forget about them completely). I read these two books in the same week by coincidence, and was initially surprised at how they similar the premise seemed to be at the beginning of the novels. A mother goes missing, and her kid(s) are left with the mystery of what happened and the guilt of wondering if they were bad children. Because The Leavers is an Asian American novel and Please Look After Mom is a Korean novel translated into English, the two soon diverge in plot and overall message. One grapples with what it means to be an Asian minority both as a mother and as a child who is adopted into a white family after his mother’s disappearance, while the other critiques traditional Korean values that make motherhood and marriage extremely oppressive.
Lisa Ko’s The Leavers:
This is a fairly recent book having been published in 2017, and deals with important contemporary issues, from ICE immigration camps, the facade of the American dream, international adoption (especially white couples adopting Asian children), urban poverty, and the narrative of success that seems dependent on college education (the main character is not the good Asian kid aspiring to be a doctor or engineer, but wants to drop out of college to pursue music. While not mentioned in the book, especially because it is his white adoptive parents that want him to return to college, I think the model minority myth makes the paths to perceived success narrower in Asian minds).
What I enjoyed most about the book was that it was refreshing to read about a new perspective (a Chinese boy who gets adopted to white parents), because most Asian immigrant narratives are about first generation immigrants or the children who are caught between their parents who still feel very much tied to their homeland and their own desire to fit in within American society. The character of Deming, later renamed Daniel, has his Chinese heritage severed from him by being adopted by a white couple, forced to move from the multicultural hub of New York City to a small college town where he is the only Asian face around. In the end, he does visit China and finally gets in touch with his real mother. While he experiences a brief moment of recapturing his cultural heritage, he also returns to New York and has to explore new formulations of Asian American identity and experience. He accepts that despite all their flaws, he also loves his white parents and is not so much caught up in the question of what it means to be Chinese-American, only what it is to be himself. If anyone is looking for a recent Asian American novel to read that is also a fairly easy read, I highly recommend this (I’m reading Viet Thanh Ngyuen’s The Sympathizer right now, and boy is it dense, although it is also the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner! What I’m saying is that The Leavers doesn’t require as much background knowledge about a specific historical time or event, and is not a very formidable book to tackle, which in my opinion makes it a great summer read!)
Shin Kyung-Sook’s Please Look After Mom
This novel is a quicker and more casual read (I think it took about three hours to finish the whole thing), and it’s sentimental and oftentimes cliched. On the other hand, it still moved me at places and brought me close to tears. This is one of the few Korean translated books that have gotten worldwide recognition, although I could see how non-Korean readers might lack the background knowledge about Confucian family values to fully appreciate the text. The ways in which the mother is treated is undoubtedly cruel, but it’s important to see that this isn’t senseless cruelty to be blamed solely on the individual family members. It’s also part of a way of thinking that has persisted for generations, and actually resonated with things my own mother might have experienced in terms of witnessing women who were stuck in self-sacrificing positions within their families or the valuing of sons over daughters. Things are also changing in Korea, so this definitely felt like a book people would resonate with if they were my parents’ generation and older, but I suppose sexism and under-appreciation of family members can always persist (it doesn’t have to though, everyone please be nice to your family and women and all other human beings and the earth in general).
To avoid spoiling the whole book, I will only say that the novel is about a mother of five grown-up children, who after experiencing headaches and possible dementia mysteriously disappears one day (so many book reviews said she was a mother of four, but this past year I’ve been surprised at how many professional book reviews get small details wrong like this. Knock on wood that it doesn’t happen to me if I get to write a review one day!). The whole story is narrated through the perspective of three of these children, the husband, and briefly the mother herself. Again, I don’t think it was the most literary of books, but if anyone is looking to read something to make them appreciate their own mothers more, this is it! I also really enjoyed the experience of reading books with similar themes close together so I could compare the differences (whether cultural or in writing style), and hope I can do this more. Goodbye for now, on to more reading!
Su Cool for School 