By Kym Jiyoung
Hello, Koreans. Are you ready? Ready to enjoy your roles as major characters in the exalted pages of American fiction and non-fiction?
Whether you are ready or not, you are already there. Gary Shteyngart features a Korean-American heroine in his 2010 novel “Super Sad True Love Story.” In 2011, Ben Ryder Howe writes about his life with Korean in-laws in New York in a memoir entitled “My Korean Deli.” Cullen Thomas reminisces about his fellow inmates in a Korean prison in his 2007 book “Brother One Cell.” These books are not entirely about Koreans, but the stories do evolve around Koreans to a substantial degree.
Koreans have come a long way as characters in American novels. My first encounter with a Korean character was in Larry McMurty’s 1982 novel, “Cadillac Jack.” There was a one-liner referring to an assassin, who happened to be a Korean. That he was Korean was of no consequence to the story. I still wonder why McMurty assigned the insignificant role to a Korean.
Other writers used Koreans from time to time as a sort of generic props in the background of their stories. Maxine Hong Kingston briefly describes a scene at the port city of Incheon in “The Woman Warrior.” Bill Bryson talks about his drunken party with a Korean businessman, Lee from Busan, in his Australian travelogue “Down Under.” Clive Cussler features crazy North Korean spies and terrorists in his 2006 novel “Black Wind.” John Irving (my favorite writer) devotes several pages to describe a Korean lady who wants to become a writer in his latest novel, “Last Night in Twisted River.” (She becomes a paramour of the novelist and a writing instructor).
Now, a new crop of American writers have brought Koreans to the foreground in their stories. Koreans have become more presentable and noteworthy on the pages of books in America, I guess. Like Korean smartphones in the world electronics market, Korean people may become ubiquitous and popular fictional characters on the world literary scene one day. So far, Koreans are portrayed fairly, that is, neither as angels nor as demons.
In his “My Korean Deli,” Howe describes Koreans in America: “The people who took over the deli industry from the Greeks and the Italians, the people who drove the Chinese out of the dry-cleaning trade, the people who took away nail polishing from African-Americans, and the people whose children made it impossible for underachievers like me to get into the same colleges our parents had attended.”
A Boston WASP whose ancestry goes all the way back to the May Flower, Ben Howe is married to one of those overachieving Korean-Americans. Ben and his wife, Gab, move into the extended family of Gab’s mother, Kay. Kay is a quintessential Korean super mom who drives her family onward and forward, rain or shine. Gab is a super-achiever (which is almost filial duty to younger Koreans) and became a corporate attorney, but opted to become a deli owner for her mother’s sake. Their Korean deli is in a poor and scary neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Ben joins the Korean duo in the operation of the deli, while maintaining his job as an editor at Paris Review, a small but prestigious literary quarterly.
Ben continues to be amazed by the strength and go-getting spirit of the Korean women. Here’s Ben’s tribute to his wife and mother-in-law: “Are all Korean women like this? Are they all unsatisfied merely holding down a hard job while being dutiful daughters, wives and mothers? Do they all have to run extended-family boarding houses, take classes in flower arranging, start a youth group at their church and master the art of traditional Korean cooking at the same time?”
His memoir, however, is not just a story of Korean immigrants. It is a story of Ben’s two diabolically different work places: a deli in Brooklyn and a literary magazine in Manhattan. As the title implies, the deli is more prominently featured. Ben spends most of his working hours at the deli. His observation and occasional commentaries about Koreans constitute the main part of the book.
Ben’s observations about Koreans are mostly astute. He describes miguk-byeong, which he translates as “America fever.” He correctly explains the word “inteli” as used in Korea: “the sort of woman she [referring to Kay] was an ‘inteli,’ which comes from the English word ‘intellectual’ but in Korean means an educated, independent, career person.”
Sometimes, however, the writer presents a concept that is supposed to be uniquely Korean, but in fact is totally alien to contemporary Koreans. In the story, for example, pregnant Gab is worried about samchilil. A Korean reader may recognize the words “sam (three)” and “chilil (seven days)” Samchilil, therefore, means three weeks. In the book, samchilil is defined as “the traditional postpartum-care regime mothers undergo in Korea,” under which a new mother would “eat nothing but steaming bowls of seaweed soup and several large glasses a day of ‘deer juice’ (powdered deer antler mixed with savory medicinal herbs) for three weeks.” Well, I bet 990 out of 1,000 young mothers in Korea in 2011 would say they have never heard of this samchilil regime. And, deer juice?
I may sound like I am nitpicking, but I am not. As a Korean who has lived in the United States for the last 30 some years, I appreciate Howe’s observation about Koreans. His portrayal of Kay, his Korean mother-in-law, and recent immigrants as a whole is positive. As opposed to his family’s and collectively Bostonian Puritan WASP’s way of “being embedded in all that family and history,” Koreans and other recent immigrants “look forward and care more about results and processes.” Well, I want to shout, “Hallelujah, that’s the way to go, America.”
An avid reader of American fiction and nonfiction, I am happy to see that American writers are writing about Koreans. I am looking forward to finding what Eunice Park is all about. Eunice is the heroine of Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story,” which I have just downloaded for my iBook.
One more thing. I am not forgetting Chang-rae Lee, whom I admire a lot. His novels, “Surrendered,” “Native Speakers,” and others, are suis generis. They are mainly stories about Korean-Americans and their experiences in the turbulent history of the Korean people. Lee, of course, wrote novels in which Korean characters are more in the background: “Aloft” whose main characters are Italian-American. Well, his novels are for another time and another column.
Welcome Kay. Welcome Gab. Welcome Eunice whom I am about to have the pleasure of meeting. And welcome whoever comes next in line.
Formerly a staff writer of The Korea Times, Kym Jiyoung is an attorney in private practice in Los Angeles, Calif. He can be reached at jkym@yahoo.com.