'Drifting House': gimlet-eyed stories from the Korean kaleidoscope
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Krys Lee's characters can be "not here nor there, not this or that. Indeterminate and silenced." -
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Krys Lee's stories in her debut collection, "Drifting House," occupy spaces between, and her characters -- immigrants and refugees, families and lovers -- are nomads of time, place and culture.
Ms. Lee -- born in Seoul, raised in the United States, and now back in Seoul -- creates nine short stories from Koreans searching for home, love and normalcy in a Korean century defined by war, oppression and the yearning for something better. Her first book is a keen observation of the layers of Korean society the past few generations, and of the dualities that have shaped the peninsula and its people.
Viking ($25.95).
A frequent theme in Korean literature and culture is han, a term considered untranslatable and uniquely Korean that conveys prolonged hopelessness and frustration through generations of suffering and foreign occupation. In the 20th century, the external triggers have been the 40-year Japanese occupation, the division of the peninsula, the tolerance of totalitarian governments on both sides of the 38th parallel, and the severe recession in the late 1990s that inspired ordinary Koreans to donate jewelry and other belongings to reduce the national debt.
What becomes obvious through this view of history is a palpable lack of Korean agency: for example, that pan-Asian recession is known as the IMF crisis in South Korea, named after the global organization that bailed out the economy.
Out of this turmoil came a Korean diaspora to, among other places, Koreatowns throughout California. In these built-from-memory replicas we find some characters looking to recapture a normalcy taken away by national growing pains or failed marriages.
In "A Temporary Marriage," a fortysomething divorcee, literally has her family taken away when her ex-husband flees to Pasadena, Calif., with her daughter. The narrator in "A Believer" considers her broken family stateside "Immigrants. Not here nor there, not this or that. Indeterminate and silenced," though that heavy thought applies to nearly all Ms. Lee's main figures in one way or another. This displacement occurs within Korea, too, when families move to Seoul for work, or move out of Seoul to evade political crackdowns.
Loss and homelessness -- literal and national -- increase as the traditional order of things disintegrates. Looking at an old man turned beggar, another says "in a sane society [he] would have been cared for by his children. But Korea is no longer sane, you no longer feel sane." Characters follow their sense of propriety and obligation to family, to friends, and to the familiar, but usually with tragic results. Marriages fail, children talk back, and governments north and south imprison their own. The men and women of Ms. Lee's stories seem burdened by their memories of history and the bittersweet comfort that lack of agency once brought.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
