“How did your mother happen to go missing?”

That is the most awkward—and frequent—question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment.

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtuman  (APR 15, 2011)

Those who have traveled in Southeast Asia – and Korea in particular — will know right away that the number 4 (pinyin sì) is considered unlucky because it sounds like “death” (pinyin s?). Why, then, did Korean author Kyung-sook Shin carefully craft a novel from four different viewpoints?

The answer is that the members of this family are unlucky, or at the very least, careless.  Through years as a family, none of them ever really knew Mom or understood the sources of her strength.  And now she has disappeared in a crowded Seoul subway station, where she and her husband of 50 years were about to board a train. Her disappearance devastates those who are left behind.

The story is told from four alternating points of view:  Chi-hon, the oldest daughter and a successful novelist, Hyung-chol, the oldest son who is wracked with guilt for not living up to his potential, her husband who inevitably disappointed Mom through his selfishness and adultery, and last of all, Mom.   Little by little, a fuller image of Mom emerges, although we, the readers, never really get to know all the facets of Mom either.

Chi-hon reflects, “Either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers…You realized you’d become a stranger as you watched Mom try to conceal her messy everyday life.”  As Chi-hon strives to sort out who her Mom really was, she realizes that, “…because of one thing or another you would push calling her to the end of your list.”  Mom had become superfluous in her busy life, a solid presence who was always a little bit of an enigma.

Hyung-chol was the favored son who was both idolized and pressured.  In the end though, he could not live up to Mom’s aspirations and dreams for him.  “Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.”

The two adult children – and their father – realize, too late, that Mom was an integral part of their existence.  Father thinks, “When she planted seedlings of eggplant, purple eggplants hung everywhere throughout the summer and into the fall.  Anything she touched grew in bounty.”  Still, he selfishly ignores her intense headaches and the heartbreaks that Mom is forced to undergo alone.

When we get to Mom’s story,  we learn some of the background – her arranged marriage, for instance, and a few of the secrets she keeps.  But it’s left to Chi-hon to recognize the truth in a letter from her younger sister, “Do you remember asking me a little while ago to tell you something I knew about Mom?  All I knew was that Mom’s missing.  It’s the same now.  I especially don’t know where her strength came from. Think about it.  Mom did things that one person couldn’t do by herself.  I think that’s why she became emptier and emptier.”

Please Look After Mom is a novel that’s distinctly Korean –ancestral-rite tables, the Full Moon Harvest, plum juice and steamed skate – but is also very universal.  Every view is explored – Chi-hon and Father’s stories are in second person, Hyung-chol’s is in third person and Mom’s is in first person.  And, while the second person tense can become a little cumbersome, the writing is still direct, moving, and graceful.

It’s worth noting that Kyung-sook Shin is already a prominent novelist in Korea; the book sold nearly one and a half million copies in South Korea.  Translated expertly by Chi-Young Kim,  the book is certain to make readers appreciate the hardworking, uncomplaining women who go by the simple endearment “Mom.” (Translated by Chi-young Kim.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 251 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kyung-sook Shin
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “missing” people stories: The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Please Look After Mom (2009; 2011 in US) *MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE WINNER*
• I’ll Be Right There (June 2014)

“It might come in a drop of rain,” Xue Xin continued, ignoring the question, “a note from a faraway flute, the fall of a leaf. Of course, you have to be ready for it or it will pass unnoticed. But if you are ready, and your eyes are open, you will see it and suddenly understand everything. Then you will know who you are and what you must do.”

“Satori.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 07, 2011)

Satori, by Don Winslow, is a prequel to the best-selling thriller, Shibumi, by Trevanian. Trevanian introduced the world to Nicholai Hel, master of hodo korusu, “the naked kill.”  Hel speaks six languages, is a master of the game “Go,” and has a special proximity sense – the ability to detect when any person or thing is nearby. As Satori opens in 1951, the Korean war is in full swing and the Americans have had Nicholai in solitary confinement for three years for the honor killing of his beloved stepfather, General Kishikawa. General Kishikawa, sentenced to a public execution, loved and raised Nicholai, teaching him “Go.” Rather than let him die that way, Nicholai killed him himself.

While in jail, Nicholai was brutally tortured, physically and pharmaceutically by a CIA agent named Diamond. Out of the blue, a CIA agent who is a colleague of Diamond’s approaches Nicholai with an offer. The United States will give him $100,000 and a passport if he will kill Yuri Veroshenin, the Soviet Commissioner to Red China. The CIA’s reason for wanting Veroshenin killed is to put a wedge between Beijing and China. Nicholai takes the offer but he has other agendas – he wants to get even with Diamond and he hates Veroshenin who once forced his mother into a lurid affair so that she could survive.

A plan is put in place for Nicholai to kill Veroshenin with the CIA’s assistance. It is more like a suicide mission for Nicholai than anything else. His odds of surviving are about 1%. Before the mission begins, however, Nicholai must get a new face. He has been so savagely beaten while in jail that his face is a mess. He is sent to a plastic surgeon and then to France where he is to learn the language nuances and mannerisms of the identity he is to take, that of Michel Guibert, an arms dealer. In France, he is taught appropriate southern French by a beautiful woman named Solange, an ex-prostitute, who also teaches him about his adopted background and life in Montpellier where he is supposedly from. They fall in love but Nicholai must leave to begin his mission. He promises to return to her.

Before the mission begins there is an attempt on Nicholai’s life in France by two men from China but Nicholai manages to kill both of them. Nicholai heads off to China and the action revs up. There are arms deals, crosses, double crosses, and no one knows who to believe about what. Nicholai does manage to kill Veroshenin but he is shot in the leg and the CIA’s extraction team fails to show up. Instead, Nicholai’s life is saved at the very last minute by a mysterious group of monks who take him somewhere secret to heal and where he searches for satori, “true understanding and harmony with the world.”

Nicholai is trying to figure out who is after him and why. It seems like everyone has a reason. The cold war is blasting, Vietnam is a hotbed of strife and the different communist nations are not at peace with one another. Nicholai heads to Hanoi where he sets up his own arms deal and is followed by the CIA.

There is a wonderful cast of characters in this book, many kinky, quirky and mean. Winslow knows his geography and history and it comes through clearly, though at times a little too detailed for my preference. Readers know that Nicholai can survive all that this book throws at him because he is alive and well when Shibumi starts. He relies on his skill with Go to navigate the subtle feints and misdirections he is faced with and figure out each of his moves. Go is a game said to be much more complicated than chess; Nicholai is very good at it.

This is a thriller to end thrillers. At times I got lost trying to figure out who was after who and why, but mostly it was fascinating and fun.  Winslow’s writing kept me turning pages through the night and he is at the top of his game with this novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing (March 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Don Winslow
EXTRAS:	Note from Don Winslow and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Savages The Winter of Frankie Machine The Dawn Patrol California Fire and Life Our review of a couple Trevanian novels: Incident at Twenty-Mile

Bibliography:

• The Death and Life Of Bobby Z (1997)
• California Fire and Life (1999)
• The Power Of The Dog (2005)
• The Winter of Frankie of Machine (September 2007)
• The Dawn Patrol (June 2008)
• Savages (July 2010)
• Satori (March 2011)

Neil Carey Series:

• Cool Breeze on the Underground (1991)
• The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror (1992)
• Way Down On The High Lonely (1993)
• A Long Walk Up The Water Slide (1994)
• While Drowning In The Desert (1996)
• Isle Of Joy (1996)

Movies from Books:

• Bobby Z (2006)
• Savages

“North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 27, 2010)

There is much earthy wisdom in the saying: “One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.” By narrating the life stories of six North Korean defectors and their daily struggles, author Barbara Demick underscores this point beautifully. Her moving book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, lets us look at the human angle behind the news headlines.

We hear about North Korea and its repressive regime in the news but it is through these six stories that you can tell the true impact of the totalitarian state—one that President Bush famously labeled one of the three “axes of evil”—on ordinary people.

The participants are drawn from Chongjin, a town in the Northeast that once was home to thriving industries that are now in a severe state of disrepair. Chongjin is also a better representative of North Korea than the showcase capital city, Pyongyang.

The assortment of interviewees is mixed and represents a good cross-section of North Korean society. There’s Mi-ran a young kindergarten teacher whose father’s roots trace back to South Korea and whose family is therefore stained. “The only mobility in the class system was downward. Family status is hereditary. Stained people are called beulsun—tainted blood or impure,” Bemick writes. Mi-ran narrates the details of her first love and how as a teenager, she and a neighborhood boy, Jun-sang, went for long walks after dinner in the dark. The bright Jun-sang eventually heads for college in Pyongyang to study science and the two continue their romance from afar.

Then there’s Mrs. Song, a party faithful who keeps at her job in a local factory till the very end even when the wages and the work have dried up. Their narratives and the others’ are set in the 1990s—a time when North Korea fell off the map in terms of development and meeting basic human needs. “North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s,” Demick, a correspondent for the LA Times, writes. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed.”

Demick’s interviewees detail the slow decline of the country and this is extremely tragic to bear. The confluence of many events lead to severe shortages of supplies and eventually to famine. Demick, through the voices of her interviewees, narrates the heart-wrenching details of how famine affects families. Each one of the interviewees is affected. Mrs. Song loses her husband and her son to famine—in the end when she is forced to choose between food and medicine for her son, it is hard not to get choked up as you read. It is also hard to ignore the fact that when America was in the roaring 90s, millions of people in North Korea were scraping bark and eating sawdust to survive. These images are searing and will remain in my mind forever. “By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population,” Demick writes. “Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid, much of it from the United States.” But only minimal food reached where it should have gone. Most of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market.

The famine forced young mothers into prostitution desperate to get food for their children. All they were looking for was a bag of noodles or a few sweet potatoes as payment, Demick writes. Elders skipped food insisting that the young ones be fed first. This lead many older folks to die and thousands of children were orphaned. Kim Hyuck, one of the interviewees, was a “wandering swallow” – one of many homeless orphans left behind by the famine.

Nothing to Envy also gives us details of what ordinary life is like in North Korea. Everything, including shoes and clothes, were provided by the government. Major purchases like watches or record players—had to be approved. There is propaganda everywhere you see—television sets are rigged so only one national channel is streamed. Secret police conduct random checks to make sure this procedure is enforced in houses. Even the math problems are worded as propaganda. “Eight boys and nine girls are singing anthems in praise of Kim Il-sung. How many children are singing in total?” is one example.

The book’s title comes from a song that all North Korean children are taught—it sings the praise of the government. Propaganda posters in Pyongyang declare: “Long Live Kim Il-sung; Kim Jong-Il, Sun of the 21st Century; Let’s Live Our Own Way; We Will Do as the Party Tells Us; We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.”

Nothing to Envy shows us just how much irony is loaded in that last statement. A country that has been in the dark for so long both literally and figuratively, might not realize just how much it does have to envy—not just in terms of material comforts but in essential human rights. This is a moving and important book—a must-read for anyone who cares about the plight of fellow world citizens in a country that most of us know little about. Demick’s remarkable book reminds us it’s time we sat up and paid attention.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 62 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; 1st Edition edition (December 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Barbara Demick
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

Bibliography:

• Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (1996)
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (December 2009)

“It was June’s decision to climb atop the overcrowded train. Since that night she had often wondered if it would have been better to wait for the next one, or to have taken their chances on foot, or else steered the twins and herself far off the main road without any provisions and simply waited for the one merciful night that would lift them away forever. The twins would not have suffered and she would not be here now. For what had surviving all the days since gotten her, save a quelled belly? She had merely prolonged the march, and now that her hunger had an altogether different face, it was her heart that was deformed, twisting with an even homelier agony.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 9, 2010)

Author Chang-Rae Lee had always heard that his father lost a sister on the eve of the Korean War. Then many years later, when Lee decided to interview his father about the war for a college project, he learned that a brother too had been lost then. The real-life horrific details for exactly how this brother was lost in a mass exodus of refugees from North Korea to the South form the backbone of the first chapter in Chang-Rae Lee’s haunting new novel, The Surrendered. It’s breathtakingly well-crafted and details the trek of 11-year-old orphaned June as she travels atop a boxcar full of refugees caring for two of her younger siblings.

Only June will survive this arduous trek. Lost and hungry, she chances upon an American soldier, Hector Brennan, on a road to Pusan and tentatively follows him all the way to an orphanage in the city.

Both Hector and June look at the orphanage as their final destination. June of course finds safety there but Hector too decides to stay behind and help with odd jobs—hoping it will help rid the scars of both the war and a childhood ridden with guilt.

At the orphanage, Hector’s and June’s paths cross with Sylvie Tanner, the wife of a missionary who is herself a terribly conflicted soul. Even as she struggles to control her addiction to drugs she also fights her attraction toward the incredibly handsome Hector. Orphaned June, for her part, finds Sylvie irresistible and clings to her almost like an obsession. Over the course of many years, June and Hector vie for Sylvie’s attention and it is this interplay of their feelings toward each other that will cause serious damage later.

The Surrendered moves seamlessly in time back and forth from what once happened in Korea to the present where June is now a middle-aged woman dying of cancer. The early chapters find her closing down her business, an antiques shop in New York City, getting ready to look for her son, Nicholas, who left for Europe and never returned. From an occasional postcard that he sends, she has a vague inkling he is somewhere in Italy. She hires a private eye to track down Hector Brennan, and insists Hector travel with her to Italy. She knows the trip will afford her one last meeting with her son. In addition, she promises Hector that the trip will bring them both closure to events that happened years ago. Hector will also get to meet his son—yes, Nicholas is the product of the only sexual interaction between June and Hector.

Hector, meanwhile, is in Fort Lee, New Jersey working as a night custodian at an ethnic Korean mall. “He took a small pleasure in the idea that more than thirty years of tumultuous world history should presently lead to a moment like this, for him to be dressed in cheap overalls, mop in hand, preparing to clean the toilets of a grubby Korean mall in New Jersey for this most slothful of their kind, a man who was, literally, born in a roadside ditch during the war but didn’t remotely know or care a thing about it now,” Lee writes of Hector’s present-day situation.

Finally June manages to convince Hector to make the trip. As they make their way through Italy, and as June’s condition increasingly worsens, Lee systematically lays to rest many of the unanswered questions that swirl around the incidents that happened in Korea.

By the time the novel ends, you become increasingly aware just how hauntingly sad it is, that the 11-year-old orphan who once craved food eventually struggles with stomach cancer—a “full belly.” It is a touch of irony that totally works under Lee’s expert touch.

Lee writes in a style that is rich and at the same time brutally forthright. As in his earlier works, The Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, this book too has some very violent scenes. This book is not for the squeamish. At the same time, it all feels like such an integral part of the story that the narrative just works. In certain places, Lee’s writing does feel labored—but these instances are few and far between.

In one chapter, The Surrendered takes us to Manchuria—back to when Sylvie was a young girl—to illuminate the tragedy she witnessed after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. So that she might never forget the horrors of war, Sylvie often re-reads a slim book “A Memory of Solferino,” by J.H. Dunant. This book (which is also one of Lee’s personal favorites) is filled with horrific details of a massive battle fought in 1859 between French and Austrian forces in an Italian town. Sylvie relies on the book to remind her of the enormity of what happened in Korea, years later. “You should have been a soldier,” Hector tells her when he learns of Sylvie’s attachment to the book, “Then you’d be dying to forget.”

Lee has said that his novel was meant to be not so much a discourse about war as about the effects of mass conflict on the human psyche and spirit. He points out that the most haunting reaction of all is a quiet, almost invisible, endurance. This is certainly true in The Surrendered. Its beauty is that it emphasizes the point that every human being has a past layered with many untold stories—which can create a deep impression that lasts forever. And while The Surrendered has plenty of dramatic moments—both of violence and grace—it is the quiet equanimity that June and Hector display right up to the beautiful ending that really takes your breath away.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 75 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Chang-Rae Lee
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Aloft Another story based on the Korean War: War Trash by Ha Jin

Bibliography:

• Native Speaker (1995) 
• A Gesture of Life (1999)
• Aloft (2004)
• The Surrendered (2010)
• On Such a Full Sea (January 2014)