The Magical Language of Others

At 15 EJ suddenly finds herself moving in with her older 19 year old brother in California. Her father has accepted a lucrative position back in South Korea and EJ's mother and father have planned a return without them. This return means they will be “well paid, confident with tall backs from splendored living.” Meanwhile what was to be a brief contract and separation goes from 2 years to 9 years away. In that time, abandoned by her parents, EJ skips school, develops an eating disorder and considers suicide while her mother sends self-absorbed and oblivious missives from Korea talking about shopping with aunts and convincing EJ that she is doing well, being strong. The letters are captured and translated here between chapters, a weird tonal counterpoint to the hardships EJ is enduring and the history she is excavating.

This is the third Korean book I've read this month where the dead can infect the dreams of the living. Here, as in The Kinship of Secrets, they are nightmares that can be translated as water seeping into the graves of grandparents. And such Korean han. Intergenerational trauma and stories of her ethnically Korean grandmother Kumiko born in Tokyo. She would escape to Korea to flee the country's suspicions and prejudice only to find herself in the midst of the Jeju Island massacre.

And then EJ finds poetry. Maybe I'm just trained to read and revere this love for words. It's thrilling to see how poetry gives EJ a place to find forgiveness. I'm a sucker for reading about an all consuming passion and the artist's discovery. All of this together creates such a strange literary collage that manages to cohere into something that speaks to a fragmented life, a notion of a hyphenated person, a second-generation, Asian-American.