Dictée, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

The groundbreaking and ultimately powerful mixed-media prose-poetry work that explores the depths and transcendence of suffering, history, love and survival. Cha tells of Korea's troubled modern history and one of its martyrs, Yu Guan Soo, along with Joan of Arc, her own mother, and the pain and sacrifice (Catholic) of women who live in suffering. Structured around nine Greek heroines, representative of literary forms, Cha suffuses associative poetry, story narration, artwork, photography and calligraphy into a whole that instills tragedy, injustice, loss and silence, and raises questions about the lauded culture of martyrdom around suffering. Many will not find this easy to read, but it's an important literary work and essential reading for Korean American literary studies.

Recently reread. Originally published 1982, shortly before Cha was murdered by a stranger at age 31.

Soldiers in Hiding, by Richard Wiley

A 2006 reissue of a 1987 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. In the early 1940s, two Japanese-American youth travel to Tokyo to play music, and then Pearl Harbor prevents their return. They are, by default, drafted into the war and serve in the Philippines, to disastrous results. The story is told interspersed with flashbacks on the events that shape an old man's life: his marriage, mistress, career in radio, his wily treatment of American tourists on the streets. Written with intensity in language that sings with action and aliveness, that makes distinctions between Asian and American despite the book being written in English, the character as both an old man and his youthful self is easy to love, though he is not the most honorable or courageous of men. He is drawn with clear humanity, his flaws presented without judgment, though he himself judges others. The writing is rich with metaphor and vivid detail, and rewarding with surprising wisdom and astute observation of the action. And action does happen; plot evolves and climaxes; and we discover along with the main character what is truly important in life, even one that is so heavily laden with history and regret.

Though this isn't concerned with Korea or Korean issues, Wiley addresses issues of language, self identity and national identity that resonate.

The Book of Dead Birds, by Gayle Brandeis

Winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction, this novel tells the search-for-identity story of a black Korean American daughter of a former prostitute who worked near a GI base in the mid 1960s postwar Korea. The structure juxtaposes present-day and present-tense narrative by the daughter against third-person accounts of the mother’s hardship story. The daughter of famed Jeju-do divers, Hye-yang follows a close girlfriend to leave the harsh working life of her island fishing community and ends up first in a folk village, then in the lurid prostitution district. Along the way, she encounters two sexual experiences (minor in contemporary standards, but devastating to her virginal world) that were virtually rapes. She escapes to America married to a GI who believes she is pure, but when her black daughter is born, is violently beaten and abandoned. Working in massage parlors until her daughter is older, she scrapes together a living making craft products from eggshells.

Ava, her daughter, doesn’t seem to know how to live in her own skin. She is clumsy and lost. Several accidents over the years claim the lives of birds kept by the mother, who documents their deaths in a book. The two live parallel in their hurts and needs, but the one place they can connect is when the mother breaks out in pansori, story-song, to bemoan her past, while Ava drums to the story’s emotional melody. The bird theme is in heavy use throughout, including Ava’s sojourn to the Salton Sea where thousands of birds have perished from botulism. Recurring themes of death, freedom, capture, release, dependence and connection are exemplified with the birds’ presence in the book.

Inclusion of the bird-death notebook entry, poems, excerpts from Audubon writings, use of different typefaces and the mother-daughter divide theme hearken to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal work, Dictee. The structure and plot of buried, pain-filled secrets also recall Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman. Brandeis’ prose, especially when describing Ava’s senses and her feelings, is elegant, lyrically detailed, elegiac, evocative and a thing of beauty.

The Living Reed, by Pearl S. Buck

An epic historical fiction that follows Korean modern history (about 1850s through 1945) through the eyes of the male members of four generations of Kims of Andong. The patriarch is a courtier to King Gojong, his son the main protagonist to the murdered Queen Min. His first reckless son becomes the Living Reed, a hero for Korean Independence who travels throughout China and comes to reject Communism; his second son marries a Christian and becomes a local patriot, dying with his wife in a church set fire by the occupying Japanese. This martyr's son is the final focus of the story, and he is modeled on a couple whom Ms. Buck met while traveling the length of Korea after the war. Buck's skill and talent for portraying the life of real people and their culture and history is apparent, though at times the story is bogged down by insertion of detailed historical information, which many readers will undoubtedly find fascinating and instructive. Her research is impressive and I wondered at her sources, coming as they were during the immediate postwar period of the fifties and sixties. There are moments of descriptive power and literary wisdom, but like in her more famous novel, Buck tends to overemphasize the obvious, and there's a sense that this novel's sweeping content overwhelms the story and the connectedness we might otherwise have had with its characters.

The Rascal and the Pilgrim: The Story of the Boy from Korea, by Anthony Kim

An orphaned boy survives the evacuation of Seoul and the Korean War, eventually immigrates to his dream America, with the sponsorship of several military workers and a Benedictine priest. Shu, orphaned as a very young boy, lives in Seoul in a poor house with “Mama Pak,” who basically is the head of a gang of beggars. When Seoul is evacuated with the sudden invasion of the North Koreans and Chinese Communists, Shu manages to cross the Han River with thousands of other refugees, crawling on hands and knees on the railroad bridge. The next several months on the road are filled with the horror of death and war, including attachments quickly made, and just as quickly lost to bomb deaths and gore. He shows himself to be resourceful, stealing food and water, and also yearning always for human attachment: a constant search for a mother and father figure. The descriptions of his wartime experiences are truly horrific, and while told with a child's voice and not the best English, the stories of torn flesh and fields of death for one so young is unforgettable. He is wounded and is nursed back to health by the Americans. Thus begins his attachment to the USMGIK as a “helper,” running errands, shining shoes, learning smatterings of English as he also learns to dream of a different future, of a future at all. He becomes obsessed with going to America, and eventually finds people who become attached to “Little Joe,” including a Colonel, translator, social club female director and a priest, and he finally does make it, many years later, and attends college. The story is among the earliest English-written autobiographies from the Korean War about a Korean orphan, and while the setting and circumstances are remarkable and fascinating, his choice to use the voice of his youth to narrate his story, and his stubborn self-centeredness (which were essential to his survival) don't convey well to modern terms of being able to grow attached to the narrator. It also falls into the genre of Christian-themed literature, though that is not its main focus. It remains an amazing story of one who finally did make it from the gutter to an American college and an American wife. Fortunately for Western readers, his precociousness and lack of early education overcome the normal Korean cultural reticence to tell all.

The Waves, by Kang Shin-jae

Young-sil is a ten-year-old girl in the village of Wonjin during the Japanese occupation. She isn’t terribly likable: her character is described as selfish, sometimes grasping, stubborn, confused and petulant. Her passionate emotions are drawn with fire and ice, nearly bipolar in extremes. The story follows Young-sil and village life for a year, throughout the seasons, covering her sister’s wedding, her own burgeoning crush on a handsome ne’er-do-well who plays the harmonica, the sudden disappearance of two youths, death of a doctor, madness in the fire chief, and school days and a church play. The characters are many and various, from the town prostitute, to the old storytelling man, to her many schoolmates, their parents, the rich man in town, the simpleton, the long-suffering women, etc. It is less a story than an experience of the village and all its various people and the drama and gossip they live day to day. Affairs, suicides, mistaken identities, miscommunications, missed opportunities, laziness, thrift, poverty, betrayal, brutality, abuse—sorrows upon sorrows abound. A revelation comes at the end which merely compounds the confusion and sorry. The narrative is somewhat hard to follow in the Western tradition of readability, as it is structurally more associative, free-wheeling, than linear, and the translation seems to belabor the allusive quality further. While some of the descriptions of nature and passion are rich and varied, much of the writing is expository, making it hard to keep track of the numerous characters who we are told about rather than experiencing them in a setting. To see this adult world mostly through the child’s eyes gives a distant to emotional impact of the constant and multiple misfortunes that befell this village—all tragically the normal course of village life. The jacket says the author is one of Korea’s most distinguished women writers, winning literary and cultural prizes in 1967 and 1984. I cannot find out when the original text was written. Translated 1989 by Tina L. Sallee.