The Queen of Tears, by Chris McKinney

After the death of her second husband in Long Island, A famous Korean actress, Soong, travels to Hawaii for her son’s wedding. She moves to the big island and becomes embroiled in her children’s lives. Eldest daughter, Won Ju, the survivor of a traumatic attack in her youth, is in a loveless marriage to the ambitious and macho Kenny, and they have a 15-year-old son, Brandon. Second in the lineup is Donny, who is marrying Crystal, a native Hawaiian stripper. The last of the three children is Darian, a Berkeley dropout who becomes attached to Crystal’s ex-con brother Kaipo. Interspersed with the contemporary story of psychodrama stemming from cultural alienation and familial estrangement is Soong’s own story of her youth and rise to stardom in 1960s Seoul, a time of massive upheaval and reconstruction and change in Korean national identity. The struggles in this story are about identity and the integrity of culture in a fluid world where change is ever stirring and making the lines of distinction blur, culminating in losses that are impossible to express, as exemplified by Brandon’s actions and ultimate tragedy. McKinney’s writing is strong and quick, the characters interesting and whole. The themes of racial and cultural identity and the integrity of native Hawaiians is stressed, but any glory or redemption for this is lost once the quasi-hero of them all is returned to jail at the end.

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home by Kim Sunée

This isn’t a rare story: that of a Korean adoptee coming of age struggling with feeling less than whole, feeling dissociated, feeling her differences and not fitting in anywhere. What makes this memoir different is the author’s strong prose, a tunnel-like focus on food and the inclusion of recipes. In the same vein as Ruth Reichl’s TENDER AT THE BONE, which also included recipes, there is a difficult mother, and youthful love that both heals old wounds and creates wounds of its own. Kim Sunée, abandoned in a marketplace at age three, is adopted by a New Orleans couple and grows up with loving, food-centric grandparents in and around many kitchens and dining tables. Uncomfortable in her own skin and always on the run, Sunée travels to France, then Stockholm, where she meets Olivier, the founder of L’Occitaine. Many years her senior, wealthy, very French, and controlling, a love affair of several years in Provence ensues. Olivier is determined to provide his love with everything she wants, in his vain (both meanings of the word) attempt to bring her happiness. She remains vague and unformed, and while she is an obvious beauty, an accomplished cook and self-claimed poet, she is unable to accept his gifts of wealth, privilege, a ready-made family and love. His love for her is suspect: is it her Asian difference that is so attractive to him; her unformed character into which he can then pour all his own needs and demands? After several years, she leaves him as a way to find herself and remains in Paris, going through a number of apparently insignificant love affairs, until her grandfather’s death makes her realize she wants him back. But Olivier is with another, older woman, his pride wounded and passion subsided. After some therapy along the way, she sees her path is back towards home and family, and that “she is hungry after all,” to use her frequent metaphor.