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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Fictional Korea from Jung Yun and Krys Lee

28/10/2016

2 Comments

 
I’ve been interested in fictional Korea since coming across Adam Johnson's chilling novel about the cruelly crazy North Korean regime, The Orphan Master's Son.  Later, I learnt that all is not rosy in South Korea either via The Defections by Hannah Michell, and about the brutal response to a rebellion in that country through the translated novel, Human Acts by Han Kang. Courtesy of Picador and Faber and Faber, I’m pleased for the opportunity to read two more novels, both debuts, providing insights into Korean politics, people and culture. Shelter is about a family of Korean immigrants to North America. How I Became a North Korean tells of the fortunes and misfortunes of North Korean defectors crossing the border to China.

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What she’s asking for is completely reasonable. His wife and child should come before everyone else. But this is an American idea too. On the other side of the world, the world he never fully left, it’s parents first, children second, wife last.

At the age of four, Kyung left Korea with his parents for a new life in the USA. Over thirty years on, he’s married to Gillian, the daughter of an Irish-American policeman, with a four-year-old son of his own. With an untenured position at the university, Kyung is heavily in debt, but could never bring himself to ask for assistance from his now wealthy parents who live in the same town. After a violent childhood – his father beating his mother and his mother beating him – Kyung can hardly bear to see them, but nor can he properly separate them to move away.

Life becomes more complicated when, after his parents and their cleaner are viciously attacked in their home, Kyung’s parents move in the young couple and their son. Jealous of the developing relationship between grandfather and grandson, while fearful of Gillian unwittingly causing offence, Kyung’s search for solace at the bottom of a liquor bottle can only make matters worse.

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Jung Yun’s gripping debut is about the horrors of domestic violence, how insecure attachment patterns are repeated across generations and how gender inequality does not only damage women. Like Everything I Never Told You it’s a story of racism in academia, and how attempts to deny it can impact negatively on the children. Moving, beautifully written and psychologically astute, Shelter will keep you wondering until the last page.


############################################################

How to sleep with rats the size of rabbits, how to endure the slow crawl of lice. How drinking helped you live with unlivable fear. How you could wake up with frozen icicles in your hair, not knowing if one of the boys would be frozen dead, forever 14.


As the son of a government minister, Yongju has lived a sheltered life in North Korea’s modern capital, Pyongyang, until the day the Dear Leader shoots his father dead in the course of a highly orchestrated social event. Jagmi, has had to fend for herself since childhood, smuggling goods across the North Korean-Chinese border, and is now devoted to protecting her unborn child. Danny/Daehan is a Chinese-American teenager of Korean descent, precociously intelligent but struggling socially on account of his religiosity and emerging sexual identity. Necessity brings each of them to the region of China bordering on North Korea, where their paths converge in a struggle for survival. Hiding in a dark cave until rescued by missionaries, but it is their saviour more interested in converting them to Christianity than moving them to relative safety in South Korea?

Krys Lee convincingly evokes the twilight world of North Korean defectors, ever fearful of starvation, exploitation by the Chinese who despise them or repatriation to torture and imprisonment. My sympathies were spread a bit thinly across the three point of view characters – or it could have been, despite being caught in my own extended adolescence, the three young narrators were too much for this older reader – but their story is one that needs to be heard.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
2 Comments
Norah Colvin link
1/11/2016 10:11:23 am

Thanks for these reviews, Anne. I know very little of North Korea. I think both of these novels sound interesting. I'd probably choose to read "Shelter" first. It was a good choice for review in the Uk's Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The review linked to in your next post (which I read first) "Learning from Baby P." continues the theme. It is an important issue and one that we are all collectively responsible for. It starts with respect for each other, but how we develop that is a mystery. We seem to be pulling apart rather than together at the moment; though I think that has always been so. I'd like to see it change, and not even soon, now!

Reply
Annecdotist
1/11/2016 04:50:48 pm

I actually didn’t know it was domestic violence awareness month until I saw it in a tweet before posting this, so it fitted really well.
I like that you’ve linked this issue to my review of Baby P – I should have thought of that! I
think respecting each other is easier if we’ve been respected ourselves, especially as children. In Shelter, Kyung’s damaged personality is well – and I think accurately – portrayed. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that he’s always thought his father-in-law didn’t like him because he was racist, but when this comes to the surface, and if we can trust what they father-in-law says, it’s because he’s got a chip on his shoulder and he’s sad that he hasn’t been able to raise his own daughter to think she deserves better.

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