I am very glad to have read this extremely rich, densely detailed novel.
The tone and breadth remind me of a great novel like Moll Flanders.
Here the narrator jumps on a plane, goes from the South Pole to Sweden, Sweden to Los Angeles, back to Sweden, then to a ferry to Faroe Island, then back to Stockholm then to Los Angeles, she is a brisk traveler, like an action figure.
There are a number of overlapping stories, jam packed in here. I deeply enjoyed some of the plot lines. I list them below:
1. Narrator’s relationship to her brother Chris who was both a mother figure and father figure, and her dealing with his resentment and resignation as the left-behind sibling who must hold down the fort. Anyone can relate to this. That the prodigal child can have an adventure because of the existence of the stay-home sibling.
a. Chris is the center chunk of the book and the best part and I strongly recommend it, very funny, and the brother’s angst and rants are deeply felt by him, how he feels left behind, forsaken, stuck caring for his disabled and disturbed father and absorbing his mother’s emotional problems to protect his sister. Chris is the most fascinating character in this novel. He is like a Korean American Oscar Wilde in Compton. I felt the Chris part can stand alone, without the other story lines. I will always remember the Chris character.
b. The violent division between North Korea and South Korea and what that’s like, to emigrate but carry the problems with you forever and not have anyone understand you.
c. Great account of Chris’s mental illness and injury following a violent incident. How someone who looks ordinary and together on the outside can be having a nightmarish inner life.
Wait, there is more:
2. Narrator’s relationship to and with the the hunky Swedish professor of Old Norse who is a Korean adoptee and also teaches Korean folklore in Swedish to the Korean adoptee college students. Who knew that Sweden has the largest population of Korean adoptees?
a. The start of a beautiful love affair, two people who were fated to meet despite the unlikeliness, American versus Swede, Korean American versus Swedish Korean adoptee, science versus humanities, young versus older, etc.
b. History and critique of transnational, transracial adoption, a bit cursory but eyeopening, informative, sensitive
c. Critique of academia, pigeonholing, marketing, self promotion, what people have to teach in order to have a job, how to define success
And wait, all the above is interspersed with:
3. Dealing with the ghost of her dead sister, this is the magical realism part other readers have pointed out. The mother character hid the existence of the dead sister from the narrator. I was moved that a long dead child can continue to haunt the family. The sacrificial, sacrificed daughter, or was it a straw sacrifice? Very creepy to think about but how our parents don't tell us about the real hopes they had.
4. Korean folkloric stories that embody and also entrench in Korean society the idea that girl children are expendable, sacrificial, less worthy. Parents deliberately did not get attached to girl babies because they would be sacrificed or married off. There are also similar Chinese folkloric myths where a girl is sacrificed and thrown in the kiln for the good of the porcelain manufacturing village, etc., and the best porcelain ever is produced. These folk stories are like snuff movies, and should be eradicated, and not be perpetuated. The mother character used to tell stories like this to the narrator. How messed up is that.
Wait wait, there is also this story line:
5. Narrator’s career as a theoretical physicist
This is the weak and distracting part of the novel. The narrator does not tell us how she felt, to be a rare female scientist in an especially rarefied and hypercompetitive field. This subject is worth its own novel, a long memoir. The treatment in this novel was cursory, like it was a small thing, to be a theoretical physicist, a young female one at that, and with a desirable academic job, even. Being a scientist at that level, in that field, is the person’s identity, a calling. It was the only incredible part of this novel, that someone would have a job in academic physics and also be able to fly around the world to pursue a personal project, investigating family stories, and avoid being called out, having the stipend suspended, etc. I could accept the ghost as real, but not this female physicist.
Despite its jampackedness and density, I enjoyed the novel greatly, it is a page turner. It is not easy to incorporate so much history and background into fiction. I got the sense the author researched all the above subjects deeply. I trust her authority on these subjects. A bit teachy but highly enjoyable, entertaining.
I would request though that in the future, that this author write in a different style, a different tone. Really slow it down and go deep into the following subjects. I'm glad Elsa was jumping on planes and boats and onto different college campuses. But we also want to know how things felt to her. I would be interested to see the narrator go deep into the feelings.
In a way I understand the novel is true to life, we minority women are really busy and we are literally jumping, changing vehicles, achieving as much as possible, hang on to us for dear life!
In Folklorn, these subjects were only hinted at, but I believe they actually are the real subjects, too big to be explored in this novel which touches so many other big, competing topics:
1. Very little detail was given on what it felt like to leave urban Los Angeles for elite boarding school in New England, getting through an elite college, getting into a prestigious science doctoral program. This story deserves its own novel or memoir: the American coming of age story of losing your past to create a future. A Korean American female Catcher in the Rye, yes, this is needed. We need the psychology, the blow by blow motivations, the self hatred.
2. Feelings towards women. Strange the narrator has no female friends. Most women have women friends. She had little adult experiences with her mother, her mother having been institutionalized. Yes, in most folklore featuring girl heroes, the mother is dead. This should be explored more, why she doesn’t have female support, doesn’t look for it, doesn’t need it, doesn't trust it. She sees the misogyny in the folk tales but she did not go all out to examine her own residual and deeply rooted distrust of women. The writer should go deep.
I hope this new young narrator keeps at it, keeps exploring.
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