THE EVENING HERO, by Marie Myung-Ok Lee
“How can you claim to know the taste of watermelon if you’ve only licked the rind?” Such is the Korean proverb that forms the motto of Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s 2005 novel, “Somebody’s Daughter”. It could also be the destructive self-diagnosis of the main character in her latest ‘The Evening Hero’. Yungman Kwak is a recently retired, not-newly recalcitrant obstetrician living in the remote and Trump-admiring town of Horse’s Breath, Minn. lives, where previous waves of Scandinavian immigrants are unwelcome to newer arrivals.
Strangled by cultural genocide, first by the Japanese Empire and then by American napalm, Yungman comes from a small village that sits on the north side of an American-drawn line. At the air force base where he becomes a “houseboy,” he is nicknamed Hong Kil-dong, the Korean Robin Hood, a curiously riotous nickname for someone so quiet, precise and observant. He only later realizes that it is just a placeholder, the equivalent of John Doe, for all men on official Korean documents.
Lee, a fiction professor and founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, has written a novel about the silent humanity of sacrifice. Yungman owes his life in America to many: his communist mother, who damns herself to save her two sons; his gangster brother, who pays Yungman’s way through medical school; his wife, Young-ae, who was smarter than he was in medical school but hasn’t exercised since her unplanned pregnancy. From the outside, Yungman and Young-ae—parents of a “Korean-like” adult son, Einstein—”appear to be so intimately connected that their communication had taken a form beyond spoken language.”
The Kwaks live on the same earth that was mined for the ore that built the fighters and battleships that bombed 99 percent of his native land during the Korean War, killing at least three million of his countrymen. He avoids all Koreanness, so much so that a lost “Koreanism invaded their gathering like a pile of kimchi dumped on the mashed potatoes.” Einstein’s white wife, Marni, says the word kimchi “with a moderate degree of dread” and forbids their son, Reggie, to speak even a word of Korean. That Reggie has heard of the neighborhood in Seoul where Yungman once lived leaves the grandfather “astonished”: “I know Kangnam,” Reggie insisted. It was now spelled ‘Gangnam’.’
