By Grace Suh
The eight stories in Paul Yoon’s first book, Once the Shore, have in common something you may not expect from Korean American fiction: They are set in Korea.
With some exceptions, Korean American writers have taken as their primary subject the lives of ethnic Koreans in America. No surprise there. After all, this dual identity—the geographical dislocation and cultural juxtaposition—is the conundrum we share, and has borne fruitful exploration.
So in a peculiar sense, by returning to the land of our parents, Yoon has boldly gone off the reservation of Korean American literature. Even more interesting, these stories are contained to a tiny corner of Korea, a large island off the coast of Korea which—with its tropical fruits, mainland tourists, women divers (haenyo) and network of caves, all centered around a volcano-crater mountain—is a clear literary analog for the popular holiday destination of Jeju.
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Shuttling back and forth in time, from the period immediately following World War II to the present day, these stories work and re-work variations on repeated images and motifs: death and loss, orphanhood, disfigurement, betrayal, escape, absence and return. Taken together, they weave a tapestry of an unusual population, removed from the mainland—and by extension, the world at large—by both geography and temperament. Uniquely isolated and backward, the Solla of Paul Yoon’s imagination is a Korean-like Appalachia, peopled by the illiterate, oppressed, crippled, violent and impoverished. In strikingly resonant detail, several characters from different stories have never seen a photograph, or see one for the first time. Although they are surrounded by ocean, so limited are these people’s lives that some have never seen the shore.
With few options, often lacking the means to advance in life or get off the island, most stagnate in inchoate desperation, while a few manage escape, but at great cost.
If most have never managed to leave, they live with the signs of those who have come to them, invaders past and present—the ponies brought by the Mongols in the pre-Joseon era, the Japanese occupiers, the American military, and finally, the tourist hordes who flock from the mainland.
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In particular, the American presence plays crucial inciting roles in several of these stories. In “Once the Shore,” based in part on a true story, the protagonist’s fisherman brother is killed when his ship is shattered by a surfacing U.S. submarine. In “Among the Wreckage,” also inspired by a historical event, an elderly couple head to sea to try to find their only son, who was on a remote island used by the U.S. for bombing practice. And in “The Woodcarver’s Daughter,” a village finds itself divided over whether to shelter a runaway American soldier from his unit.
The American soldier is one of several runaways in the book, running away being one of the only means of escape. In “Faces to the Fire,” a girl lends her orphan friend money to run away to the mainland and then faithfully waits years for him to return. When at last he does, it’s to brutally betray and disappoint her. An orphan also runs away in “And We Will Be There,” but his return is hoped for in vain.
The main characters in “So That They Do Not Hear Us” are also orphans of a kind. The elderly diving woman has no family, and so she befriends the Japanese boy next door, who is bullied by the boys at school for being foreign and disfigured, and essentially abandoned by his parents, who have themselves run away from their homeland, perhaps to escape the shame of the accident that took their son’s arm.
In “The Woodcarver’s Daughter,” Haemi’s parents also feel shame for their crippled child, and despair for the inevitably limited prospects for her future. She is but one of the unlucky women in the book. There is little chivalry on Solla. Girls stand up for their boys and are beaten for it. They care tenderly for younger brothers or brother stand-ins, only to have them run away. They wait for loved ones to return, often to be disappointed. And they are deceived and betrayed by the ones who do.
But if these fates seem harsh, Yoon writes of them with compassion and a kind of careful attention. His voice is muted and atmospheric, the pace hypnotic. This is a book of internalities, of unvoiced moments, contemplation, yearning and waiting. The cadences of the stories echo this quietude, speaking with deliberation, the language taking flight mostly in descriptions of nature.
There is action, to be sure, much of it harrowing—deadly fires, drownings, war wounds, mutilations, beatings—but as in Chekhov’s plays (of which Yoon counts himself a grea ….
