By Kim Jin-hee

Death of Family in Korean American Literature: Leonard Chang’s "Over the Shoulder"

"Migration is a wrenching, disruptive experience," conclude sociologists Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich in "Immigrant Entrepreneurs" (l988) as they sum up their 500-page discussion about the Korean immigration experience in the American metropolis. While giving critical attention to the apparent advantages of immigration status-economic gains, educational opportunities, and social advancement-Light and Bonacich assert, "tears people from their often beloved homelands, breaks up their families, and forces them into a prolonged, sometimes life-long period of adjustment to a strange and alienating environment."

In a mass migration such as the one from South Korea to the United States, an entire generation is subject to suffer the pains of dislocation. In an effort to ease such pains, the majority of first generation immigrants dearly hold onto their Korean identity through ancestral memory, family attachment, and community bonds. In contrast, their children, torn between loyalty to Korea and assimilation in America, find their life as the descendants of diaspora not only difficult but also confusing and even disturbing.

Such a distinctive generational divide delineates the greater development of Korean American literature. First generatioin immigrant writers such as Mary Paik Lee ("Quiet Odyssey") and Ronyoung Kim ("Clay Walls") depict eloquently the lives of Korean people who arrived in America during the Japanese Occupation. Both Lee and Kim offer an incisive perspective on the early immigrant experience, which was plagued by the rampage of racial discrimination and judicial prejudice. Despite perennial poverty and blatant racism, the early immigrants scraped and saved every penny in order to aid the independence movement in Korea. The political solidarity that the early Korean immigrants showed reaffirmed their pride in their national identity.

The sense of community and cultural unity that was so readily identifiable in the lives of the early ilmmigrants is not so visible in the works by second generation Korean American writers. Despite the obvious prosperity and wealth which Koreans have garnered since the l960s, the sense of cultural rootlessness and political marginality loom large in the writings of the second generation Korean American writers.At the center of their emotionial disenfranchisement stands the death of the family. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in "Over the Shoulder" (Ecco Press, 200l) the third and latest inistallment by the San Francisco-based thirty-two-year-old novelist Leonard Chang.

"Over the Shoulder" paints a grim picture of a Korean American family that pays a high price in the course of pursuing the American Dream. In the beginning, the Choice family-the family’s name is anglicized by John, the patriarch of the family, from Choi to Choice-strives to succeed. John Choice, a college graduate in Korea, raises a son all by himself and slaved to make ends meet by driving a container truck. Despite the back-breaking long hours at work, John never gives up his dream to enter medical school. His sister Insook is a bookkeeper at a small company but has grand plans for her future. Their dreams, however, take a wrong turn one fateful day.

When we meet the protagonist Allen for the first time in the novel, twenty years have passed since the death of his father John. Cut off from Insook, his only surviving blood relative, Allen is currently working as a security specialist in the Silicon Valley. At first, Allen appears to be blissfully ignorant of his family’s history. As the story progresses, however, Allen uncovers the truth about his father’s death and learns his aunt’s secret: John disapproved of his sister’s illicit relationship with a wealty white businessman Roger Milian and black mailed him to extort money. One night John and Roger found themselves in a physical altercation. John met his death after falling to the ground on his head when Insook pushed him away in an effort to defend her lover.

In Chang’s fictional universe, family is not only a complicated institution buit also far from romantic. The Choices betray each other. It is all the more ironic because the Choice family is, in appearance, a perfect example of a model minority family. They are hard workers, determined, and never give up their hopes. In "Blue Dreams" (l995), John Lie and Nancy Ableman write that the outline of a good society is constituted by two pillars: the family as a "haven in the heartless world" and the community that upholds the individualist ethos. In this vision, "home" is the nurturing environment, while the larger "community" protects the "home." The family is a sacred institution in the ideal of the American dream. Essentially, the home is a "haven" where individuals are nourished and protected, it is an incubator and protector of individuality. (l78)

In short, family is the bedrock of an ideal Americana and a cultural necessity for the members of society to realize their dreams. In "Over the Shoulder," however, the popular academic notion that family is the social sanctuary where the human instincts of nurturing, bonding, and sacrifice are best practiced is nowhere to be seen.

Home is the last thing Allen Choice had the privilege to receive in his life. Family is the last thing he learned to trust. Allen’s mother died right after he was born. Allen lost his father when he was ten years old. He was raised by his aunt, a cold-hearted woman who had no courage to correct her wrongs. The severity of Insook’s emotional bankruptcy led her to efuse to buy her only nephew a new pair of socks when the old pair wore out. Insook, also denied Allen his father. As soon as the funeral was over, she discarded everything that belonged to Allen’s father-his material possessions (books, clothes, receipts, and notes) and any scraps of the past which could remind her or Allen of the dead man.

When Allen recovers the English-language biology books that belonged to his father, he is elated. Although the books do not give Allen any clear answer as to who his father was or why his father decided to come to America, they help Allen to begin constructing a working image of his father; this time not through the words of strangers but through his own deductions. Earlier, Lois Stein, the shift manager of the company John worked for told Allen that John was a kind man and that he was too bonafide to do anything such as blackmail. Roger Milian, on the other hand, claims that John was a coward who tried to gain $l5,000 by exploiting his ties with his sister. John Choice might well have been both good-hearted and corrupt at the same time, but the way in which Allen ultimately remembers his father comes through his father’s books and margin notes. When Allen runs his fingers through the notes that his father scribbled down in Korean, he immediately remembers that his father wanted to become a medical doctor. While connecting with his long-forgotten family history through the dog-eared pages of pallid books, Allen realizes that his father’s enormous aspirations did not make him a hero of any sort. John was an average man who labored to make ends meet, who failed to achieve his dreams, and who lost his better half to a dishonorable opportunity. And that is how John is remembered by his son.

If the American dream motivated the Choice family to undertake the challenges of the immigrant experience, it was John’s greed and Insook’s selfishness that ultimately destroyed the family. Family, to most of us, is an identity. The demise of the family among one of the most successful immigration groups is a startling social development, because it directly challenges the premise of the American dream. The Korean characters in Leonard Chang’s latest novel unhesitatingly undercuts the popular belief that Korean Americans are model American citizen and are great students of global capitalism. The Choice family deconstructs the ideology of the American dream.

More and more Korean descendants will grow up in America without learning their parents’ mother tongue, national history, and cultural memory. The dislocation of cultural heritage will intensify with the passage of time, and the sense of diaspora-typically represented through patriotism, longing for the homeland, and the struggle for new identity-will gradually be replaced by different kinds of emotions. The disconnection with their heritage could push second-generation Korean Americans to develop an apathetic attitude to their parents’ homeland. As Allen Choice amply demonstrates, the ideological landscape the second generation Korean America chooses to subscribe to is very different from the one chosen by first generation Korean Americans.

Allen Choice looms large as the soul of a lost generation, a symbol for a voiceless, faceless people in the melting pot. He struggles with the emotional vacuum and cultural wilderness, a problem which many second generation Korean Americans deal with in their effort to make sense of the immigration experience inherited from their Korean parents. The death of family seems to know no border-be it race, ethnicity, or nationality-in the contemporary American context.

This book review is contributed by Kim Jin-hee, a Korean professor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Prof. Kim has a Ph.D in comparative literature and has taught such courses as "Women Writers of East Asia," "Korean Women Writers of the Twentieth Century," "Modern Korean Literature" and "War and Memory in Korean Literature."-ED.