THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER, the Korean War should never, ever be "forgotten"

THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER
EVE J. CHUNG
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong.

“When I found the courage to lift my head, I expected to stare down the barrel of a gun, but instead there was a woman in front of me, the back of her white skirt embroidered with columns of yellow chrysanthemums.”

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang is on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down.

As she emerges from the fallen aircraft onto an icy field surrounded by the enemy, Ellie is sure it’s the end, certain she’ll never make it home to her parents…until a woman pushes her way through the crowd and claims Ellie as the lost daughter that she’s been searching for since the last war ended. Never mind that Ellie doesn’t speak a word of Korean.

Ellie is taken in by her rescuer—a woman who calls herself “Emma”—and the Paks, a pastor’s family. She knows she can’t stay and yet there’s no way she’ll survive on her own.

As the war intensifies, the sky alighting with bombs overhead, Ellie convinces Emma and the Paks to travel south towards an elusive promise of safety, and where Ellie insists they are more likely to find Emma’s real daughter, stuck on the other side of the frontlines.

Emma’s decision to claim Ellie, and Ellie’s choice to take her hand will connect their lives forever.

Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stories with this kind of stakes, "everything changes because one moment to the next a decision is made," always appeal to me. So do stories about Korea, probably because it was my father's wartime experience. This story, then, started out with literally every advantage granted to it.

Why then is my rating so mingy?

Because the author is very, very clear on the story she wants to tell, but rather less so on the craft of storytelling. The dialogue, the scene-setting, the stakes she clearly thought through carefully, all work together. They don't cohere emotionally to punch me in the gut as I weep for the fate awaiting Emma and the Paks if they are not able to use Eleanor's Americanness to leverage an escape.

Here is my opportunity to say that Eleanor's CHINESE-Americanness rubbed a serious saddle-sore on me. Emma claiming this CHINESE-American woman as her long-lost daughter...well, no one in Korea would fall for that for a single second. Han people, assuming that's who Ellie's ancestors were which is by no means guaranteed, are visually quite distinct from the Korean people; it's very "Western" to assume there's no difference, or such a small difference as to be indistinguishable to natives of the region.

So...the story's foundation was my problem, not the story itself. The awful intersection of colonialism and its bastard child warmongering was the source of the story's impetus. As Ellie and Emma navigate their intersecting desires to leave the place they are, escaping the suite of violent terrors that war orchestrates for those who are not allowed control of their world (read: old men), they illuminate the compromises and suffering the old men in charge inflict so indifferently on the world's mass of humanity. In service of what? Does any ideology, any philosophy, justify the titanic life-altering suffering of vast numbers of people? Ellie, a war correspondent, is well placed to use the scalpel of reporting to cut away the rottenness of propaganda to expose the real wounds caused to real people. Emma's loss of her daughter to the Japanese colonialists, probably as a "comfort woman" or, more accurately, a sex slave has wounded her entire family. The author, a lawyer by trade, has clearly read Frantz Fanon ("The formula 'this all happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'we are going to speak of what happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today and it might happen tomorrow') or encountered his ideas of the artist as moral actor because this story is very much the argument for despair, and its fellow traveler inactivity, as a moral wrong.

Ellie spends part of the story in survival mode, not doing anything to actively improve her chances for escape. In this time of joining the woman who "claimed" her as a daughter, she is gathering her circle of women who share a goal of ending the harms being done; it's assembling a posse, not only sinking into a morass of misery. Going back to my foundational problem, would Emma's actual daughter need the kind of help and instruction Ellie receives all uncommented on?

It all ends up making this a three-and-a-half star read. I found the prose adequate, if unexciting; quite mannered at times thus unlikely to move me to empathetic tears. The story being told moved me to outrage and its hotter, briefer tears. Ellie...and Emma...are supremely tough women. Reading about their struggles was angering, educational, and instructive. I did not come away converted to Eve Chung fandom though I'll read another story by her. I respect her eye for what makes a good story and hope she will enter into the next one all guns blazing.

WHALE, the precarious lot of Korea's powerless through a family's life

WHALE
CHEON MYEONG-KWAN (tr. Chi-Young Kim)
Archipelago Books
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

Shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's 2024 National Translation Awards!

The Publisher Says: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A sweeping, multi-generational tale blending fable, farce, and fantasy—a masterpiece of modern fiction perfect for fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Whale is the English-language debut of a beloved and bestselling South Korean author, a born storyteller with a cinematic, darkly humorous, and thoroughly original perspective.

A woman sells her daughter to a passing beekeeper for two jars of honey. A baby weighing fifteen pounds is born in the depths of winter but named “Girl of Spring.” A storm brings down the roof of a ramshackle restaurant to reveal a hidden fortune. These are just a few of the events that set Myeong-kwan Cheon’s beautifully crafted, wild world in motion.

Whale, set in a remote village in South Korea, follows the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle. Brimming with surprises and wicked humor, Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions by one of the most original voices in South Korea.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

While the man with the scar—the renowned con artist, notorious smuggler, superb butcher, rake, pimp of all the prostitutes on the wharf, and hot-tempered broker—was a taciturn man, he was gregarious with Geumbok, telling her everything about himself. The stories he told her were frightening and cruel, about murder and kidnapping, conspiracy and betrayal—how he was born to an old prostitute who worked along the wharf and was raised by other prostitutes when she died during childbirth, how he grew up without knowing his father, how a smuggler who claimed to be his father appeared in his life, how he stowed away to Japan with this man, how a typhoon came upon them during the journey, how the ship capsized, how the smuggler didn’t know how to swim and flailed in the waves before sinking into the water, how he, who thankfully knew how to swim, drifted onto a beach and lost consciousness, where he was discovered by the yakuza, how he lived with them and learned to use a knife, how he killed for the first time, how he met the geisha who was his first love, how he parted ways with her, how he returned home and consolidated power in this city—but she remained enthralled, as though she were watching a movie.

It really amazed me how very violent this read was. Women, queer people, and children are assaulted in every way you can conceive of on practically every page. This is not to say the women are never the abusers...one woman grooms and sexually assaults a young boy.

Korea, once a backwater place only marginally present in the world's mind, was never expected to be more than the setting of a future war between the US and China. The huge existential dread of living in a place known only as the scene of a war that hasn't happened yet and only a few years away from being the colony of a brutal imperial power that was determined to extirpate its history and culture made all the modern cultural and economic flowering of Korea inconceivable. That has given the worst, most predatory actors free rein to design the socioeconomic climate to empower the lowest, most venal people to excel. (Does this sound familiar, Westerners?) The present-day creators working in Korea are shouting their "NO MORE"s and "NEVER AGAIN"s into excellent, internationally important artworks. This short novel is definitely one of those.

There is a dark, bitter gallows humor in the recounting of the many and various forms of violence in the story. The fact is, there are many very uncomfortable line-crossings of every sort in this family's trip through modernizing Korea. What I understood from this is that the author, who presents, eg, sexual assault as a fact of life, was not sensationalizing the existence of it, or trying to invalidate the experience of it; but was instead making the awful aftermath, the survival of its brutalizing horror, the point of her story...not the acts themselves but the aftermath of quotidian sameness that every victim of violence must, in fact, return to. Dinner still needs to be made, the garden still needs to be weeded, there are bricks to be made and laid, your tedious humdrum existence chugs right along...and that, my spoiled fellow Westerners, is how life is.

Not sensationalized. Not minimized. Lived over, through, shoved into a dark closet and sealed as tightly as is possible. No, it's never going away; yes, it bursts out in strange places in one's post-traumatic life that often cause more trauma; most of the world calls that "getting on with it." We're conditioned to condemn this pragmatism as being less than ideal. It is, in fact, the best and only way poor people all over the planet cope. It is a very privileged response to decry this kind of humor masking awful untold, untellable agony as perpetuating a system that is entrenched.

Not everyone is equipped to rebel, to spark change, and those people deserve our respectful attention, too.

That doesn't make this an easy read but I think it makes this an important read.

By its very nature, a story contains adjustments and embellishments depending on the perspective of the person telling it, depending on the listener’s convenience, depending on the storyteller’s skills. Reader, you will believe what you want to believe.

WINTER IN SOKCHO, Impressionism in Korean-inflected words

WINTER IN SOKCHO
ÉLISA SHUA DUSAPIN (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.95 Kindle edition, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

WINNER OF THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION! Watch the ceremony here.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers.

A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a run-down guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French graphic novelist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape.

The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on his trips to discover an ‘authentic’ Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows: the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. She is pulled into his drawings but troubled by his vision of her – until she strikes upon a way to finally be seen.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! THEY NEED US, AND WE NEED THEM.

My Review: I can't say too much, because there isn't one helluva lot of book here.

He’d never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells, the octopus. The isolation.
–and–
A rubber-gloved hand pointed us in the right direction.

Too much of everything. Too big, too cold, too empty. The clatter of our shoes on the marble slabs rang out.
–and–
Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited. That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.

This is the most Duras thing I've read that wasn't set in France. This is what Impressionism looks like in words. This is the way you take a simple, even banal, story of a young woman whose life is in neutral and chunk it into first gear without using the clutch.

You can feel a good, faithful translation. It fits and it means something you won't ever find anywhere else. This is a good, faitful translation by that metric. I haven't read the French but, should it ever swim across my bow, I will grab it and gobble it down to see how the flavor of fugu feels in French.

Mother and daughter at daggers drawn, sisters locked in battle, no one is getting a leg up on anyone else in this bitter little pill. It's always the family that makes you feel the worst when they could choose to give you their best. It's certainly true that South Korean culture is the epicenter of the plastic surgery world. The pressure to "look perfect" whatever that means there is powerful, and it's astonishing to me how high the percentage of South Koreans who've had serious work done is. It's no surprise that Jun-Oh, the narrator's boyfriend, is caught up in it...it makes sense, in that world, and her categorical refusal to give in to the not-subtle pressures he puts on her, her mother puts on her, and her mother's sister puts on her to "fix her flaws" is proof to me that this is someone I'd like to spend more time with.

Food is a huge part of this read...you'll read words in Korean that aren't translated, eg tteok, and it's on you to go figure out what the heck they are, or not if you don't care. I like that in a book. I will figure out what a tteok is (a rice cake made with steamed flour made of various grains, including glutinous or non-glutinous rice) and why it would smell of cold oil (some meal-base versions, not desserts, are fried) if I decide it means something to me. In a nutshell, the plot is nothing; in reality, it is Everything...how we mistreat our intimates without really giving it a thought; how we form alliances and attachments that never ever get to the surface of our lives (poor old Park!); how completely we fail to find our world's gifts until they make the gravity double and the body sink into a slough of despond with their absence.

Most of all, though, reading this beautiful book is an exercise in allowing words to do their work in you. You are not there, you more than likely have never been there, but through the magic of fiction here you are:

All night long the town was entombed in frost. The temperature fell to minus twenty-seven degrees, the first time it had happened in years. Curled up under the covers, I blew on my hands and rubbed them between my thighs. Outside, against the onslaught of ice, the waves struggled to resist, moving ever more slowly and heavily, cracking as they collapsed in defeat on the shoreline. I bundled myself up in my overcoat, the only way I could find sleep.
–and–
The rain hammered down, the sea rising beneath it in spikes like the spines of a sea urchin.
–and–
‘What I mean is you may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.’

Don't miss the chance to read this book. It is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards! The winner will be announced this evening.