At Home and Abroad
HEATHER HAVRILESKY,
ELIZABETH ROSNER, and ROBIN RUSSIN
on new works of fiction by
Krys Lee, Susan Sherman, and Allison Burnett.
Memory Railroad, Oil on Canvas © Lee Guk Hyun
HEATHER HAVRILESKY
Believers
Krys Lee
Drifting House
Viking Adult, February 2012. 224 pp.
Was it right to leave? Was it wrong to stay? Are we better off here, or there? These are the questions that haunt the denizens of Krys Lee’s Drifting House, a short story collection that traces the hard choices faced by Koreans at home and in the United States over the past half-century. From the mother who moves from Seoul to Culver City, California, in search of her lost daughter, to the laid-off South Korean worker who chooses homelessness over returning to his family in shame, to the three starving North Korean children seeking refuge in China, Lee’s characters are forced to make the sorts of impossible decisions that turn regret into an indelible feature of the landscape. Each new indignity or misfortune they face stirs up new doubts: How might life be better if we left this place? Could we have averted this fate if we had never left? Lee returns repeatedly to the question of identity and outsider status, asking what it means to value your home over your personal liberty, or to value opportunity and possibility over belonging. “What if they had been the all-American family who fit into the order of things?” wonders Jenny in “The Believer,” whose family is fractured by an act of violence. “Would her mother have become as sick as she had? Immigrants. Not here nor there, not this or that. Indeterminate and silenced.”
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