asianamlitfans | A Review of Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay (Ecco, 2019).

A Review of Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay (Ecco, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

So, this novel was one I stalled out of the first time I picked it up. I’ve been having this problem more and more, as I’ve just gotten busier. In any case, Steph Cha’s graced us with a high literary, crime novel, Your House Will Pay (Ecco, 2019), one that follows on the foodsteps of her newish, detective fiction series featuring the protagonist Juniper Song. Let’s let Ecco’s description give us some particulars: “A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions in Los Angeles, following two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime. In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.”

I was actually listening to a podcast that Steph Cha was on with Brad Listi, in which she discussed some of the challenges writing this book. Cha mentions the fact that the first 70 pages were some of the hardest, and she had to draft them around a dozen times. I wasn’t surprised. The first section of the book was hardest for me as a reader. Part of the problem is that the two main POVs, Grace Park and Shawn Matthews, seem to have very little to do with each other. There are few overlaps, except for the primary fact that both families live in Southern California. My guess is that Cha was wrestling with this bifurcation, which I’d hazard required her to make the first section as precise and as lean as possible, so that the link between the two characters is revealed in the appropriate fashion. When that link is revealed, I think most readers will be surprised. As a Korean American who had lived through the period of the 1992 riots and all that came before and after, I was absolutely riveted by Cha’s updating of this narrative.

I’ll provide a spoiler alert here in case you don’t want to know the link between the characters. Have you looked away yet, if you need to? In any case, as readers discover, Shawn Matthews is the brother of Ava Matthews, a teen who was gunned down in a liquor store (by one of the female owners, Jung Ja Han) in the period before the riots. Her story is based upon the case of Latasha Harlins and Soon Ja Du. We find out that Grace Park’s mother, Yvonne, is none other than Jung Ja Han, who has now remade a life as a pharmacy store owner, running it alongside her husband, and her daughter Grace. By that point in the story, Grace’s sister Miriam has become estranged from the family due in part to the strain that comes out of the killing. Grace herself remains in the dark about her mother’s identity for a good half or so of the novel. The novel gains even further steam when Grace’s mother is gunned down just outside her pharmacy. The question then becomes: why and who perpetrated this crime? While this question does seem important, at least on the level of plotting, the larger issue that Cha’s is wrestling with is perhaps the more crucial one. How does one continue to deal with the aftermath of racial violence and racialized mourning, decades out from the Los Angeles riots? Cha’s novel reminds us that such issues remain ever present, even today, perhaps especially today, when some would argue that the nation continues to be divided as ever. Cha’s work must be applauded for its ambition and wide-ranging narrative scope; it would be an excellent book to teach alongside Nina Revoyr’s Southland, two novels that deal with the fraught interracial dynamics that have affected African American and Asian American communities over
the long 20^th century.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu