asianamlitfans | A Review of Alice Stephens’s Famous Adopted People (Unnamed Press, 2018).

A Review of Alice Stephens’s Famous Adopted People (Unnamed Press, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn

This crazy, unexpected debut novel, Alice Stephens’s Famous Adopted People (Unnamed Press, 2018), is the kind where I am SO glad I did not read any sort of synopsis before beginning it. That being said, let’s let B&N provide YOU with some context (that I did not have): “Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan and the situation there—thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways—has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend Mindy. The young women share a special bond: they are both Korean-born adoptees into white American families. Mindy is in Seoul to track down her birth mom, and wants Lisa to do the same. Trouble is, Lisa isn’t convinced she needs to know about her past, much less meet her biological mother. She’d much rather spend time with Harrison, an almost supernaturally handsome local who works for the MotherFinder’s agency. When Lisa wakes up inside a palatial mountain compound, the captive of a glamorous, surgically-enhanced blonde named Honey, she soon realizes she is going to learn about her past whether she likes it or not. What happens next only could in one place: North Korea.”

Now, I’m going to delay for a second to give you your moment of the requisite PLOT SPOILERS warning, because I need to reveal some confusion about what goes on after Lisa wakes up in a “palatial mountain compound.” Look away now or forever be spoiled! The location of that compound is North Korea, and we discover that Honey is none other than Mindy’s biological mother. At this point, I’m going to be a little bit more vague because I’m not quite sure I understood everything as this story moves into the surreal from this point forward. While in that compound, Mindy is essentially forced to play by Honey’s rules in order to “earn” certain small privileges, but she is ultimately a prisoner. Also, Mindy’s genealogical ties extend in unexpected ways that potentially cast her into North Korea’s national spotlight. What is perhaps the most intriguing thing about Stephens’s novel is that it signals a move away from some of the memoir/ autobiographical approaches that have dominated the work of overseas adopted Koreans. In this sense, I was perhaps most interested in this novel as a kind of expansion of what the adoptee narrative might look like. At various points, Mindy is encouraged to write a novel that would explore her identity specifically as an adoptee, but she doesn’t necessarily want to be limited to this story. The satirical nature of the larger narrative going on in relation to Mindy, Honey LeBaron, and North Korea is an extension of this metacritique of the adoptee story.

Everything that Mindy thought about herself is put into question, but as the novel hurtles toward its crazy denouement, you begin to understand that not everything is so farcical. Indeed, as Mindy gets to know the people who live inside her compound, the novel considers the very “real” possibility of the lives existing under duress within the North Korean regime. In this sense, the novel has much in common with a work like Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean in emphasizing the importance of engaging in Korean American literature as one that is always haunted by the unending Korean War and that it is a nation that is still ultimately divided.

Buy the Book Here:

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