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asianamlitfansA Review of Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore
I have had the luck of receiving an advance copy of Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, a short story collection that will be coming out of Sarabande Books on April 1st, 2009. I am also sick in bed with a cold so it has been nice to sink my teeth into a fictional work. In my mind, the Korean American literary terrain can never be too overpopulated. Indeed, my sentiment is that it still remains to be contoured more fully. With the general threads of transracial adoptees, the Korean War, Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, the advent of the small business owner (the greengrocer, the liquor store owner), chiclit, comfort women, among other such organizing narrative and lyrical threads running through this ethnically specific body of writings, Once the shore takes us elsewhere into the coastal regions of South Korea.
The other genre impulse that I’m very much attuned to lately has been that of the short story form, especially since so many Asian American writers have been producing such fascinating work in that vein including Nam Le, Aimee Phan, Shimon Tanaka, Frances Hwang, Mary Yukari Waters, Rishi Reddi among others. I just finished reading Frances Hwang’s Transparency on a plane ride down to Long Beach and it was the perfect travel companion. Apparently, traveling doesn’t sit well with me though and when I returned, I was hammered with a terrible cold and picked up a number of poetry collections and books to help me pass the time in bed. One was Paul Yoon’s collection.
Once the Shore takes a very unique trans/regional approach by depicting the lives of various characters on what seems to be a fictional South Korean island. I say fictional because the Solla Island, at least according to my cursory internet research, does not actually exist. In addition, one of the stories involves a diving woman (who is just one in a long line of diving women from her family), a figure who makes her trade through this skill. Such women have been connected to the history and culture of Cheju Island and its neighbor Udo Island. A recent article on these women echo the major sentiment of the story, which is that the culture of these diving women is "dying out." In terms of the geographical specificities located in the novel, it would seem that Cheju would be the most logical choice as a number of the characters make references to Japan and its close proximity; Cheju, located south of Korea’s mainland certainly would fit that bill. In any case, the fact that the stories are set on the Island rather than the Mainland is interesting in and of itself because it contours the understanding of Korea’s literary geography and topography, especially since the vast majority of Korean American works that have considered Korea directly (such as Susan Choi's The Foreign Student) have tended to focus for the most part on the mainland, with the major cities, Pusan and Seoul, being obvious urban nodal points.
The “title story” opens up the collection and embarks upon the unique friendship forged between an American “tourist” and her Korean waiter. What is so rich about Yoon’s collection is that each story is always off-set by what seem often to be at first minor details about the larger sociohistorical contexts of a particular temporality within the story. For instance, American presence is immediately invoked in “Once the Shore” as the waiter’s brother is killed in a sea collision with an American submarine that had been surfacing. The tensions of the continued American presence on the Island and elsewhere are a major specter over the character’s lives. “Among the Wreckage” follows “Once the shore” and explores the fragile family dynamic among an aging and elderly husband and wife; their son is missing and they embark on a search for him. This story considers the “secret” testing sites that the United States military employed prior to and following the detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In one of the most poignant stories of the collection, a strong friendship is made between a young Korean woman and a U.S. soldier that has gone AWOL. What seems to be a developing romance between them is put into constant instability by the US serviceman’s problematic situation. Interestingly, this story casts a different signification upon the migrant worker as this American is collapsed into the itinerant laboring bodies that Korean farmers have employed to harvest their crops.
But, rather than provide summaries of all of the stories, I’d like to emphasize the particularly poetic qualities of Yoon’s writing. In “So That They Do Not Hear us,” Yoon depicts the unique relationship between an aging sea diver, the famed sea divers of Cheju Island (in this case changed to Solla Island), and a Japanese immigrant boy. The boy is an amputee, having lost his arm in a freak accident involving a tiger shark and now bares many scars both psychic and physical related to that event. This excerpt showcases Yoon’s brilliant aesthetics:
“He wanted a room filled with water. And sea creatures. For in addition to his fixation on turtles, the boy was also convinced that if you tried for long enough, the possibility of drowning grew less, until the danger vanished altogether. He thought Ahrim [the sea diver] had accomplished this, no matter how much she tried to tell him otherwise. His theory was supported by her constant scent of ocean water and by the answer she once gave him when he asked why she dove: because I have to die. And so he believed her to be of another world. His conclusion was logical. ‘You are a sea woman,’ the boy said. ‘Then you are also a woman of the sea’” (93).
It is the coasts, the oceans, the sea that exists as an important “character” in Once the Shore and its presence structures and challenges the lives of many subjects that appear. I plan to teach this collection in the future.
Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Once-Shore-Stories-Paul-Yoon/dp/1932511709/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226540721&sr=8-5
I have had the luck of receiving an advance copy of Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, a short story collection that will be coming out of Sarabande Books on April 1st, 2009. I am also sick in bed with a cold so it has been nice to sink my teeth into a fictional work. In my mind, the Korean American literary terrain can never be too overpopulated. Indeed, my sentiment is that it still remains to be contoured more fully. With the general threads of transracial adoptees, the Korean War, Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, the advent of the small business owner (the greengrocer, the liquor store owner), chiclit, comfort women, among other such organizing narrative and lyrical threads running through this ethnically specific body of writings, Once the shore takes us elsewhere into the coastal regions of South Korea.
The other genre impulse that I’m very much attuned to lately has been that of the short story form, especially since so many Asian American writers have been producing such fascinating work in that vein including Nam Le, Aimee Phan, Shimon Tanaka, Frances Hwang, Mary Yukari Waters, Rishi Reddi among others. I just finished reading Frances Hwang’s Transparency on a plane ride down to Long Beach and it was the perfect travel companion. Apparently, traveling doesn’t sit well with me though and when I returned, I was hammered with a terrible cold and picked up a number of poetry collections and books to help me pass the time in bed. One was Paul Yoon’s collection.
Once the Shore takes a very unique trans/regional approach by depicting the lives of various characters on what seems to be a fictional South Korean island. I say fictional because the Solla Island, at least according to my cursory internet research, does not actually exist. In addition, one of the stories involves a diving woman (who is just one in a long line of diving women from her family), a figure who makes her trade through this skill. Such women have been connected to the history and culture of Cheju Island and its neighbor Udo Island. A recent article on these women echo the major sentiment of the story, which is that the culture of these diving women is "dying out." In terms of the geographical specificities located in the novel, it would seem that Cheju would be the most logical choice as a number of the characters make references to Japan and its close proximity; Cheju, located south of Korea’s mainland certainly would fit that bill. In any case, the fact that the stories are set on the Island rather than the Mainland is interesting in and of itself because it contours the understanding of Korea’s literary geography and topography, especially since the vast majority of Korean American works that have considered Korea directly (such as Susan Choi's The Foreign Student) have tended to focus for the most part on the mainland, with the major cities, Pusan and Seoul, being obvious urban nodal points.
The “title story” opens up the collection and embarks upon the unique friendship forged between an American “tourist” and her Korean waiter. What is so rich about Yoon’s collection is that each story is always off-set by what seem often to be at first minor details about the larger sociohistorical contexts of a particular temporality within the story. For instance, American presence is immediately invoked in “Once the Shore” as the waiter’s brother is killed in a sea collision with an American submarine that had been surfacing. The tensions of the continued American presence on the Island and elsewhere are a major specter over the character’s lives. “Among the Wreckage” follows “Once the shore” and explores the fragile family dynamic among an aging and elderly husband and wife; their son is missing and they embark on a search for him. This story considers the “secret” testing sites that the United States military employed prior to and following the detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In one of the most poignant stories of the collection, a strong friendship is made between a young Korean woman and a U.S. soldier that has gone AWOL. What seems to be a developing romance between them is put into constant instability by the US serviceman’s problematic situation. Interestingly, this story casts a different signification upon the migrant worker as this American is collapsed into the itinerant laboring bodies that Korean farmers have employed to harvest their crops.
But, rather than provide summaries of all of the stories, I’d like to emphasize the particularly poetic qualities of Yoon’s writing. In “So That They Do Not Hear us,” Yoon depicts the unique relationship between an aging sea diver, the famed sea divers of Cheju Island (in this case changed to Solla Island), and a Japanese immigrant boy. The boy is an amputee, having lost his arm in a freak accident involving a tiger shark and now bares many scars both psychic and physical related to that event. This excerpt showcases Yoon’s brilliant aesthetics:
“He wanted a room filled with water. And sea creatures. For in addition to his fixation on turtles, the boy was also convinced that if you tried for long enough, the possibility of drowning grew less, until the danger vanished altogether. He thought Ahrim [the sea diver] had accomplished this, no matter how much she tried to tell him otherwise. His theory was supported by her constant scent of ocean water and by the answer she once gave him when he asked why she dove: because I have to die. And so he believed her to be of another world. His conclusion was logical. ‘You are a sea woman,’ the boy said. ‘Then you are also a woman of the sea’” (93).
It is the coasts, the oceans, the sea that exists as an important “character” in Once the Shore and its presence structures and challenges the lives of many subjects that appear. I plan to teach this collection in the future.
Buy the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Once-Shore-Stories-Paul-Yoon/dp/1932511709/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226540721&sr=8-5
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