Category: Modern Fiction

The Handmaid’s Tale

By Margaret Atwood

Published 1985

Read in 1986 and March 2019

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after its publication because I had read her previous four novels and looked forward to more.  It was sufficiently considered “science fiction” to be considered for the Nebula Award and to win the first Arthur C. Clarke award .  However, her “science fiction” has nothing to do with space or aliens.  Rather she terms her work “speculative fiction” which is a great description—what could the fairly near future be like if society continues some of its current paths…  This particular book, published in 1985, does not specify the specific timing

What I remember most distinctly from reading of the book thirty-three years ago (aside from what the Handmaid was…) is the overnight suspension of Compubank cards for all women.   My reaction was so swift and severe that I nearly called a friend, who had cheerfully indicated she paid for her groceries with an ATM card, to warn her of the dangers of relying on such devices.  While we haven’t had ATM cards shut off for all women since the book’s publication, some of the lines in the book remain remarkably relevant:

“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency.  They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. ….. That was when they suspended the Constitution.  They said it would be temporary.  There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets.  People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction.  There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on. … Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen.  Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said.  The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses.  Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

During my recent reading of the novel, I was again impressed with Atwood’s ability to engage you in the protagonist’s (Offfred) present day-to-day life while slowly reeling out both her personal past and the state of society as she could was aware of it given her new role.  Then Atwood then propels Offred into a new situation that is both destabilizing for and providing some potential hope for Offred and the reader. 

The abrupt and wonderfully ambiguous ending is followed by “Historical Notes” that are brilliantly written.  Atwood provides “a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies in June, 2195.”  Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, Department of Caucasian Anthropology, University of Denay, Nunavit introduces Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Archives, Cambridge University, England and the notes then record his talk.   The edition I read most recently was published by Penguin Random House as part of their Everyman’s Library of Contemporary Classics.  I first encountered Everyman’s Library when I read Cranford.  Interestingly, both books are about a woman’s world in a time when women’s place in society was in transition—Cranford about a society that was slowly dying out; Handmaid’s Tale about a society that could never have been imagined by the ladies of Cranford, nor, we hope, us.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree

By Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Published 2018

Read April 2019

This is a vivid and engaging book set in Columbia in the time of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar and narrated by two major characters, Chula and Petrona.   

The book opens with a brief description by 15 year old Chula of a letter she has just received from Petrona, her family’s former housekeeper in Columbia, which includes a photograph of Petrona holding a newborn.  The photograph’s date stamp was 9 months after Chula’s family fled Columbia and arrived in Los Angeles when Chula was about 7.  Thus we learn that Chula’s family fled Columbia and we become aware that Petrona didn’t. 

The book then shifts back to the when Petrona first started working for Chula’s family.  The story progresses by alternating narration between Chula and Petrona.  Chula (7) and her sister Cassandra (9) live in a well-heeled gated community in Bogota with their mother and father.  The father is usually not at home as he works at a distant oil field. Petrona (15) lives with her family in an invasione (land owned by the government on which poor and displaced people have settled) outside Bogota.  Chula’s mother prefers to hire girls in this situation for her housekeeper since she grew up in a similar invasione but since had climbed out of poverty.

Through both narrators we hear about the happenings in the two households and get as well bits and pieces of the political and societal turmoil that is the backdrop to the lives of the narrators.  The author does a very credible job on the perspectives of each narrator.  Chula is somewhat aware of what’s going on through newscasts but is more interested, as expected for any seven year old, in playing Barbies with her sister and spying on the neighbors with her sister and friends.  She is also fascinated by the new and very quiet housekeeper, Petrona.   Petrona is living a difficult life as her brothers are being seduced into working with the guerillas and/or taking drugs to escape their reality.  At the same time, however, she is experiencing the universal trials and tribulations of attraction to a boy she probably should be avoiding.  Chula’s mother is intent on helping Petrona rise above her circumstances and even enrolls her in a First Communion class and throws her a First Communion party after the ceremony.

As the story progresses, the family and Petrona are buffeted by increasingly unstable situations.  Chula’s family leaves the city briefly and stays with Chula’s maternal grandmother who has improved the original shack in the invasione substantially over the years. Unfortunately they don’t completely escape the fighting between the government, paramilitary, and guerillas (the definition of each not told by Chula or Petrona).  While the family is away, Petrona and her boyfriend take up residence in Chula’s house and Chula becomes aware of this but keeps this secret to herself.  Petrona’s love interest involves her in a dangerous plot against her employer which turns out very badly for Petrona.  In parallel, Chula’s father joins the ever expanding ranks of the kidnapped.  A recording of his kidnappers on the phone becomes an essential ingredient to Chula’s family’s successful “Credible Fear Interview” as they enter the US and are accepted as refugees. 

Chula’s entries describing the family’s integration into the US is especially riveting.  Chula’s remarks in the opening section become more poignant.  “US was the land that saved us; Columbia was the land that saw us emerge.”  “We understood how little we were worth, how small our claim in the world.”  We learn the family gains US citizenship when Chula turns 15.  Meanwhile Petrona’s final entry describes her dream to leave someday with her son (to where is not clear) and that she think often of Chula.

The author introduces the reader to a number of aspects of Columbia as experienced by both girls. Among them:  Chula’s mother is insistent Petrona take her First Communion but is equally devoted to various supernatural practices.  Petrona’s family is of nearly pure Spanish blood and Chula’s mother is Indian.  Petrona’s mother’ prejudice based on bloodline makes her especially angry as Chula’s family is wealthy while Petrona’s family essentially has been thrown to the ashes. 

The credibility of the vivid descriptions about what things were like during this period and about Columbian culture is due, in part, to the author’s own experiences as she herself grew up in Columbia during the Pablo Escobar period and came to the US as a refugee.   

This reader very much appreciates that the author writes without any clear political stand on any of the situations she describes.  Rather she tells a story that provides a believable picture of how people try to live in a country with an unstable and generally corrupt government while a drug lord reigns economically through terror and violence.  It was impossible for this reader not to reflect on the current “immigration crisis” and wonder what influences our views of it.   

An American Marriage

By Tayari Jones

Published 2018

Read Jan 2019

I devoured this book.  It’s really good.

In the first section of the book Roy and Celeste, through their first person narratives, introduce the reader to them, their views of their spouse, and their recollections of the fateful weekend trip to visit Roy’s parents.   Roy was born and raised in Louisiana but attends college, meets and marries Celeste, and makes a home with her in her home town of Atlanta.  When they visit Roy’s parents, they choose to stay in a local motel.  They are woken by police that night and Roy is arrested for raping another guest in the motel.  Although falsely accused, Roy is convicted and sent to prison in Louisiana for 12 years.  Celeste returns home to Atlanta.  Life disrupted….

The second section of the book is presented through letters Roy and Celeste write to each other while Roy is in prison.  Through this approach we have a very intimate view of them and their marriage.  We hear exactly and fully what Roy and Celeste say to each other through this medium, their only route of regular communication given the distance between Roy’s prison and Atlanta (which results in few “live” visits).  In his first letter, Roy indicates he thinks he last wrote a letter when assigned a French pen-pal in high school and “That whole thing lasted ten minutes.” He knows with certainty it’s the first time he’s written a love letter.

In the meantime, Celeste’s uncle works to free Roy and he is eventually successful.  Roy leaves prison after 5 years hoping to “return home”.  But home is not as he left it.  In the third section, Jones returns to first person narratives by Roy and Celeste.  A third voice, Andre, also participates and alternates with the other two. Andre was a college friend who has remained part of Celeste’s life while Roy was imprisoned.  It seemed to this reader that Jone’s writing made the pace of the alternation of the three voice-lines hastening dramatically as the three characters reach a point of, potentially, no return.

The title of Jone’s book is “An American Marriage” and it is a story of a marriage– one that has been disrupted.  She requires the reader to face this disruption—the immediate terror of police breaking into the motel room, the disbelief that Roy could be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit, the lost years of his imprisonment.  In one of Celeste’s early letters she indicates “Uncle Banks is preparing the first appeal.  He reminds me it could be worse.  Many people have run-ins with the law and they don’t live to tell the tale.  There’s no appealing a cop’s bullet.  So at least there’s that but it’s not much.”

Much of the story is universal–disapproving in-laws, a husbands’ wandering-eye, a couple’s first year of marriage when they are trying to figure out how they will live together as a married couple.  Many novels are available that deal with these topics written across many centuries by countless authors.  But Jones also provides the reader some insights that are different.  The characters are black.  Roy had a scholarship to Morehouse.  Celeste graduated from Spelman but spent her first year at Howard University.  They are upwardly mobile and they expect to be “rich black”. The disruption that impacts their marriage is one that traumatized Roy, and his family, through a system that is far from color-blind.  This reader got a different view of life in the US through their voices and their reactions to this disruption.  Jones provides us distinctly unique characters whose feelings were realistically painted and which certainly impacted this reader.    I look forward to discussing this book with others.

 

 

Mrs.

By Caitlin Macy

Published 2018

Read Dec 2018

Mrs. has some parallels with Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities:  set in high-end New York City, providing a glimpse of “how the other half lives”, and a crime committed that brings down one of the characters.  What’s different:  this book is told through the eyes of most members of each of three couples (vs the primary protagonist in Wolfe’s book), supplemented by a “chorus” of unidentified mothers; the binding tie between the characters is St Timothy’s Preschool which all the characters’ children attend; the criminal’s voice isn’t one we hear nor is he apparently concerned about his crime.

Macy is most sympathetic towards Gwen Hogan and her husband Dan.  Gwen is a chemical engineer turned stay-at-home mother; Dan works for the measly salary of $150,000 as a lawyer for the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan.  They have one child who wowed St Timothy’s enough to earn a big scholarship.  Dan and Gwen’s  dreams of moving to the suburbs to raise a houseful of children have been destroyed by a gone wrong.   Their child attends St Timothy’s because Dan heard it was the best school in town and while Dan and Gwen consider themselves “different from the others”, Dan wanted his daughter in the best school possible as he hasn’t really silenced his ambitions.

Phillipa Lye Skinker grew up in next town over from Gwen, didn’t attend college, and maybe didn’t even finish high school before she started a career in modelling that took her to Japan for a while, although her history isn’t fully clear to the other mothers.  She somehow married Jed Skinker, current CEO of the last privately held investment bank who would prefer to be living on the farm in the country he inherited from his uncle.  Nonetheless, although they have money coming out of their ears, Phillipa can’t remember to bring her purse with her during dropoff of the kids at St Timothy’s and the other mothers rescue her when she can’t pay for the taxi. 

Minnie Curtis left her husband to marry John Curtis, a man aggressively climbing the ranks in finance, although perhaps not always according to Hoyle.  Minnie worked at the same law firm at which Phillipa spent a short time before she met her to-be husband Jed in a bar.  Minnie and John are clearly eager to become a large splash in high-end society in New York City so have enrolled their (too old?) daughter at St Timothy’s and Minnie pursues Phillipa to get a seat on a foundation board on which she’s a member.

Stage set for something to happen–which I won’t detail. 

We do learn through this book that:  more money = poorer diet for the kids (daily chicken nuggets vs homemade healthy stews); some wealthy mothers drink in the middle of the day; some wealthy attractive mothers send their nannies to pick up their kids from pre-school, but not chemical engineer-turned-stay-at home moms who are “different”; persons previously desirous of a relationship with wealthy attractive people will have their children be a no-show at a birthday party if the skeleton in that wealthy attractive person’s closest is exposed; even less than wealthy husbands cheat on their wives.

Macy’s book is entertaining.  She gives “the rest of us” a particular lens into the “rich and famous”—specifically one that tells us we’re lucky not to be so “rich and famous”. 

Waiting for Tomorrow

By Nathacha Appanah

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Published 2015 (French); 2018 (English)

Read Dec 2018

This slim volume uses an interesting structure to tell the story of Anita, an immigrant from Maurituis  and an aspiring journalist/writer, and Adam, “a woodcutter/ cabinetmaker/ painter/ surfer/marathon runner/ only son” and architecture student from the countryside of France.  The opening section is entitled “Today” as is a chapter in each of the three parts.    In these passages, we learn a small bit of their future state—Adam is in jail, Anita is at home with daughter Laura, who is now confined to a wheelchair, and someone named Adele drowned the same day as Laura’s accident.  Through three parts Appanah tells Adam and Anita’s story—how they met, their early days falling in love in Paris, moving to Adam’s home province, Anita’s ambivalence about being a stay-at-home spouse who originally had different ambitions, their struggles to juggle two careers while raising a small child, their desires to retrieve what they once had as a young couple in love with their artistic paths still open.  We eventually meet Adele and slowly learn her story and how that story becomes engaged with Anita and Adam.  I won’t give away more here. 

Appanah uses little dialogue but rather relies on beautiful descriptions of her character’s thoughts and their encounters during their days to paint pictures of Anita and Adam and their travel through life together and as individuals. Her approach managed to show me their struggles and progress—I didn’t feel she was merely “telling” me, something that dialog often accomplishes. 

It’s apparent the paths Anita and Adam are taking are going to result in a collision of some sort.  The “Today” passages spell out the result of that collision but Appanah effectively delays disclosure of its details to very near the end.  Appaneh leaves the future ambiguous.  She also leaves the reader with the dilemma to decide how they now feel about these characters whose struggles they have witnessed and whose futures this reader hoped would be closer to the ones they were beginning to track towards.   

The Leavers

By Lisa Ko

Published 2017

Read Dec 2018

The author tells her story through the voices of the two major characters via a number of flash-backs and flash-forwards. 

Deming Guo is 6 when his mother, Polly, disappears mysteriously.  His sections tells his perception of the story:  his last day with his mother; living in the Bronx with Polly, his boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and Vivian’s son Michael;  early days with adoptive parents Peter and Kay Wilkerson; and present time (age 22) as he struggles to gain a footing in the music scene with high school friend Roland after he has dropped out of college.  Deming is renamed Daniel Wilkerson when he is adopted and moved to a small town six hours from New York City.  He is continually conflicted about his feelings towards his American parents while missing his Chinese mother and especially by not knowing why she left.  He can’t follow, with conviction, Kay and Peter’s preferred path for him to be a college graduate although he makes some stumbling steps along that road.  Deming/Daniel is contacted by his boyhood friend, Michael, and he slowly and painfully finds a path to his mother, now in China, while wrestling with his feelings for Kay and Peter and while wandering into his future.  

Polly’s sections are written as though she is talking to Deming.  Through her voice we learn that Peilan Guo was born and raised in a small village outside Fuzhou, China.  She left her village as a teenager to work in the city of Fuzhou.  A boyfriend from the village eventually went there as well and Peilan became pregnant.  To avoid marriage she left, with financing from a money lender, and entered New York City illegally.  She lived in Chinatown in a makeshift dormitory with other Chinese immigrants seeking to pay-off their debt to a moneylender.  After the baby was born, she eventually turned to a common practice for immigrants from China and sent her son to China to be raised by his grandfather until he is was ready for school.  Deming returned to Polly in Chinatown when he was five and his grandfather died. After Polly met Leon, another undocumented Chinese, she and Deming left their dormitory in Chinatown to live in the Bronx with him, his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael.   Polly wanted to leave NYC to go to a job in Orlando, Florida but both Leon and Deming object.  Near the end of the novel we learn from Polly what happened the day she disappeared and how she accidentally became so completely separated from her son.

 Through this engaging story Ko exposes us to some reasons why people are willing to risk much to enter the US, what they are willing to endure to stay here, and the consequences they face when things go wrong.   The picture she paints of Peter and Kay is somewhat unflattering, but it does cause the reader to consider the child involved in a foster care turned adoption situation and the special issues associated with cross-cultural adoptions.  Deming/Daniel and Polly’s stories come to some resolution by the end of the novel but their next steps remain somewhat ambiguous which was appreciated by this reader.    Ko offers much for discussion and the book should be a welcomed addition to a book discussion group. 

The Vegetarian

By Han Yang

Published in Korean 2007

Translated by Deborah Smith

Published in English 2015

Read Dec 2018

I thought that my first experience with Han Yang (and also translated by Deborah Smith), Human Acts, would prepare me for Yang’s unusual choice of topics and feeling seared by her treatment of it.  Not so.

 The Vegetarian  is composed of three parts, each part from a different person’s perspective and with their voice.   In the first, Yeong-hye’s husband, self-described as always taking the “middle course in life”, describes his life with his seemingly bland wife and its disruption when she decides to become a vegetarian.  “I had a dream” is her only response to his question “why?” We are introduced to her sister and brother-in-law and to her parents who are all mystified by her behavior.  Her father strikes her and tries to force her to eat meat.  He fails and she hurts herself and ends up hospitalized.  Throughout this section, the Yeong-hye’s husband only considers his wife’s change as an inconvenience to himself.  He initially is dismissive and, after she apparently tells him about the dream that caused her to become a vegetarian, he doesn’t want to hear more from her about her dreams which are clearly becoming more consuming and difficult for her.

The second part is told by the brother-in-law about his extraordinary interactions with Yeong-hye after she has been released from a hospital and after her husband has divorced her.  This male relative also is focused on himself and his unusual desire to create a film with her in it with little regard for Yeong-hye.   His final encounter with Yeong-hye causes her to be hospitalized again and precipitates the end of his marriage.

 The third part is told by Yeong-hye’s sister who is trying to help her while she is a patient in a mental hospital and falling farther into an unreachable state.  The sister is devoted to Yeong-hye, visiting her monthly and then weekly after Yeong-hye had disappeared into the woods during an unsupervised walk.  It was “a miracle” she had been found as she was standing so still and silently while the rained poured down on her.  The sister has a dream herself in which Yeong-hye communicates she is becoming a tree.  Only the sister is self-reflective and reveals she is trying to understand her sister.  She recalls their childhood and changes in Yeong-hye which she hadn’t previously noticed.  She tries to understand her own motivations for marrying her husband, who, she considers, never really loved her and who has also been as quiet as Yeong-hye had become.  She blames herself for not understanding earlier that Yeong-hye was fully withdrawing into herself.  She tries to continue managing her business, be a (now) single mother, and stave off the consequences of insomnia she herself is experiencing now.  When Yeong-hye is admitted to the latest hospital, “the reason she gave the doctor, was this worry about a possible relapse.” Yeong-hye stops eating completely, and tells her sister she is becoming a tree and only needs water; she asks her sister “Why, is it a bad thing to die?”.   The sister realizes “Now she was able to admit to herself  what had really been going on.  She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminds her of.  She been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.  And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

Yang leaves us many questions including:  Why did Yeong-hye marry her husband?  What are Yeong-hye’s dreams about and why did they start? What role does Yeong-hye’s father play in her slow then quickening descent? Her husband?  Why are food and clothing the things Yeong-hye avoids?   Why is Yeong-hye’s husband the only one of the three narrators who isn’t impacted by her mental state/breakdown?  Why are Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law and sister so impacted by her situation and what will become of them? Will the sister be able to hang on for the sake of her child at least or will she cross the boundary Yeong-hye (and her husband?) had?  

What is Han Yang trying to tell us about mental health issues—about “the patient”, about those who love them, about those who are charged with caring for them? What is it that keeps any of us from slipping across that boundary?   I anticipate much discussion will spring from these and other questions.    Yang forces us to face questions regarding mental health and provides us no answers. Likely because there are no simple answers but avoiding the questions isn’t the answer either.

 

There, There

By Tommy Orange

Published 2017

Read Nov 2018

This debut novel is really quite impressive.  Orange opens the book with a Prologue that gets and keeps your attention.  It is a powerful indictment of the White Man for his intended impact on the Native population.   I use the word intended here because it’s hard not to when the US uses the term “Indian Termination Policy” to describe its policy regarding Native Americans in the 1940s through mid-1960s.  A “positive” attribute of the policy was to grant Native Americans the rights and privileges associated with US citizenship (something denied anyone with more than 50% Native blood since the 1600’s).  But it also meant that the US ended its recognition of the sovereignty of tribes.  The intent was that Native Americans abandon their traditional lives, become civilized, and just plain assimilate.    In the Prologue and Interlude later in the book Orange writes a number of short essays informing the reader of facts and figures that are difficult to digest and to which you want to hide.  We also learn that Urban Native is a term describing Natives that have been born in urban environments vs those that were moved there or moved there themselves.

This book is about 13 characters who live in Oakland, CA, whose varied paths take them to the Big Oakland Powwow, and what happens to them at that fictional event.  The characters are rather diverse.  Single mothers; offspring of single mothers with various degrees of problems; offspring of two parent households with a variety of issues; a daughter of two Natives who is given up for adoption and raised White while knowing she isn’t; offspring from one Native and one White parent; offspring of wholly Native or part-Native who have some connection with some of their Native customs; offspring of wholly Native or part-Natives whose parents or grandparents have suppressed their connection to their Native background; significant others of Natives.  Some of the characters are family members.  Some of the characters meet through their involvement in planning the Big Oakland Powwow.  Some of the characters know each other through drug dealing or using.  There are many interesting characters with a range of connections and a range of experiences.

Each chapter is titled for a character and is told by or tells about that specific character and some part of the overall plot.  Each character has at least one and usually several chapters titled for them but many appear in other chapters as well.   The point of view in these character titled chapters is not constant.  For instance Tony Loneman’s first chapter is in in first person but a later Tony Loneman chapter is in future tense told by a third person.  One chapter has a long email written by the title person to his brother, another significant character who never has his own titled chapter.   The language is straightforward and it’s clear who the chapter is discussing and what is happening in that chapter.  What takes a bit of work understanding  the various connections between characters and the interleaving circumstances.  I eventually succumbed to re-reading and taking notes to which I could refer to more fully tease out  he various characters’ situations and  interleaving story lines that all press them towards the day of the Big Oakland Powwow.

So this is a book with a simple structure that is actually a fairly complex product which is about complex characters that represent a very complex situation of Urban Natives which is but one type of Natives in this very complex and complicated county that has always dealt poorly with how to interact with people of different blood (even when everyone is “All White”).

This book demands you work at reading it and listening to the many kinds of things it is sharing with you.  It is well worth all the energy required to take it in. You will be changed.

Pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

Published 2017

Read Oct 2017

Lee gives us an engaging saga of a family and their friends over several generations and about 80 years.  The setting being Korea and Japan provides an opportunity to learn about the challenges faced by working class families in this area of the world during this period of dramatic change.

Pachinko is a gambling game in Japan found in Pachinko parlors which are run nearly exclusively by Koreans.  We don’t start learning about Pachinko until about half way through into this novel that follows an extended Korean family.  We slowly learn that Koreans in Japan have very few opportunities for rising above a poverty or poor working class level.  Pachinko is a primary path for actually running a business and developing some wealth.  Through this book we learn or are reminded that Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and lost it through WWII.  A new learning for me was that Japan has maintained a policy that Koreans can never attain Japanese citizenship, even if they are the second or third or more generation born in Japan.    Further, social standing for an entire family, even among Japanese, can be lost through a shameful act by a family member, making it impossible for them to marry well or find good employment.

Lee slowly reels out the story of the various family members and their friends and how they deal with the limited options available to fishing village working class Koreans in Korea and Koreans in general in Japan.   For much of the story, the strength, daily hard labor, and resourcefulness of women members of the family (the widowed mother, her daughter and her daughter’s sister-in-law) are essential to the families’ survival.  The story shifts to the daughter’s sons and their families and friends and how they make their way through life as non-citizens of Japan and having no real country that’s theirs.   The sons rise above the manual labor lives of their parents through education for one son and through hard work in a business setting for the other son.  Both end up working in the Pachinko business but from totally different paths.  A grandson seems to have an a chance at breaking out of the confined opportunities for Koreans with a US based education and a US born girlfriend but in the end finds himself limited by his Korean background.

Lee uses a universal narrator approach so we are told the thoughts and feelings of the character being discussed at the time.  This is effective in telling us what the author wants us to know but seems a weakness at the same time as Lee leaves us little to figure out for ourselves about the characters.   The dialog and some responses to challenges seemed a little “modern” and “western” to me at times.

However, Lee does help readers in the USA appreciate the precious treasure of a policy that confers citizenship to all those born here and that this is not a world-wide policy.   She directly reveals the unfair challenges of being a non-citizen in Japan if you descend from Koreans even if your family has been there literally for generations.  She also expands our consideration, though not directly, of the plight of other peoples who aren’t considered citizens of a particular country, defined by current political borders, either because they have migrated to it, usually driven by man-made reasons for fleeing their native country, or because they aren’t members of the ethnic (defined by bloodline, race, region, etc) majority of the current political country.  She quietly provides us the opportunity to think about how groups treat other groups that are different, how hard and fast that line of differentiation can remain,  and the resulting human barriers raised against being simply human.