Still Life with Rice: A Young American Woman Discovers the Life and Legacy of Her Korean Grandmother. - book reviews

The unfair media portrayal of Korean-Americans as one-dimensional, gun-toting shopowners was just one facet of the devastation wreaked on the community by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. East to America grew in part out of a desire to address that stereotype, and it does so with humor, pathos, and commendable candor.

Presenting an array of divergent voices to illustrate the complex cultural, social, and historical factors on which the Korean-American community is based proves a brilliant device, at once educational and entertaining. Part of the beauty of the book is the discovery that there is, of course, no "average" Korean: we meet a gay-rights activist; a lesbian attorney with a Latina lover; an artist/DJ who speaks Spanish better than Korean; a mechanical engineer with a Korean mother and an African-American father; a volunteer grandmother who sews clothing for unwed mothers.

There are ministers, community organizers, a counselor to abused women, grocery-store owners, soldiers, artists, and all kinds of delicious psychocultural tidbits, like the following from Kyumg-Ja Lee, a filmmaker: "When Koreans fight over who's going to pay the bill for a meal, it's very sophisticated and complicated....People secretly remember who paid before....I know one guy who never paid. It gets ugly; people feel like killing a guy like that. They get homicidal."

Koreans share a heritage of foreign occupation, political repression, and civil war which Americans of this generation can only imagine. "Basically, our whole family got wiped out just like most other families during the Korean War," one interviewee says matter-of-factly. This history goes far toward explaining why, unfairly or not, Koreans are often portrayed as unduly concerned with material security, a perception that the book addresses head-on.

Paul Kim, a twenty-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, says, for example, "Take the typical Korean family. Materially, they may be well-off, but in every other way, they are living in poverty. They have absolutely no life, except working. They have no family life. No recreation, no reflection on anything, no participation in the world, nothing outside of materialistic pursuit, no real sympathy for human beings, whether Korean or not."

While many of the other narratives belie this harsh characterization, the fact is that if this is the typical Korean family, it is also, like it or not, increasingly typical of Americans in general. Kim has held a mirror up to our collective face, and looking at it, I couldn't help but think that the tragedy may not be so much that we don't always get along--which is inevitable when our principal contact consists of competing for a share of the market--but how blindly so many of us have followed, and been disappointed by, the idea that money buys happiness. "[Koreans] built their dream on the unprecedented rise in real estate values in Southern California," says journalist K.W. Lee, who goes on to blame the country for dashing those dreams, as if the recession in the late '80s had been discriminatorily directed toward Koreans alone. The fact is that a lot of other people suffered, too; the emotional effect of the failure of the economy speaks more to me of misplaced dreams across the board than it does of racism.

Material gain, however, is only one of the many factors that motivate this extraordinary group of people, almost all of whom have made sacrifices that border on the superhuman; some of these folk sparked off so much energy I felt I needed rubber shoes to read their stories. Jay Kun Yoo, for example, supported his family from the age of fifteen by working three jobs while simultaneously attending school and evangelizing for his church, taught night classes for the poor while getting a degree in international relations, earned a master's while working as an officer in the Korean Air Force, became student activities coordinator at Seoul's UNESCO office, fled to the United States after the Korean government became suspicious of his activities as a "progressive-minded intellectual," earned a second master's, graduated at the top of his law school class, passed the California bar on his eighth try, and spent the next six years working at minimum legal wage to help exonerate Chol Soo Lee, a Korean unjustly convicted of murdering a fellow prison inmate. I couldn't help but feel it was our loss when Yoo recently moved back to Korea, though as he says, "In the end, it doesn't matter where you are; this world is all God's world."

Helie Lee grew up, thoroughly Americanized, in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. Nonetheless, when, at the age of twenty-five, she was not yet married, her Korean mother and grandmother took to calling Lee "rotten fruit." Envious of their cultural pride, and exasperated with her own long-standing repudiation of all things Asian, she impulsively bought a one-way ticket to Seoul and began the search for her history chronicled in Still Life with Rice. The book is a first-person re-creation of the life of Lee's maternal grandmother, Hongyong Baek, born in North Korea in 1912.

In those days, couples were connected by a matchmaker, the bride and groom didn't formally meet until the wedding day ("it was great sport for wedding guests to peep through holes they punched in the paper [bedroom] door"), and the woman relinquished her identity and became known henceforth simply as "so-and-so's wife." Nonetheless, Hongyong was the de facto head of the family; although she and "Husband" eventually developed true love, he spent most of his time running off to get drunk and fool around with other women.

Meanwhile, she became her mother-in-law's personal slave, as was the custom; raised five children; moved the family to China during the Japanese occupation; made a fortune by smuggling opium (Husband got caught and was thrown in jail the one time he tried it); and established a profitable restaurant. The family returned to North Korea at the close of World War II only to experience the Communist seizure of their land and a country shattered by the Korean War. After Husband and Eldest Son (who disappeared for forty years) fled south to relative safety, Hongyong made the harrowing midwinter journey with the four remaining children. Now in her eighties and living in Los Angeles's Koreatown, she practices the healing art of chiryo, which promotes healthy blood circulation by slapping and pinching the skin until the bruised patient screams for mercy. Hongyong claims it cures everything from worms to crippled limbs; her patients, whom she treats for free, come from all over the world.

I learned more about Koreans in the time it took to read these two fine books than I have in three years in Koreatown, where I happen to live myself. I propose we all meet at Hongyong's for a bracing chiryo session, followed by noodles and kimchee. It might not solve everything, but it would be a start.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group