SHELTER
By Jung Yun
Picador/Macmillan Publishers
www.jungyun.info
In her debut novel, which has picked up some good early reviews, Jung Yun builds off her Korean-American background to tell a story of family strife, assimilation in a new land and the struggle to find the strength to forgive.
Yun, a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, centers her story on Kyung Cho; he’s the son of successful Korean immigrant parents, but he’s not doing so well himself. He and his Irish-American wife, Gillian, who live in suburban Boston with their young son, are deeply in debt, saddled with an expensive house just as the economy has gone sour. Gillian has suggested they rent out the home and move in with Kyung’s parents — an idea Kyung can’t abide.
As the novel reveals, Kyung, a college professor in his mid-30s, has a troubled relationship with mom and dad, who live in the best neighborhood in town. As a child, he enjoyed plenty of material comforts, from private tutors to expensive hobbies, but he never felt any real affection from his parents, and he doesn’t see them that often anymore. They’ve also left him with a brooding sense of failure.
But not long after the novel begins, his parents, Jin and Mae, become the victims of a brutal home invasion, and suddenly Kyung must decide if he can swallow his feelings and take them into his own home. But in doing so, his long pent-up anger, resentment and distrust begin to surface, particularly his feelings toward his father.
In addition, having his parents in his home tends to highlight the struggle Kyung is having in his own marriage, as well as the confusion he feels in being a father to his 4-year-old son (“Parenthood still feels like a heavy new coat, one that he hoped to grow into but hasn’t quite yet”). Kyung is also conflicted about his identity: When his wife tells him he would have been justified in cutting his parents out of his life at an earlier point, he responds, “That’s an American idea. Koreans are different.”
“But you grew up here,” Gillian says. “You’re American, too.”
Yun, who now works for a UMass department dedicated to providing faculty with additional resources, was born in South Korea but grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. And in a novel that reads both as a page-turner and a family drama, she’s created what one critic calls a “work of relentless psychological sleuthing and sensitive insight.”
Jung Yun will read from “Shelter” on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.
WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
twitter.com/kkgreenidge
Part satire, part serious examination of race relations, “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” profiles an African-American family that moves from Boston to western Massachusetts as part of a grand experiment: working under the auspices of the Toneybee Institute for Ape Research, they’ll welcome a new member to their family – Charlie, a chimpanzee — so they can teach him sign language.
The Freemans – Laurel, Charles, teenage Charlotte and younger daughter Callie — are adept at sign language, thanks to Laurel, a sign language teacher who learned to sign when she grew up in Maine as the only black girl for miles around. But though Charlotte, who serves as the main narrator for the story, understands her mother’s excitement about her special assignment, she soon feels extremely isolated in the virtually all-white town her family has moved to.
Author Kaitlyn Greenidge, who grew up in Boston and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, tells part of the story through other voices, including those of Laurel and Charles. She also flashes back to the past, looking at the racist origins of the Toneybee Institute, which was involved in the eugenics experiments of the 1920s and 1930s in which scientists and doctors searched for means to decrease the population of “inferior people” — blacks, American Indians, the mentally ill — through sterilization and other methods.
It’s Charlotte’s discovery of this past, and the sense that her mother is becoming more enamored of Charlie the chimpanzee than with her and her sister, that causes the family’s life at the Toneybee Institute to begin to unravel — sometimes in humorous ways, sometimes in a more serious fashion.
Greenidge notes in an essay that her real mother learned sign language and once was offered a job teaching it to an ape, though she didn’t take the position.
The author also says she spent close to 10 years working as a guide at African-American history sites, getting a mix of open, perplexing and sometimes hostile reactions from visitors she talked to.
Her debut novel, she says, became her means for examining America’s complicated racial past and the difficulty in talking about it. “[It’s] an attempt to join in the conversation that the United States has had since its founding, our never-ending story and cry and argument about race.”
Kaitlyn Greenidge will read from “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.