The Dark Misinterpretation of the American Dream

Book Review by Minnie Chi

The perfect house, the perfect weather and a plethora of opportunities for your children to excel in life. These are the ideals that drove 1st generation Korean immigrants and their families out of their country and into America, the spacious and liberated land of the free. But as glamorous as the American Dream is advertised to be, the backlash of the pursuit is just as heavy and Korean-American first-time novelist Suki Kim delves deep into the dark realm of the western promise in her ambitious fiction story, “The Interpreter.”

This stark yet riveting novel is exquisitely set in and around New York City from the third person narrative. The protagonist, Suzy Park, is a 29 year-old Korean-English court interpreter who is haunted by the murder of her parents that happened years ago when she abandoned her dysfunctional family to run off with a married man. She purposely reduces herself to the role of a stone-cold mistress in two passionless affairs, is an ivy-league drop out, has worked a series of odd jobs, has hardly a social life save a bare minimum of two somewhat close friends, and is painfully distant from her orphan sister, Grace. She is seemingly solemn and detached as a result of the overwhelming lack of resolve that burdens her for reasons she herself is not conscious of until she fatefully follows the trail of signs and hints of the truth behind her parents’ death. Or so it would seem, for the truth does not bring mere enlightenment but a cruel reality about the sacrifice of her Korean-immigrant parents as tattered bridges toward a more promising life for their displaced heirs who have their own share of issues.

Suzy’s character embodies an enigmatic emptiness and a distraught guiltlessness from the beginning as an orphan who never learned to love much less acquaint herself with her grocery store owner parents given the fact that they never had time to live but only to work, an all too familiar second generation Korean-American experience. She catatonically reminisces the pressure from her affectionless father to preserve her Korean heritage but also his dependence on her older sister to translate intensely formal business phone calls demanding the many debts their family owed. Suzy is remotely likeable as a person and a heroine she is not. She is basically a vessel that the mystery is slowly unveiled through to the reader as every eventful chapter unfolds.

One day, Suzy is assigned to translate for a witness who happens to mention her parents’ name in court and who, she later realizes, is a former mistreated employee of theirs. Through him, she discovers that her parents were notorious in the Korean community for their manipulative and backstabbing ways of handling business. She is left to reconcile the lost time between her and her parents, the reality of their absence symbolized by their death, and the questionable justification of their conniving deeds that led them to their stepping and squashing over people of the same ilk to attain the American Dream at any cost, even death but more importantly a futile life of workaholicism and relational dysfunction.

“The Interpreter” is a highly and ingeniously symbolic fictionalized immigrant story contextualized into a revelatory mystery. Kim’s writing is guileless and poetic, instantly grabbing you from the moment you read the first chapter. Her stream-of-consciousness flow propels the plot naturally, consequently maintaining your interest. Even in its daunting moments of intentional obscurity, you’ll want to read on. The little voids become filled only to leave you pondering upon the over-arching complex strife and arduous process that not only minority parents but their children and the entire community must face and leads you to ask “Whose dream is this anyway?”

There are no lessons to be learned for there are no lessons taught. The novel is not attempting to simply compel social commentary or testify the minority experience but Kim seems to be accentuating and perhaps even romanticizing the Korean-American sacrifice into a very strong debut novel revealing the discrepancy between the old and new, the inevitable missing truths in language (symbolic for culture) interpretation, and one very harrowing consequence of the pursuit of the American Dream.

www.sukikim.com

5-07-03