THE FUTURE PERFECT

Living between two cultures, never feeling quite at home in either, a young woman must come to terms with her rigid upbringing and the parent who applied it.

None of the principal characters in Kim’s debut has a proper name, and its central figure is addressed by the narrator only as “you.” This girl, who lives in Seoul, is the only child of a taciturn 31-year-old man who spends most of his time at the office and a woman who shapes her daughter’s upbringing using a traditional maxim: “Endure, mortify the body.” When the woman decides she wants to move to the U.S. to study architecture, mother and baby temporarily relocate to Minnesota, where the daughter attends nursery, gets older, learns English, makes friends, attends a party at McDonald’s, and can’t escape a sense of difference. Her peripatetic existence, switching unpredictably between Korea and the U.S., attending school in one country then boarding school in the other, never resolves her question of identity or underlying sense of loneliness. Meanwhile, she is perpetually pushed harder by her mother’s unbending work ethic—urged to study longer and apply herself more intensively to violin lessons. This striving contrasts with her more relaxed American friends, whose culture her mother despises: “No hard work, no discipline, stupid fat and bacon,” the mother lists. “Stupid Disney and Pringles,” the daughter continues. Kim’s portrait of a tightly wound mother and struggling child is obsessive, often harsh, increasingly fraught, rendered all the more stifling through its detached narration, which allows little space for interiority. The tension between cultural expectation, family history, and parent-child attachment is the crux of the switchback, episodic, often uncomfortable story. But with coming-of-age comes insight: “You know she did it for you.”

An intense first novel puts the burden of upbringing under a piercing scrutiny.