THE ALL-AMERICAN

A teenager in rural Washington gets tangled up in his South Korean roots.

Bucky, the narrator, runs more than his fair share of high school hurdles. He’s a perpetual outsider, one of three Asians at his school, including a Korean American classmate named Chantal who keeps flipping him the bird. His birth mother died in South Korea. He’s living in a trailer home with his White American stepmom, Sheryl. She had married Bucky’s Korean birth father, but he later abandoned them. The boy has just had his hopes of a college football scholarship dashed when his Uncle Rick’s failed suicide attempt soon leads to a shooting incident that lands Bucky in jail facing policemen who suspect him of terrorism. They discover that he’s undocumented thanks to his father’s misfiled immigration documents and a bounced check. After some time in a detention center, where he must refer to himself as Bed Forty-Two, he’s flown to South Korea. He doesn’t speak the language, so he’s still a fish out of water. He learns that he’s officially a Korean citizen and faces another fresh hell: mandatory military service in his new homeland. Bucky is clever but impetuous and tends to handle challenges as if it’s third and goal, charging forward with head down, legs churning. Milan throws a lot at him, putting him through the seven stages of grief as his old life fades away and he’s pulled deeper into an ugly tale of by-the-book repatriation. Bucky could end up in the DMZ. It’s dark stuff, but Milan sustains in his narrator an amusingly bewildered, blundering, bumptious voice along with a leavening sense of absurdity. There are echoes here of Heller’s Yossarian and even of the 1966 film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.

An unusual take on undocumented immigration that makes for a strong debut.