AMERICAN HAN

A long-simmering tragedy unfolds in the Kim family of California, from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

The title of Lee’s heartrending debut novel employs a Korean word that isn’t defined in the text. Most sources describe “han” as a collective feeling of sorrow, resentment, regret, and internalized anger stemming from the historical experience of suffering; the story of the Kims expresses this complex emotion in a number of ways. The novel opens in December 2001, when Jane Kim’s mother shows up unexpectedly at her apartment in San Francisco, announcing she’s planning to move into town from Jane’s childhood home in Napa. Jane is not happy to see her, explaining, “Our relationship had soured to the point where I’d become almost mute around her, a habit formed out of instinct and anger.” The elder Kims, who have recently split up after decades of incompatibility, arrived along with the wave of Koreans who came to the U.S. after the Immigration Act of 1965 removed restrictions on Asian arrivals; those optimistic times are now far in the past. Jane is in her last semester of law school, but plans to leave the state and apply for the bar somewhere else, seemingly to escape her parents. Later chapters revisit the childhood Jane shared with her brother, Kevin, both having had notable junior tennis careers, and track the unfolding of a serious crime Kevin committed in 2002, when he was a San Jose cop. Lee captures the culture of the Korean diaspora both with small details—a jar of kimchi buried in the yard for more than 10 years, dug up only when the house is sold—and with broader brush strokes. “We have a sense of loyalty, of obligation, as if we came into the world with it programmed in our DNA,” Jane observes. “Responsibility reaches beyond the filial, beyond members of our own families, encompassing an entire network of people with whom we share shame and grief and pride and a way of seeing something funny in the bleakest situations.” But it is at that last point that the author parts ways with the community. Lee’s refusal to find comedy in the Kims’ personalities and predicament is rare, and extremely effective.

Lee’s self-aware, relentlessly honest narrator feels absolutely real, and her story cuts deep.