In these stories, set largely in Seoul, Korean women ranging in age from 10 to 80 navigate the everyday with a quiet determination to allow themselves joy. Often, the stories give the reader insight into family dynamics in the context of the larger society\u2019s repression. In the collection\u2019s tender opening story, \u201cUnder the Plum Tree,\u201d the narrator\u2019s oldest sister, Geumju, is set adrift from a life controlled by the labor of duty by Alzheimer\u2019s disease, finally affording her time to enjoy simple pleasures. In \u201cRunaway,\u201d the narrator\u2019s elderly father runs away from home in order to \u201cstart living [his] life\u201d in the years he has left. Though his children and their mother are at first distraught, the father\u2019s absence allows them the space to reveal themselves to each other as fully rounded humans, rather than automatons fulfilling their familial roles. Other stories take on the foundational misogyny of a patriarchal culture more directly: In \u201cGrown-up Girl,\u201d a woman who self-identities as a feminist finds herself conflicted by the way her high school aged daughter stands against unwanted sexual attention. In the sublime \u201cNight of Aurora,\u201d an aging woman struggles with her aversion to being asked to help raise her grandson as society expects, while her daughter struggles with her own aversion to quitting work to dedicate herself solely to motherhood. Throughout the collection floats the specter of Miss Kim\u2014a model for the possibilities of Korean womanhood who is sometimes an icon for the rights of women to live self-determined lives, sometimes a literal incarnation of the invisibility of women\u2019s labor, and sometimes a foil for the narrator\u2019s own complicated feelings about gender roles, duty, aging, and the relationships between mothers and daughters. Spare but never stark, weary but never despairing, Cho\u2019s trim prose examines the under-seen world of women with a keen appreciation for all the possibilities for their lives\u2014including the ones they themselves may not be able to imagine. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In these stories, set largely in Seoul, Korean women ranging in age from 10 to 80 navigate the everyday with a quiet determination to allow themselves joy. Often, the stories give the reader insight into family dynamics in the context of the larger society\u2019s repression. In the collection\u2019s tender opening story, \u201cUnder the Plum Tree,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":843,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}