Moonbay

The Asiaweek Literary

....a sensitive portrayal of Korean immigrants in Hawaii.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These seven expansive, attentive stories by the author of Guilt Payment survey Korean-American identity. The Korean War provides the background for several of the tales. In "The Tiger Cub," the narrator recognizes a speaker at a meeting of Korean-Americans as an injured child saved by U.S. soldiers when the Communists overran Seoul; the ironic ending confirms his mother's prediction that "the grown Tiger Cub would bite back." Lieutenant Park, the narrator of "A Debt," owes his life to an unruly, racist member of his patrol, Private McDuff, who rescued him during a Vietcong ambush. Park muses that "nobody in my outfit would have expected him... to save me, a Korean he had been programmed to look down on and antagonize." Pak (whose novel Cry Korea, Cry is being released simultaneously), also addresses the tensions between blacks and Koreans that broke out in violence during the recent L.A. riots. "The Court Interpreter" imagines the trial of a Korean store owner who has shot and killed a black shoplifter. The title story, the collection's best, plays with a theme from Conrad's Secret Sharer. The navigator on a Korean fishing boat, Daro Jo, joins a mutiny against the interim captain, Moonbay Sin. But Moonbay and Daro look alike. After Moonbay's murder, Daro Jo is jailed in El Salvador, then rescued by a woman who takes him for Moonbay. The coolly unruffled prose of Pak's first-person narrators suits the ironies they confront as they explore the dilemmas of Korean-American history, memory, "national reputation," migration, survival and pride. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.