A Temporary Marriage

• “Mrs. Shin thanked him, all the time wondering if he was as innocuous as he looked. …They needed photos to authenticate their engagement, then their marriage, to immigration.” (pg 2) Mrs. Shin is obviously extremely uncomfortable with being around Mr. Rhee, and exhibits all the same fears that women in the US have concerning strange men, so the marriage thing really surprised me. This really hits home the reality that people in Mrs. Shin’s situation are often really dependant on the goodwill of others, and the unknowns associated with coming to America can be terrifying. Intellectually I knew this already, but this helps make it much more apparent on a personal level.
• “They had done well enough until the recent recession, which had even lawyers watching their expense accounts.” (pg 4) This story seems like it’s set more recently than the other books we’ve read so far, which all seemed to almost make immigration and its related struggles a thing of the past as a result of being set decades ago. In this, immigration still seems to be a struggle financially at the very least.

• “On that first night in America, Mrs. Shin’s failures returned to her in her dreams. As she slept, her hands, those animals of habit, clutched at her crotch, a spot she forbade herself to touch when awake. …She woke up trembling with excitement, her arms filmy with sweat and the residual scent of sex.” (pg 5) She feels like a failure and that arouses her? Am I understanding this correctly? She associates her husband’s abuse of her with sex?
• “She always called people doctor when the situation required flattery.” (pg 9) This confused me because the person she is referring to is a detective, not a doctor. Is this a common practice in Korea, to use “doctor” as a sign of respect rather than to denote an occupation or someone who has a PhD? Why would she do this?

At the Edge of the World

• “…his father taught him algebra, his oversize dandelion head wagging on the short stalk of his body…” (pg 26) Is this implying that his father is blond and possibly American? Or is that just a way of saying that he has messy hair? When I think of dandelions, I think of yellow, so I’m assuming he’s blond?
• “ “It’s blasphemous,” she said. “It’ll bring us bad fortune to live near someone talking to the dead.” ” (pg 31) Does shamanism often involve talking to the dead? Does she know what shamanism is and what it involves and disagrees with it? Or is she just denouncing it because it’s not Christianity? What makes it “bad fortune” to her?
• “He didn’t understand why kids tried to pull off his pants or walked behind him, poking between the crack of his buttocks with a stick.” (pg 32) Was this just “regular” bullying by other children, or was this motivated by racial stereotypes that I’m unfamiliar with? Also, wouldn’t trying to pull off his pants be considered sexual harassment/assault? Why would they do this?
• “Mark was shocked; he had assumed these were chores that she had enjoyed.” (pg 42) I thought this was interesting because previously Mark has been established to be very socially conscious for a little kid. He cares about the environment, he doesn’t like Coke because the company used slave labor in Nazi Germany, he has rows of library books in his room instead of buying his own in order to save the trees. Why did he assume his mother just enjoyed doing all the cooking and cleaning when it’s such a “traditional” housewife thing?

The Pastor’s Son

• “Instead of the promised quiet family gathering, Hyeseon’s tribe had opted for a typical Korean ceremony and hired a flashy wedding hall for several hundred acquaintances. Our recently widowed father was forced to ride a mechanized Venetian gondola to the altar; a fog machine blew smoke into his face, and we endured two wedding ceremonies…” (pg 52) Since they call it a “typical Korean ceremony”, does that mean that weddings in Korea often have things like fog machines? How did a practice such as that come about?
• “He wobbled over to New Mother’s potted begonia, adjusted himself, the peed on the plant.” (pg 55) I’m assuming that he did this as a sort of revenge against her for lying to him about the wedding ceremony? Or maybe it’s just the only way he knows how to express his dissatisfaction?
• “ “He’s a goldfish copy of his mother,” they said.” (pg 61) Is this anything like saying someone is a carbon-copy? If so, how did this phrase come about? Is it because most goldfish look pretty much the same?
• On page 66, it surprised me a little bit that he told his father he would call the police when he saw him pushing his step-mother into the water. Up until that point, I was under the impression that he was more on his father’s side than hers, and she had been completely wretched to them; he certainly hadn’t stopped his father from dragging her out of the house in the first place. Did he not stop him at first because he was too upset about the broken picture to think clearly, or did he think he didn’t have the ability to stop his father from taking her?

The Goose Father

• “The original goose fathers, the term signifying their journey from one country to another, were Korean men who had been drafted or volunteered as mercenary soldiers for the U.S. army in Vietnam, and sent their salaries back to their family.” (pg 71) I thought this was an interesting term, and I wonder how it came about. Why geese in particular? Do they have a significance in Korean culture?
• Aren’t geese supposed to be really mean? Why does Wuseong have a pet goose? He says “she just found him”and that she has a broken wing on page 73, so I’m assuming he’s trying to nurse her back to health, but why would he do that?
• Gilho’s description of Wuseong’s behaviors on page 78 make him seem almost manic. Since he’s already admitted that he sought out Gilho because of his poetry, combined with the revelation that he has no contact with his father, that makes me suspect he has latched onto Gilho because his poetry gave him a sense of stability in his life and came to think of him as a father figure.
• It was only after reading page 84 that I realized that Gilho is still in Korea and his wife and children were the ones who went to the United States. I think I got confused because it mentioned that he was sending them money, but my first clue probably should have been when it mentioned that his kids “escaped Korean Universities” (or something to that effect) on a previous page.

The Salaryman

• “Nightly the nine o’clock news parades such stories. These clips, rare to Korea before the 1997 IMF crisis destroyed the job-for-life policy, are suddenly so ordinary that when you attended your acquaintance’s funeral, your mourning felt like a forgery.” (pg 94) What was the IMF crisis? This is terrifying, that things like suicide were apparently so common that it barely registers for this person.
• “But they live off of what little money their alleyway eatery brings in and you are their only son, the one whom they worked hard to send to college, and they depend on you.” (pg 94) I thought that this was interesting because the wife is upset that he’s taking care of his parents. In the other books and films we’ve watched in class, generally the children seemed to be expected to take care of their parents, especially in their old age, which seems to me to be one of the Asian stereotypes. Does that not apply in Korean culture? Or is she an exception to this attitude?
• “You leave the flowers on the mat. You are a salaryman who works -worked- for a respectable company, so how can you confess that you can no longer support your family?” (pg 97) What do the flowers have to do with him admitting he lost his job? Where did the flowers even come from? It says they’re “pink delphiniums”, but it doesn’t mention where he got them from or why?
• “Yeongsuk entertains himself by doing things like reciting the periodic table, tracing word etymologies, and deducing the possible whereabouts of former dictator Chun Du-hwan’s reputed illegal fortune of two hundred million U.S. dollars.” (pg 102) Yet more references to historical events and figures that I don’t know anything about! Why would they measure his illegal fortune in US currency instead of whatever currency they use in Korea? I’m assuming it’s not just for the ease of readers, because the author has no qualms in using untranslated terms elsewhere.

Drifting House

• (pg 113) Apparently rampant cannibalism, and it’s only the first page! Was this actually an issue in Korea? What led to this?
• “Then he closed his eyes, twisted their mother’s scarf around Gukhwa’s neck, and choked her. It was better this way, he was convinced, than to leave her afraid, starving slowly to death.” (pg 115) Why did he feed her if their situation was so desperate that he felt the need to kill her instead of leaving her to die? That almost seems more cruel to me, not less cruel.
• “…Miss Han furtively married to a Chinese farmer, despite the Chinese government’s bounty on North Korean heads.” (pg 118) If the Chinese government had bounties on North Koreans, how were these people getting away with being in China? Wouldn’t it be obvious that they weren’t Chinese? Were they pretending they were actually from South Korea or something?
• I didn’t understand the ending of this story? Did he get killed by the soldier, and that’s why he’s seeing his dead father and sister and all those other people? If not, what is this meant to symbolize?

A Small Sorrow

• (pg 129) I don’t understand what they mean by “compromised”. They use it to describe democracy and marriage, so do they mean compromised as in coming to an understanding, or as in endangered?
• “Seongwon kissed her forehead, her toes. His eyes, bright with worship, sought her approval.” (pg 132) He was practically flaunting his new lover in front of her earlier, but now he’s seeking her approval? Does he even care about her at all, or is he just oblivious and/or manipulative?
• “So what if they tended daily to their garden and cleaned their own house, activities that few in Seoul with their means participated in. In the village, elderly men carried forty kilos of rice on their backs. Many families still used outhouses.” (pg 136) Her awareness of their comparative privilege, her descriptions of what seem to be attempted activism from her and her husband, and the mentioning of how the government let her husband live indicates that one or both of them had at least been arrested before and possibly tortured into compliance. Does mean that their apparent “free” lifestyle is their attempt to cling to what little avenues of resistance they have?
• “Village boys returning to the rice fields pointed at the black sedan the size of a small tank – yet another ostentatious gift from Seongwon’s parents to embarrass Eunkang.” (pg 139) Why would a sedan embarrass her? Was she “lower” class than him before marrying him? Or is she overly aware of her privilege and is embarrassed of “flaunting” it in front of people who don’t have access to such things because of her activist past?

The Believer

• “She saw the torso of a Chinese American boy she knew, a fifth grader in the neighborhood, protruding from the industrial-size waste bin.” (pg 148) That would be incredibly alarming to come home to a kid’s dead body in your kitchen, but why did they have an “industrial-size waste bin”? Was her mother planning on killing him? Was it racially motivated? Was it pre-planned or an accident?
• “On the day of his twentieth wedding anniversary, she caught him lying in a mountain of her mother’s lingerie, his nose in the 34B cup of a bra, his hand folded around the crotch of a lace panty.” (pg 149) I’m assuming this means he still loves his wife even though she turned out to be a murderer? When he said they never should have left, does that mean he thinks she wouldn’t have hurt anyone if they had stayed in Korea?
• “A boy who had knocked on their door selling newspaper subscriptions and had been mistaken as the devil.” (pg 154) Is this why Jenny doesn’t want to be religious anymore? Does she blame religion for “convincing” her mother to kill the boy and is afraid that she’ll do the same? Or is it just because she can’t stand the thought of her supposedly faithful mother killing someone despite her belief in god?
• “But when she blinked, the orange became the boy’s head.” (pg 160) Is she hallucinating because she’s tired, or because this is meant to indicate she has whatever issue that made her mom believe the boy was the devil? Or is it just meant to be symbolic somehow?

Beautiful Women

• “The only thing he ever talks about is a Nam, the same Nam that her missing father is very friendly with. Will this stranger beat her with his club? Or with it bestow on her a cave of gold?” (pg 169) I’m assuming that her father died in the Vietnam war and her mother just told her he’s missing? Why does Mina think the other veteran will beat her or give her gold? Is that the result of a child’s imagination, or did someone else use a club to beat somebody in front of her at some point?
• “How can her mother trust a man who irons his collar crisp but overlooks what must be dirt and moss under his fingernails? All children like animals, the man says. When he smiles, he bares glistening yellow teeth.” (pg 170) These descriptions of the veteran feel very sinister, like he has bad intentions or isn’t actually a veteran or something like that. Is that just in Mina’s imagination, or is it foreshadowing of some sort?
• “Mina chants her hand into a bamboo wand, commanding the cuttlefish to change into Hershey’s chocolate, for the shouts to become a song, but all that transforms is the door now gasping open and the man’s bare toe, a raw ginseng stump that reminds her of a goblin’s lump, boring into Mina’s rib cage.” (pg 181) Why would he suddenly leave his argument with Mina’s mother, which wasn’t even about Mina from what I can tell, to hurt Mina? Did he do it because she was an easy target and he wanted to get his way?
• “To the saleswoman, Mina points her finger at the store’s sign and says, Someday, we’re going to live in a house as big as your store. This charms the stranger into a smile, which seems strange to Mina, since the woman does not know her mother, so how can she possibly be happy for her?” (pg 185) I’m just as confused as Mina at this. Is the woman being condescending, or is there something else going on that I’m not picking up on?