Thursday, August 28

Disaster prep

 











Two elegantly simply plotlines intertwine in Tilt by Emma Pattee: The first is a day in Portland, Oregon, when the Cascadia earthquake strikes, bringing chaos to the city, and the story of a pregnant woman walking miles to connect with her husband. The second is the backstory to their 14-year relationship. The would-be actor and playwright met as young adults, the same age as college students who tried to jumpstart their careers, “but we were not students at a college. A fact that we never said out loud but it was in every sentence. We were on step behind where we thought we should be.”

Time passes, and the couple abruptly find themselves in their thirties with a child on the way, struggling to keep up. “Summer is really over. In a moment, it’ll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”

The husband still pursues an acting career, working at a coffee shop with flexible hours while the wife puts her writing aside after finding an office job with healthcare benefits. The earthquake pushes any dreams for the future aside. There is no cell service, few passable roads, houses and bridges are down, and readers are left in suspense about why a woman so close to giving birth would ever walk miles to the distant coffee shop rather than home or hospital. The couple had sat through an earthquake preparation class a few years earlier, the husband preparing for a tryout for a role role as a geologist. Yet that memory includes no mention of a key recommendation for any disaster: Family members should plan a meeting place in advance.

The two plots collide with the conclusion, the protagonist's motivation becoming clear, with recollection of a conversation between the wife and husband the previous night. She vows to make a new start, to head to L.A, to quit her job, to write her play. “And if I ever see your father again, I will tell him that I get it now, that stuck is stuck is stuck…. That he’s big-time to me. He is time to me.”

Disasters can strike suddenly and broadly, destroying an entire region, or roll in with slow motion, touching one family at a time.


Wednesday, August 20

Despair











Some people deny the horrors of genocide, hoping to protect the reputation of their country or community. Some listen but quickly set the past aside and move on. Others are left devastated. 

We Do Not Part by Han Tang, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, examines the response of two women years later to atrocities committed around the Korean War. The colleagues, one a writer and the other a photographer/videographer, both talented and compassionate, document the atrocities. A friendship forms and the unsettling subject matter inevitably intrudes and disrupts their own lives, eroding productivity and prompting nightmares. “Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?” explains Kyungha. 

The collaboration ends after Kyungha enters a doomed marriage and Inseon abruptly takes up carpentry and returns home to care for a mother losing her memories. Before the separation, Kyungha describes a recurring nightmare – blackened tree stumps shrouded in snow – and the two women plan to produce a short film based on the imagery, with the slim hope that such a project might vanquish the nightmares. 

Four years pass, leaving Kyungha certain the film will never be made, yet friendship, mutual respect and shared pain endure. “There are people who actively change the course of their own life,” Kyungha says of Inseon. “They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So in that time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

Inseon enters a hospital in Seoul after slicing her fingers while cutting wood and she calls Kyungha with a favor – travel to Jeju Island, about 150 kilometers from the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, during an intensifying snowstorm and rescue a lone white songbird left forgotten in its cage. 

Kyungha makes the trip and trapped by the weather and her own deep depression she wanders about her friend’s home, examining the meticulous research compiled by Inseon about the widespread massacres conducted on the island between1948 and 1949.  

June of this year marked the 75th anniversary of when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, often referred to as the start of what many call the forgotten war. Fighting and divisions began earlier though, explains Grace Cho for the Nation, even as the US Army Military Government in Korea was the governing body of South Korea after World War II. 

Elections in 1948 formally separated the South and North, Cho explains, though the Soviet-controlled North rejected UN monitoring and many Koreans from both sides opposed permanent division. 

“Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea,” Cho writes  With protests, strikes, and a growing insurgency, Jeju island was branded a “red island." In 1948, “an all-out offensive” against a band of an estimated a small group of guerilla fighters, estimated to number no more than 500, resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 people, or 10 percent of the island's population.” 

A US naval blockade prevented those who tried to escape. Anti-communist fervor continued throughout the Korean War with critics jailed, newspapers closed, and the Bodo League killing up to 300,000 people regarded as communist or sympathizers and other political prisoners. 

Over the years, authorities targeted family members of Jeju Island victims who asked questions and tried to investigate. “Unlike other Korean War massacres that were partly motivated by uncertainty about whether enemy soldiers might be hiding among civilians, the Bodo League massacres cannot be called ‘collateral damage’ or chalked up to ‘the fog of war,’” Cho goes on to explain. “They were highly coordinated, carried out simultaneously across several provinces of South Korea, and the groundwork for them had been laid in April 1949. While the registry began as a list of people to be re-educated, it turned into a slate of people to be killed during a national emergency, a reminder that surveillance of political groups can quickly escalate into something much darker.“

The novel recalls the Jeju Island massacre’s influence on one family. Some villagers resisted and others collaborated; years later, some went silent and others questioned and protested.  

Years of shame, denial, persecution and official subterfuge eliminated much of the historical record. Inseon's older, quiet parents protect their young daughter from the worst details early on, but as a teenager, she resents the quiet secrets, harboring hatred especially for her mother. At 17, she runs away to Seoul and after an accident wakes to her mother’s presence. Only then her mother, among the few who pressed for answers, shares what she knows about the massacre and the relatives who vanished. 

Inseon adopts her mother's determination to uncover the lost history, at one point searching for the homesite where her father once lived before the village was ravaged by fire: “it was easy to tell from the lack of trees where the houses and paths had been.” But questions go unanswered. “Not when I’d never been told how big his childhood home had been nor on which side of the village it had stood.” 

An uncle was 19 when the massacre took place and his parents worried because “he was the only man at home within the age range the soldiers and police were likely to suspect of communicating with the guerrillas in the hills.” With rumors of torture and executions, the parents convinced their son to hide in nearby hills. “He heard whistles and saw the homes burning but instinct told him to stay hidden,”  later returning to find the village destroyed and most of his family dead.  

“[I]t’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer,” the novel states. “The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization.” Members of a youth league were trained, infused with resentment against communities holding different beliefs. “The murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded…” 

The poetic quality of  Han's prose is inescapable. At one point, alone in Inseon’s home, Kyungha places her hand over a photo of bones. “Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away. Over what was no longer human – no. Over what remained human even now.”

Inseon’s findings are devastating for Kyungha, depressed before she began her journey, and the novel ends with her giving up on life, leaving shelter during the snowstorm and laying down to sleep. “Rapt in that strange, intense passion – and I couldn’t tell if it was excruciating pain or ecstasy – I walked through the biting wind, through the countless gathered who wore bodies spun from the wind. In that profound, uncanny euphoria, feeling my heart might rip open, I knew.”

The characters understand too well that leaders can instigate followers to turn on others easily, willingly. There is no guarantee that the resentment and hatred fueling genocide can’t happen again. 

The South Korean government issued an apology in 2003, and the police and defense ministry followed suit in 2019.  In April of this year, the executive board of UNESCO recognized the Jeju Massacre documents, as well as the truth-telling campaign that followed as “world heritage that belongs to all.”

Han's title refers to more than a friendship, but also to atrocities than can haunt with increasing intensity over the years, challenging societies or individuals who struggle to suppress the truth. 

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Pryer wrote a 2014 essay about "Moral Injury: What Leaders Don't Mention When They Talk of War."  Pryer quotes Jonathan Shay from his 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character: "Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated."

The essay concludes: "Human beings are creatures of passion, and war displays this passion at its noblest and cruelest extremes. It stands to reason that our nation will not always choose only just wars to wage and that servicemembers will not always perform just combat actions. Nevertheless, human beings are also governed by moral forces. The great cost of underestimating these forces in the information age is surely too great to go long unnoticed and inadequately addressed. Our nation will not always be able to wage just wars justly, but we must try much harder to do so."

Wednesday, August 6

Revenge

 

A society that treats innocents as wrongdoers unleash more criminal behavior. 

Don’t let the title of Laura Lippman’s latest book, Prom Mom, put you off. Some readers will expect fluff and others will be left pleasantly surprised by the theme of social inequality that was on full display during the early days of the Covid pandemic. The tight, suspenseful plot covers all the angst, panic and self-interest of 2020.  

Amber Glass returns to her hometown of Baltimore in late 2019 to settle her stepfather’s estate, deciding to use a surprise inheritance to start a small folk-art gallery. She worries about others in town recognizing her – the notorious “Prom Mom” from 1997, a promising high school junior who hid a pregnancy, leaving a dead infant in a hotel room.  Amber finishes her studies in juvenile detention before starting a new life in New Orleans. Her prom date was a senior whom Amber tutored in French. He insisted she locked him out of the hotel room and didn't answer his knocking. Briefly labeled as “Cad Dad,” Joe moves on to a normal life, attending college, marrying a plastic surgeon and joining his uncle’s real estate business.  

Lippman keeps readers guessing about her characters' motivations. Amber makes little effort to hide her past, giving the gallery her own name  –  “wondering how the old life might have gone if it had not jumped the track and she had a right to know what she had lost, even if it means putting herself at risk for losing it all again.” She regrets her loss of privacy, the abrupt exit from high school, all due to a night of which she has no memory. “All Amber wanted for herself was what had been granted to Joe. Was that so much to ask? Probably. Apparently.” 

Joe and his wife seem devoted to each other, but appearances are deceiving. Meredith takes great pride in knowing about Joe's early transgressions and he credits her for shaping him into a model husband, a man who is sloppy about his extramarital dalliances. Society and rich parents tolerate the wealthy making excuses about failures, deluding themselves while using others to get what they want. 

For these characters, knowing others' secrets is power. 

Amber studies Joe’s seemingly perfect life on social media, and the gallery's name serves as bait for getting Joe to stop by. More meetings follow that hurry along Joe’s unraveling marriage. Joe and Meredith are accustomed to money ensuring a comfortable life while expecting the vulnerable to do their dirty work. But Amber has her own money and plans, uncovering the couple's secrets and upending the narrative.  

Terrible decisions and callous disregard for others contribute to a noir plot with plenty of dark humor. Dates are key to understanding character motivation and what happened on that prom night years before. The book leaves unresolved strands, including questions about Amber’s relationship with her stepfather and an odd clash with Joe’s best friend in a liquor store. 

Early in the book, Amber observes, “There’s simply not a lot of suspense in most people’s lives.” That's simply not true for an observant, intelligent protagonist who learns just how much she was wronged. 

Lies of omission can be as evil and consequential as outright falsehoods.