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."

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. 

Pain

While treating patient complaints about pain, doctors typically inquire about the type, sharp or dull, and the intensity on a scale from one to ten. Most pain addressed by doctors is imposed from external sources such as an illness, an accident or an attack by another creature. Such pain can be temporary, sporadic or permanent, but is often regarded as separate from the sufferer, suggests Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Another source of pain is internal, the agony associated with deep shame, guilt and other emotions linked with regret linked to situations over which an individual had some measure of control. The encyclopedia touches on this category only briefly: “Like other experiences as conscious episodes, pains are thought to be private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge."  The internal pain is based on individuals' experiences, memories and agency and can be soul-crushing.  

The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck eloquently captures the tension between the two categories. The novel weaves historical facts with an imagined description of the final months for a young Catholic girl from a rural village of Southeast Poland during World War II. The cover is a photograph of the child, revealing her as simultaneously earnest and afraid. Despite her parents' unhappy marriage and poverty, the adolescent appreciates her life and the animals, including a mean guard dog kept on a chain. 

Germans conquer Poland in September 1939, an event unknown for the rural family until schools are closed and soldiers confiscate the family farm in summer of 1942 and shoot the father dead.  

Czeslawa and her mother arrive at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, assigned identification numbers and endless work with sub-optimal tools. Conditions are horrific and the work is grueling, nonstop to the point that prisoners lose all strength and motivation. Perhaps the only comfort is mother and daughter share a cramped bed and hushed conversations at night. 

Thoughtful despite her lack of education, Czeslawa often frets about leaving behind the dog known as Pies, meaning “dog” in Polish. “Although she did not like the dog – she was afraid of him – she often dreams about him. In one of the dreams, she is walking through a field of wheat and the dog is following her. The dog is friendly and when she speaks to him, the dog wags his tail. Another thing that she remarks about the dog is that his eyes are different colors…. In the dream, Czeslawa thinks that this a sign of good luck and she wishes she had had time to free Pies.”  

In another dream, the dog has pups and when Czeslawa tries to retrieve one, the dog bites. And on another night, the girl wonders if the dog dreams of her. 

The mother tells stories, increasingly revealing more secrets from her own youth while reticent about talking about the farm or abusive husband. Eventually, the woman admits that the dog surely is dead. Yet the daughter persists, continuing to worry about the dog’s fate. “For some reason she cannot explain Czeslawa keeps thinking about the dog – the dog with no name.” 

And at another point, Czeslawa slips while working and a guard sets his dog loose. The dog bites and infection begins. The prisoners fear the camp's doctors and like other prisoners unable to work, weakened by dysentery, disease, malnutrition, injuries and more, Czeslawa is sent to the gas chambers.  

The mother died on February 18, 1943, at age 47. Czeslawa, 14, died the following month on March 12. 

The novel's title is based on the final words of the poem "Nostos" by Louise Glück, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” The poem's title refers to the long journeys undertaken by the heroes of Greek literature and is tied to the Greek words for pain, travel and the longing for home and the past. 

Ripping the most vulnerable from their homes, separating families and disrupting lives, denying individuals due process, is pure evil. A child is mistreated, tortured, yet retains the compassion to worry about an unloved pet left behind. All humans are equally worthy of dignity and basic rights - and those capable of imposing physical and mental anguish on the most vulnerable in society are lacking in conscience and basic humanity. 

"At times, greed, revenge, selfishness, and dishonesty are being celebrated and even accepted as the norm, which creates an imbalance in our understanding of basic human morality," explains Diane Whitehead of Childhood Education International. "Our basic humanity and lifelong capacity to live successful and cooperative lives within societies begins in childhood. If we care about children and care about the continuation of our humanity, then we must do our part. Our children need examples of moral behavior as they grow and learn. How do we all – including teachers, parents, grandparents, caregivers, neighbors, business leaders, and government officials – model through our everyday actions that we value compassion, generosity, acceptance of others, honesty, and kindness?"

Children observe the actions of the adults surrounding them, judging and acting accordingly. Some will go along with the bullying and brutality while others have an inner strength to resist.  

One afternoon

 

The novel Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford captures a child’s perspective in this brief novel with minimal details, minimal plot, minimal characterization.  A few lovely passages describe a summer afternoon of childhood play while adults sit on porch, drinking and ignoring their children. 

The writing has a dreamlike quality, rambling about an afternoon for a group of cousins. The memory could belong to one individual or the collective. The setting is an unmarried aunt’s home, with a small patch of woods nearby, somewhat familiar but leaving plenty of strange questions that go unanswered. The children are both hyper and bored together, inventing challenges. The exact number of cousins is unknown. Only four “main players,” those who happen to be older or admired, are named. Others, including the narrator, are regarded as unimportant and also-rans, blurring together like a watercolor,  an exact count never given. 

The vague setting, the lack of names and details, creates an atmosphere of unease: “We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable… It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent. Nothing, on the other hand, meant that we would need to go downstairs eventually an get ourselves a 7UP, start thinking about the 9 times tables or something along those lines.”    

Accuracy is constantly in question as the unnamed narrator relays childhood memories that mostly center on one afternoon. A brother is sure his 3-year-old sister has gone missing and the group sets out to search. The children switch quickly from cooperation to competition, compassion to cruelty. Clues about family disappointments and failures abound in overheard snippets of adult conversations, old photographs and claims over a mother's possessions.

The afternoon stretches out expansively, foreshadowing adult outcomes for the four named characters, and these adult careers and relationships are relegated to a few pages, meaningless when stacked next to that strange and adventuresome afternoon. Still, the novel delivers little in the way of suspense or motivation. The older children fail to escape the influences of a dysfunctional extended family.  Not by chance, Abi, the youngest child labeled as “missing,” achieves success as an artist. No trying to tag along for her. Age, stealth and an ability to vanish in that crowd of cousins lend protective distance from troubled family members. 

The book leaves many unanswered questions, and readers will give up caring. One afternoon does not make a life. The quest promises thrill but in the end the lingering memory and novel seem pointless. Children who flourish shake off childhood labels, anxieties and family issues. They move on and take control of the life they have now.      

Finally, the publisher made a terrible mistake by describing the novel as “a warped Nancy Drew detective story.” The phrase snag a few who developed a love a reading with that protagonist, but a false promise guarantees disappointment. Idle Grounds has little mystery, spunk or resolution.

Careless

Wealth can make one careless. Too much pushes other priorities aside and weakens those who eventually must encounter life’s realities. And by comparison, too little might heighten feelings including empathy and caution. Insecurity abounds in either camp. 

Johnny Careless by Kevin Wade is the story of two friends on who met as teens on an elite-league lacrosse team based on the North Shore of Long Island. One comes from old wealth and the other is solidly middle-class. In the background are two fathers, a New York City police officer, who worked the remains of the twin towers post-9/11, generous with advice and love for his only son until early death, and the other controlling and persistently disappointed.  

Johnny Chambliss and Jeep Mullane fix situations for each other, with little imbalance in that regard though Johnny tends to act before asking: Jeep claims to be a driver when Johnny crashes a new Porsche, and Johnny blows off a playoff match for a family ski trip but points out that his absence will help Jeep gain notice from college recruiters attending the games.

Johnny leaves it to Jeep to inform the coach who then confides that staff had long nicknamed his friend Johnny Careless – “He could care less, the wake he leaves just walking around.”  Jeep, also annoyed by his friend, too, is troubled: “it seemed wrong to me for the adults to brand you for how you were when you were seven or eight.” 

Jeep does win a college scholarship and follows in his father’s footsteps by joining the NYPD, hard-working, thoughtful and considerate with perps and victims alike. Involvement with a victim of domestic assault and a subsequent attack prompt him to quit the NYPD and become chief of police for the small North Shore community where he grew up, regularly reminded of words of wisdom from his father about smart policing, including always thinking twice and being generous with favors. Candid with judgment and opinions, Jeep regularly gives breaks to perps as well as annoying citizens and officers. He sees irony in Long Islanders suffering from the lifestyle choices they embrace, traps they may well be.  

The town is not sleepy for long with a South American gang targeting luxury cars and Johnny’s battered body washing up on shore. Nassau County police take the lead on such cases but Jeep knows Johnny, his parents and ex-wife, as well as his darkest secrets which he can help hide or expose to show the true character of his best friend. 

Being careless extends to both sides of the wealth divide, and Jeep observes that “Being careless wasn’t a crime around here, just a tribal custom.”

Stories

Ordinary, everyday relationships offer more intrigue than a murder case in Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. In small Crosby, Maine, a curmudgeonly 90-year-old woman, Olive, forms a companionship with Lucy, a writer, and they exchange stories. Both agree that all people, even the most ordinary, have stories to live and learn from. The stories may draw curiosity, intrigue, hope and other reactions, patterns others can observe and learn from even if the person living the tale does not. 

Olive observes a budding relationship between Lucy and Bob, a lawyer in town who is not so happily married, and during the course of their exchanges, Olive relays stories about love, including unrequited love and the damage accompanying destroyed marriages. At one point, Olive tells Lucy a story about people who live with ghosts in marriage. Couples who don’t communicate, who don’t really care about the other and constantly pine for someone they cannot have. A person simply may not be available at that moment in time. Those who once enjoyed close relationships might remind others to appreciate the bird in hand.   

The meetings between Bob and Lucy and happy and innocent, including regular walks along the river with deep, uplifting conversations.  Each believes the other is truly listening and listens in turn. Their respective partners do not object and even support the deep friendship. Bob is conflicted as his wife calls Lucy childlike and Lucy raises no quick objections when Bob recalls how his wife was once labeled a narcissist. Trust is on the line.

Any number of factors blunt the potential love affair. A bad haircut results in Bob going into a period of hiding. Bob abruptly cancels a NYC trip with Lucy in the airport after a potential suspect passes by and he takes off to follow. Lucy is rude to a woman in the grocery store, not realizing Bob is observing. Irritation at an immature comment and cutting retort. A naïve client idly mentioning how much he admires and appreciates Bob’s wife. Perhaps all combine into the inescapable knowledge that such a relationship is wrong because it hurts others.

Toward the novel's end, Lucy and Olive talk about people who are their partner’s linchpin, and how they fail to thrive without that partner. Lucy finds herself wondering, “How many people out there are able to be strong – or strong enough – because of the person they’re married to.” 

Some people have reserves of strength on their own and others do not. Lucy may often seem shallow and immature, almost selfish in her quest for details, but still can prompt others toward self-reflection.

By the end, Lucy and Bob separately decide that they cannot be together and each take steps to recalibrate, easing the relationship’s intensity. “We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by  those who have come before us.” 

Influenced yes, but we can and should shape the plots we live. 

Love comes in many forms, and love can be shared, but taking what belongs to another will trouble more than satisfy. All have stories to live and learn from. The smallest of stories, the unrecorded ones, often matter the most deeply.  

Strangers

Health experts are adamant that maintaining strong social connections is key for healthy aging.

Loneliness and social isolation contribute to depression, anxiety, as well as increased risk of suicide, dementia, stroke and heart attacks, reports Mayo Clinic. 

The elderly are not the only ones feeling loneliness.

In Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang, a young man works for an online rent-a-companion service, well paid for standing in as dates, friends and even father to a little girl with a distracted, insecure single mother. The mother has paid Stranger for years to stand in as father to the intelligent and somewhat neglected girl, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. The time commitment is one day per week, and his storyline: He works as a long-haul trucker. 

That relationship is shocking but understandable as Stranger was the child of a single mother dedicated more toward her failed acting career than her role as mother. Stranger didn’t finish high school and has few skills except for good looks and an amiable personality flexible for most client scenarios. He excels at his work, hence the novel's title. He balances long-term connections with suitable cool distance, likely atoning for past transgressions and his mother’s suicide. Adept at providing people with the services they need, Stranger surely would have relished a stand-in father who would have helped with homework and offered guidance on everyday problems: “Wasn’t the staid performance of love and care everything anyone really wanted? Did deeper feeling have to exist for the act to have meaning?” 

Stranger also sees his line of work as another reflection of “the trashed decadence of an overfattened empire poised for its inevitable fall.” 

Friendship can turn on and off like a faucet, and Stranger mulls over the meaning of such relationships, wondering if it’s all an attempt to dodge loneliness: “In school, friendship was an incidental by-product of liking the same movies or being good at kicking a ball on a grassy field. Rarely did we take care of one another… but still stuck together because we didn’t want to be alone. But now, as adults, people chose friendship – this fickle arrangement that could be taken away at any time without recourse.” 

Problems ensue when Stranger mixes two clients, the young girl who trusts him as her father and a woman who’s struggling with writing assignments and relies on him for role playing. The threesome heads off to the zoo, and suddenly, “Somehow, we were more of a family with the addition of one female stranger than we had been without – a feminine power.” Darlene, the writer, actually pretending to be a paternal aunt, fascinates the little girl who wants more, and Stranger must handle a fake daughter corresponding with a fake aunt.  

The writer condemns the pretend-parenting as wrong, and threatens to expose the charade even as Stanger contemplates trying for a relationship with the girl’s mother in order to have a daughter. His narrative breaks down and the girl’s mother breaks off contact, accusing him of being a parasite. “You prey off people’s insecurities. You don’t let them change or grow. You want them to be weak, to depend on people like you.” 

Afterward, Stranger sets out to learn more about his own mother and confronts the purpose of his life, realizing he must decide if he wants to keep pretending at relationships or take a risk by proving his existence and pursuing the real thing, good or bad. 

Back to aging and isolation, Senior Navigator offers tips for staying socially connected. And sometimes companions can be rented, as one family did when an aunt suddenly became incapacitated and landed in a nursing home a few hundred miles away. The family heard that that nursing home staff pay more attention to patients with involved family members. So the family paid a woman and child to visit each Wednesday or Thursday, bringing milkshakes and standing in as family. Two nieces also visited regularly, at least every other weekend. 

Simple and regular companionship can be a treasure. The aunt was pleased with the visitors, whether friends or strangers.