Second-generation Korean Canadian Jane Park's gorgeous debut novel, Inheritance, achingly encapsulates an immigrant family coming to terms with their closest, yet least empathic, relationships: with each other. Anne Kim and her older brother, Charles, were born in Canada but their parents' homeland, Korea, remains their "true home... never mind that [they've] never been there." Told that they're "descended from a great king," Anne can't understand why her parents continue to endure joblessness and menial labor. "Let's just go back to Korea," she proposes as a young child in 1984--"I want to be a princess"--but her parents tell her that they moved to Canada for her and Charles's sake. Eventually the family settles in rural Crow Plains, Alberta, where they own and operate a grocery store.
Thirty years later, in 2014, the father has died of a sudden stroke. Anne, now a New York City lawyer with a degree from Yale, returns to Edmonton to help her mother deal with the funeral and aftermath. Charles needs to be picked up from rehab, having never quite established his adult independence. She resents him for always forcing her to be the responsible one; despite being younger and the daughter, she's the one who bought their parents a house, their car, and shares her "annual bonus so they could finally live a little"--which they used for securing their gravesites instead.
Self-admitted "fuckup" Charles also bares hard truths: "You were lucky to be the one to leave and be able to send money and help from a clean distance. I stayed and got my hands dirty." Despite their intimately shared background, Anne comes to realize how little she knows of their parents: she learns that their father was actually from North Korea, and for years wrote letters to a younger brother he never saw after part of his family escaped south; their mother lost an aunt who was rejected after surviving being a comfort woman for the Japanese military. Rebellious Charles attempted to break free of their parents' rigid expectations, only to bear the legacy of their buried traumas.
Park narrates between the "now" that is 2014 and the 1980s and 1990s of the siblings' growing up--and apart--with each time jump effortlessly revealing intricate details of outsider identities, racial tension, societal judgments, cultural divides, mental illness. She meticulously examines the complicated dynamics of a fractured family, of suffocating traditions and splintering rejections, while leading cautiously toward accepting honesty and the possibility of healing. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Jane Park's lyrical debut novel, Inheritance, resonantly confronts multigenerational family tensions exacerbated by hidden traumas.