For greater satisfaction, readers might try Sonya Chung’s Long for This World or Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered. Verdict: No argument that the prize-winning Chung writes elegiac, exquisite, multilayered prose, yet her debut ultimately falters between too much (self-absorption overload, cousin Gabe’s death, sleazy adviser) and not enough (Hannah’s disappearance, her uncle’s silence). The sisters’ devastating confrontation sends Janie alone to rejoin her parents and extended family, each scarred by the terrifying legacy of colonial occupation, war, dangerous politics, and a fractured country. Buy Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung from Waterstones today Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over £25.
Seeking the latest treatments, her parents return to Korea, charging Janie with bringing Hannah back. Two decades later, living Stateside, Janie’s family is in crisis: sister Hannah has severed family ties, while their father faces terminal cancer. “In our family … a sister always dies,” her grandmother warns, sharing the horrific tale of her own infant sister’s death during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Catherine Chung is the author of the novel Forgotten Country, and the recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as an Honorable. The woman returned, empty-handed, having learned Buddha’s lesson that “no one can be spared loss, that this is the cost of life.As Janie weeps over her first-ever separation from her mother, who is about to give birth, her grandmother admonishes her with the grave responsibility Janie must bear for her new sibling. Buddha tells her he will grant her wish when she brings him a blanket from a house that hadn’t known sorrow. It also perfectly illustrates one of the many Korean folk tales woven into Chung’s assured debut novel: There was once a woman who besought Buddha to bring her dead child back to life. Chung’s haunting novel is both heartbreaking and redemptive. What both sisters do at this critical juncture when their lives are once again in upheaval reveals their very different temperaments as well as their similar loyalties. Neither adhered to their mother’s injunctions about “gratitude, filial duty, and decency,’’ but Hannah actively defied them. Beneath the games and banter, Janie always felt put upon, unappreciated, while Hannah felt suffocated. Throughout their childhood, the sisters had an intense bond, playing games they adapted from their mother’s stories: They became heavenly maidens or seal women they pretend-jumped off trains as their father had to do as a boy, and sometimes they played “the dead auntie’’ game, one that always brought Janie a shiver of dread. It became Janie’s job to keep Hannah safe. Their grandmother had lost a sister, as had their mother.
When Hannah was born, their grandmother had revealed the family’s “curse’’ to Janie: In each generation, a sister had died. Long before those demands, Janie has been responsible for protecting her younger sister.
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