In Korean tradition, there’s a complicated emotion called han which, by general consensus, applies chiefly to women. A recently published Korean commonplace book defines it as “resentment, sorrow, sense of loss and hardship, stifled passion and love, or the frustration of the downtrodden.” A woman who manages to overcome these obstacles is said to have “resolved her han.” In 21st-century American terms, this is what Oprah would call “living your best life.”
In her accomplished and engrossing first novel, the Yale-and-Georgetown-law-educated writer Min Jin Lee tells the story of an angry young Korean-American woman, raised by status-conscious immigrant parents in Queens, who falls out with them after she graduates from Princeton. Not only does this heroine harbor han, she embodies it — her name is Casey Han.
Casey’s filial, romantic and professional struggles lie at the heart of “Free Food for Millionaires,” which unfolds in New York in the 1990s with an energetic eventfulness and a sprawling cast that call to mind the literary classics of Victorian England. Defiant and proud, Casey sorts out her life with a little help from her beautiful and docile Korean-American friend, Ella Shim, whose kindness she accepts with suspicion and resentment.
In their differing temperaments, Casey and Ella recall the seesaw sisters in “Middlemarch” or “Pride and Prejudice” — foolishly idealistic Dorothea versus sensible Celia; headstrong Lizzy Bennet versus amiable Jane. But the men in their lives aren’t as tidily classifiable as Casaubon, Chettam, Darcy or Bingley. Nor is marriage the girls’ primary goal. Like the author herself, Casey and Ella are modern women whose definition of happiness includes career satisfaction and personal fulfillment — both of which can be harder to secure than a man with a ring.
In his precociously feminist novel “Can You Forgive Her?,” Anthony Trollope (one of Casey’s favorite authors) told of a young woman who, early in the story, decides to reject the marriage proposal of a virtuous man who bores her. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot mused, “We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.” But Trollope explored the opposite side of that proposition: how does a woman come to fall in love with a man? What if she changes her mind? And what happens after that? He believed that everyone — male or female — “should endeavor to stand as well as he can in the world.” Henry James, who, like many critics of Trollope’s era, felt mixed admiration for him, praised his “complete appreciation of the usual” and called him “one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent of writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.” This “appreciation of the usual” and unmassaged portrayal of present realities also emerge in Lee’s ambitious book.
It would be remarkable if she had simply written a long novel that was as easy to devour as a 19th-century romance — packed with tales of flouted parental expectations, fluctuating female friendships and rivalries, ephemeral (and longer-lasting) romantic hopes and losses, and high-stakes career gambles. But Lee intensifies her drama by setting it against an unfamiliar backdrop: the tightly knit social world of Korean immigrants, whose children strive to blend into their American foreground without clashing with their distinctive background. It’s a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls it off with conviction. In the first chapter of “Free Food for Millionaires,” Casey and her mild-mannered younger sister, Tina — home from M.I.T. — have returned to the family apartment in Elmhurst. While their meek mother prepares one of their favorite dishes, their taciturn father, just back from his job running a Manhattan dry-cleaning shop, slurps whiskey and glowers. Casey has been accepted at Columbia Law School, but has decided to engage in what rat-race-averse college grads throughout the world call “finding themselves.” Breaking the news at dinner, she discovers that in finding herself she will lose her parents.
“When I was your age, I sold kimbop on the streets,” Joseph Han blusters, enraged by her sense of entitlement. But Casey proves equally wrathful. “I’ve always worked hard,” she shouts back. “Do you know what it’s like for me to have to go to a school like that? To be surrounded by kids who went to Exeter and Hotchkiss, their parents belonging to country clubs?” “I’m sick of hearing how bad I am,” she adds, “when I’m not. You won the sweepstakes with kids like us. Why aren’t we good enough?” At the end of their violent argument, Joseph kicks her out of the house. A fight this brutal crosses cultural lines: its heartache is universal.
Slender and tall, and possessed of an innate sense of style as well as a pair of glistening silver wrist cuffs (which remind her of the “Wonder Woman” shows she watched on television as a child), Casey gets a low-level job at an investment bank to support herself while she plots her future. She knows she doesn’t want to crunch numbers or go to law school: she wants to sew hats, even though “in America, only eccentrics and religious women” wear them. Casey has acquired her outsize sense of personal destiny from two sources: her mentor, Sabine (an immigrant from her mother’s village in Korea who has built a successful fashion business and married a rich American), and a handful of British authors whose works she reads again and again: George Eliot, the Brontë sisters and Trollope. Their fiction, Casey notices, bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Korean fairy tales her mother used to tell her,” in which good things came to clever and virtuous women who followed the paths of “sacrifice and integrity.”
But growing up in Queens at the end of the 20th century — rather than in the British countryside in the 19th century or on the outskirts of Seoul in the aftermath of the Korean War — Casey finds she has little appetite for the “sacrifice” part of the fantasy she savored as a child: “She had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.” Her mentor reinforces the message that she must write the script for her own future.
“Every minute matters,” Sabine tells her. “All those times you turn on the television or go to the movies or shop for things you don’t need, all those times you stay at a bar sitting with some guy talking some nonsense about how pretty your Korean hair is. ... Your life matters, Casey. Every second. And by the time you’re my age — you’ll see that for every day and every last moment spent, you were making a choice.”
Refreshingly, Lee is interested not only in Casey and her friends, lovers and colleagues, but in her parents’ generation as well. While she escorts Casey and her contemporaries through their first acts and toward their second ones, she also guides Casey’s parents and friends toward third acts, showing their continuing evolution and the precariousness of their own Korean-American existence.
Trollope wrote that men and women ought to grow upward, “towards the light, as the trees do,” and Lee clearly has absorbed that lesson. But in “Free Food for Millionaires,” she imparts a lesson of her own: young and old need to accompany one another as they grow — sometimes shooting ahead, sometimes lagging behind, sometimes crossing paths. They’re different branches, but they’re part of the same tree, no matter where they’re planted.
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