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Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

"I read Forgotten Country in one sitting, and it was one of those rare cases when I wanted to start over and read again from the beginning. The novel’s understated complexity sneaks up on you, with at least three major parts seamlessly intertwined: one part a family story, focused on two sisters and the elder sister’s struggles with her role as sibling, daughter, student, as well as with the father’s illness; the second part an immigration story, with issues of identity, assimilation, boundaries, memory; and the third a series of stories told to the sisters from family history, Korean history, and Korean folklore. The skill with which Chung weaves these strands together is subtle and masterful.

The prose is spare and beautiful, reminding me of young Ishiguro. This spareness gives the incidents of violence—of which there are a number—both personal and political—devastating impact. That the violence remains secret, unspoken, hidden, avoided, often for decades, gives it unexpected power. An altogether dazzeling novel—Bravo, Catherine Chung!"

Carole H.

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Author Catherine Chung
Publisher Riverhead Hardcover
Publication Date 2012-03-01
Section New Hc - Fiction / Staff Recs / All Staff Suggestions / Carole H.

Type New
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781594488085

On the night Janie waits for her sister, Hannah, to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's stories, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.

Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.

Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

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