ISSUE: Summer 2010

DEPT: Plugged In

STORY: Susan Soon He Stanton

The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee: Book review and Q&A

Famed author Chang-rae Lee is out with yet another stunning novel, The Surrendered. In our Summer 2010 issue, Audrey book reviewer Susan Soon He Stanton reviews the work and talks to Lee about his father, the Korean War and The Iliad.

They Could Be Heroes

Reviewer Susan Soon He Stanton says Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered is an engrossing tale of the effects of war.

Chang-rae Lee opens his fourth novel with the words “the journey was nearly over.” A curiously misleading start to an epic tale which moves from 1934 Manchuria, the aftermath of the Korean War, and New York in the 1980s. Lee spent nearly six years crafting The Surrendered and his uncanny gift of describing the war-ravaged countryside of Korea can make the reader forget Lee himself is not a war survivor. Inspired by a memory of his father’s, Lee turns his attention to the aftermath of the war, creating characters that are profoundly shaped by acts of shocking violence and loss. The result is a haunting story of endurance: survival at a cost.

The story begins with June, a young Korean girl, fleeing south with her two siblings. When she is separated from her siblings, she is sent to an orphanage run by a minister and his beautiful but troubled wife, Sylvie Tanner. Hector, a handsome American GI, stays on after the war to work as a handyman at the orphanage. June and Hector find themselves vying for the love and attention of the enigmatic Sylvie. The dark hands of history also shape the course of Sylvie’s life after she witnesses a horrific massacre in Manchuria and is nearly raped by Japanese soldiers. Hector, June and Sylvie negotiate an unstable triangle until a horrific event closes the orphanage. Hector saves June’s life and they travel to America together in hopes of carving out new lives.

Many years later, despite a mutual animosity toward each other and a secret catastrophic past, June and Hector reconnect in New York. June, suffering from advanced stages of stomach cancer, closes her antique shop and sells her home. Leaving her few belongings behind, she is on a singular mission to track down her missing son. Believing Hector is the only man who can help her, she struggles to bridge 30 years of separation and silence. Hector, now a janitor at a strip mall run by Korean immigrants, attempts to drink away his unlucky past. Warily, he joins June’s search, traveling with her to Italy in hopes of finding her prodigal son.

With prose so visually stunning it verges on the cinematic, Lee moves swiftly between the various landscapes. Throughout the novel, there are powerful vignettes of minor characters whose lives are changed by the war: a young Korean bugler tortured by American soldiers and a Korean farmer looted of his food supply by roving refugees. At times, the story takes incredible, nearly implausible turns causing me to question how much tragedy and senseless violence can two lives hold? Despite the impressive death count, The Surrendered does not collapse into melodrama or dwell in depictions of gratuitous violence. Folding intense moments of carnage with subtle descriptions of daily life, Lee creates a heartbreaking story that captivates with the details.

Although not for the faint of heart, The Surrendered is an engrossing story about the complications of war and the intricacies of human nature. Moreover, it is an impressive work of fiction by a stunningly gifted writer.

Author Insight: A Q&A with Author Chang-rae Lee

Audrey Magazine: You’ve written that The Surrendered was inspired by your father’s experience as a refugee during the Korean War. How did the protagonist become an 11-year-old girl?

Chang-rae Lee: The only thing that directly relates to my father’s experience was that his brother was killed on the train, just like June’s brothers and sisters. So I was just using that one incident as the final scene in that chapter, but really I had an idea about a Korean orphan who was a girl. So there was no other connection to him. It was that incident that spoke to me and haunted me.

AM: The Korean War is almost a lost war in the American consciousness, Vietnam having eclipsed it from sight. How do you see your book affecting the Korean American community and what has the reaction been?

CRL: I don’t know yet how it will affect the Korean community. It’s a war that no one wants to talk about, not Americans, not Koreans. A lot of Koreans from my generation, their parents never talk about it and I know why because it’s too painful and unhappy. So I don’t know, but I do know that these stories and experiences exist and have haunted people in my father’s generation. Perhaps there will be an opening. That’s not why I wrote the book. A Korean friend of mine said as their parents were getting older, they wanted to tell more stories from that time because it was something they would never forget.

AM: Do you think there is a connection between the psychic damage of losing a mother or father and losing a homeland?

CRL: There is a connection on a different kind of scale. I’ve never lost a homeland, not one that I’ve ever really owned. But I think one of the things about this book is that all of the characters are unmoored. They are orphans and anchorless. That’s one of the conditions that I wanted to explore in this book. It’s a condition that fascinates me and troubles me. I know it’s partially because of my upbringing and feeling unmoored by society and culture.

AM: I wanted to ask you more about the meaning behind the title The Surrendered. Who are the surrendered and how does it relate to Hector and June, who seem almost immortal in the face of danger and tragedy?

CRL: I used the passive form because they were surrendered by the forces and history of fate. They had to endure war. They had to see what they had to see, do what they had to do. There is also a sense that they had surrendered to themselves. Hector surrenders to self-pity and self-loathing. June surrenders to her own furious will to live, and pays the price for it with her son. Surrendering for me is complicated.

AM: June Han, the young orphaned Korea refugee, is an extremely sympathetic character at the start of the novel, but less so as a teen and an adult. Was this a conscious decision to make her less likable later in life, or was this her character arc from the start?

CRL: I saw her as someone who was very hard, stubborn and willful. I didn’t see events as completely forming her but revealing her. Maybe she would have been different had those things not happened to her, but that’s what the book considers. It considers a force as grand as history influence and determine who people are. Also, just as importantly, after that happens, how do people construct and create themselves? My father made a choice to live a very normal life, just as most of the people who survived this war and had normal experiences.

AM: What is Hector’s relationship to Hector in The Iliad?

CRL: He shares the name but he doesn’t share the character. Hector in The Iliad is an upright and noble and wise good son who tries to do all of the right things, and is ultimately slaughtered by Achilles. I wanted Hector to be the anti-Hector, the opposite of all of these things. A fallen titan. A fallen Immortal. I like the idea that Hector is an immortal soul and could not be vanquished. I asked myself, “What would be the worst thing for Hector?” and that would be if he could never die. If he could never feel the pain in the way he wants to feel pain. He could never even get drunk, so that he could not erase himself. It hooked up with my wink to classical writing and epic tales of Gods and immortals. It would define his tragedy.

— Susan Soon He Stanton

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Tags: book review, chang-rae lee, korean war, susan soon he stanton, the surrendered

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