After the rural Minnesotan hospital where Youngman Kwak works closes, he no longer has work to keep his mind occupied. This means that memories of his life in Korea during and after the Korean War start to creep back into his conscious mind. It also means that Youngman has time to reflect on his relationship with his wife, how they raised their son, the medical profession, and the casual racism he and his family have always faced. There’s a lot going on in Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s The Evening Hero. Unfortunately, it’s a little too much and the tone veers from beautifully thoughtful to absurdly satirical. To me, it read like two novels spliced together.
Youngman Kwak is a dedicated OB-GYN at Horse’s Breath Hospital when we first meet him—more so because the new director of the hospital is squeezing every scrap of profit out of the hospital before ingnominiously closing the whole thing down. Youngman feels very much for his patients, all of whom are now just that much further away from good medical care. Youngman’s diligence and humane care of his patients is a sharp contrast to his son, Einstein, and the employees at SANUS (the very company that bought and closed Youngman’s hospital). After an uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner that further highlights the differences between Youngman and his wife and their son and daughter-in-law, Einstein talks his father into taking a job at SANUS. Unfortunately, the promised job delivering vaccines turns out to be a humiliating gig operating a depilation machine. SANUS is mall medicine. It’s far from Youngman’s work delivering babies and caring for women.
Meanwhile, Youngman starts to receive letters from an unknown woman in Seoul. He knows that the letters have someting to do with the brother he abandoned in Korea, to start his new life with his wife and unborn child in the United States. He’s been running from his brother—and his regrets—for decades. At this point, the narrative takes us back to just before the Korean War. Youngman and his mother, younger brother, and grandfather, are eking out a living in Water Project Village. When the war comes, their situation becomes even more fraught. Not only are they facing starvation, the small Kwak family and the rest of the non-combatants walk up and down the Korean peninsula, avoiding violence from soldiers on all sides, and hoping to find a safe place to stay until they can go home. This part of the novel is utterly harrowing.
Over the course of the rest of the novel, the narrative switches back and forth from Trump-era America to post-war South Korea. The contrast between the escalating weirdness of Youngman’s life in America and Youngman’s nostalgic memories of Korea grows bigger and bigger—and harder and harder to reconcile into a cohesive whole. For me, the parts of the book in Korea and South Korea were the most interesting and enjoyable. The narrative is much better when Lee leaves behind the satire and the absurdity. Although I appreciated the points Lee made about the greed of the America healthcare industry, I preferred the emotional honesty of the other half of the novel, the parts in which Youngman looks back across his long life and wonders if he made the right choices.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss for review consideration.