Rating: 96% | ★★★★★
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Dr. Yungman Kwak is in the twilight of his life. Every day for the last fifty years, he has brushed his teeth, slipped on his shoes, and headed to Horse Breath’s General Hospital, where, as an obstetrician, he treats the women and babies of the small rural Minnesota town he chose to call home. This was the life he longed for. The so-called American dream. He immigrated from Korea after the Korean War, forced to leave his family, ancestors, village, and all that he knew behind. But his life is built on a lie. And one day, a letter arrives that threatens to expose it. Yungman’s life is thrown into chaos—the hospital abruptly closes, his wife refuses to spend time with him, and his son is busy investing in a struggling health start-up. Yungman faces a choice—he must choose to hide his secret from his family and friends or confess and potentially lose all he’s built. He begins to question the very assumptions on which his life is built—the so-called American dream, with the abject failure of its healthcare system, patient and neighbors who perpetuate racism, a town flawed with infrastructure, and a history that doesn’t see him in it. Toggling between the past and the present, Korea and America, Evening Hero is a sweeping, moving, darkly comic novel about a man looking back at his life and asking big questions about what is lost and what is gained when immigrants leave home for new shores. Non-Spoiler Review: How many choices does it take to make a life? How late is too late? What kind of country do we want? These are all questions explored in The Evening Hero, a sprawling tapestry of love, life, and decisions stretching from Korean War-era Korea to present-day America. Through the superficial ordinariness of her protagonist, Yungman, Marie Myung-Ok Lee explores situations on the macro scale—American politics, immigration policies, the aggressive privatization of healthcare—and situations on the micro scale—the weight of the past, the boundaries of familial love, the value of community even in the most painful of times. This is a story about the history that each individual carries within them, told and untold. Even as the daughter of immigrants, I feel Yungman's story deeply. It's the little things— like eternally latching onto scents as random as pine and comparing them to rice cakes back home (or, for me, inhaling a wisp of incense in the middle of my college campus and being immediately transported to one of the many temples that abut the sidewalk in Taiwan). Even the perspective of Einstein—Yungman's son—on his childhood is shockingly relevant to my own upbringing. But it is perhaps the community aspect of Asian and Korean culture Lee explores that is the most important; as much as this is a novel focused on the past, it is also a novel exalting the longevity of certain values, chief among them being family. Family is never simple, never easy—but it can be, at the end of it all. Even Lee's various musings on American healthcare today blend seamlessly into the story; what could have easily been a soapbox tangent becomes integral to the story. Her criticisms of American politics—landing just shy of criticizing Donald Trump himself despite including all other events and attributes of his tenure—are less successful but effective in their own way. The Evening Hero is the story of a life. There are stories that are sprawling in their own way, either in the amount of details and characters they encompass or in the sheer amount of events they cover, but they cannot all claim to be the story of a life. Yungman's fingerprints are on the pages of this novel. He lives and breathes in every single word, and to tell such a story without ego, without overusing authorial tricks—that is Lee's strength. I would gladly seek the spotted lily with Yungman all over again. Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. The Evening Hero is out now.
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