A Tale of Two Sisters: Review of Wait for Me by An Na
The young adult novel Wait for Me tells the story of two Korean-American sisters living in the shadow of their bitter and disappointed mother.
Hearing-impaired Suna, about to enter middle school, has always been rejected by their mother, who sees her disability as an unforgiveable imperfection and disparages her intelligence. Mina, the elder and favored child, has woven an intense web of lies to preserve her mother’s image of her as the perfect daughter-a straight-A student, good Korean girl, and selfless worker at her parents’ laundromat.
Over the first half of the novel, we slowly discover just how false this carefully-crafted image is, and the toll maintaining it takes on the anxious and unhappy Mina. Her love for Suna, for whom she serves as a surrogate mother, is the only true thing in her life, and even that is endangered by her inability to face the truth-and by the fact that both she and Suna fall for Ysrael, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who comes to work at the family laundromat.
An Na tells this story with great skill in alternating chapters from both sister’s point-of-view. The dreamy and shy Suna’s short and imagistic chapters are told in the present-tense, and in third-person-close; Mina tells her own, more complex story in the first-person past-tense, a more traditional choice. Na also uses punctuation to signal which language her bilingual characters are using; conversations in Korean have no quotation marks.
The slow unravelling of the dynamics within the family is beautifully done. Na is a master of showing and not telling, giving us information-like the complicated backstory of the girls’ mother-piecemeal, and to powerful effect. She’s also written a story in which the complexity of family relationships mirrors the messiness of real life, and continually brings us to a deeper level of a story we think we understand.
As someone who has long done work around domestic violence, I was struck by how much Mina’s relationships with both her mother and (more so) Jonathon Kim, a friend who wishes she were his girlfriend, felt like unusually realistic depictions of abuse.
The sympathetic insights that Na gives us into both characters’ motivations only strengthened this sense. Real-life abusers, unlike many of their fictional counterparts, do have sympathetic aspects of their personalities, situations, and desires, and their victims (like Mina) often feel complicit in creating the problems between them. But no one deserves to have their life controlled by another, and media focus on tools of enforcement like physical violence often obscures the reality of how extensive abuse is.
Instead, Na depicts the complicated and messy world of emotional manipulation, which transforms apparent favors or unexpected kindness into tools of control. The one act of violence that occurs is abrupt and unpredictable, and we see the after-effects of the incrimental process by which abusers get victims to violate their own personal standards.
Jonathon in particular is clearly a master manipulator, and though I suspect Na wants me to feel sorry for the ways he is trapped between the need to live up to his own family’s expectations and to defy stereotypes of the Asian geek, I couldn’t forgive the way he uses what power he has at others’ expense.
The book touches lightly on tensions within the Korean-American community-the successful and comfortably middle-class Kims are much looked up to by Mina’s working-class family-and on Korean-on-Mexican racism. (There are no white characters in this novel.) I personally found it a pleasure to read about an interracial romance in which both lovers are people of color, and familial obstacles are neither elided nor allowed to overwhelm the personal story of two characters falling for each other.
Ysrael, who falls for Mina even as Suna is crushing on him, has his own complicated backstory (so similar to that of a character named Ysrael in Junot Diaz’s Drown that I suspect both were drawn from a real-life case, or this is plagiarism). Ysrael-a “beneficiary” of paternalistic US doctors, who fixed his mutilated face but let his mother die because she was neither a child nor a cause celebre-has sharp words for neo-imperialistic charity. He also has dreams of becoming a musician, and immense tenderness for both Mina, whom he loves, and Suna, whose deafness he parallels to his own disfigurement.
Suna is central to the book, and yet the jacket flap copy presents only Mina’s story. I don’t entirely blame the publisher there, however, as despite all the chapters in her voice Suna remains elusive. Both the present tense (which can easily sound artificial) and the third-person close voice in her chapters have a distancing effect, especially in contrast with Mina’s immediate past-tense voice.
While I think it’s great that Na wrote a hearing-impaired character, Suna acts too young for her age-I personally found it hard to believe that a girl about to enter middle school and anxious about filling out her training bra would carry around a stuffed animal-in ways that made me feel the author was infantalizing her because of her disability.
Adding to this impression is the fact that Suna largely appears as she figures in Mina’s story-as an obstacle, obligation, and object of love. At times I was reminded of much worse YA novel, Luna by Julie Ann Peters, which while ostensibly about a young transwoman is in fact about the stress her existence exerts on her cisgender sister.
While ultimately Na takes a very different tack from Peters to resolve the conflict between the sisters, this otherwise accomplished novel is marred by an abrupt and melodramatic ending. It jolts, and while Mina at last achieves a moment of growth, we readers don’t get to see it happen. (We never get to see, for example, how Mina’s Uhmma reacts to learning the truth about certain lies.) Coming at the end of such a carefully constructed fiction, the end feels feels out-of-place.
Hearing-impaired Suna, about to enter middle school, has always been rejected by their mother, who sees her disability as an unforgiveable imperfection and disparages her intelligence. Mina, the elder and favored child, has woven an intense web of lies to preserve her mother’s image of her as the perfect daughter-a straight-A student, good Korean girl, and selfless worker at her parents’ laundromat.
Over the first half of the novel, we slowly discover just how false this carefully-crafted image is, and the toll maintaining it takes on the anxious and unhappy Mina. Her love for Suna, for whom she serves as a surrogate mother, is the only true thing in her life, and even that is endangered by her inability to face the truth-and by the fact that both she and Suna fall for Ysrael, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who comes to work at the family laundromat.
An Na tells this story with great skill in alternating chapters from both sister’s point-of-view. The dreamy and shy Suna’s short and imagistic chapters are told in the present-tense, and in third-person-close; Mina tells her own, more complex story in the first-person past-tense, a more traditional choice. Na also uses punctuation to signal which language her bilingual characters are using; conversations in Korean have no quotation marks.
The slow unravelling of the dynamics within the family is beautifully done. Na is a master of showing and not telling, giving us information-like the complicated backstory of the girls’ mother-piecemeal, and to powerful effect. She’s also written a story in which the complexity of family relationships mirrors the messiness of real life, and continually brings us to a deeper level of a story we think we understand.
As someone who has long done work around domestic violence, I was struck by how much Mina’s relationships with both her mother and (more so) Jonathon Kim, a friend who wishes she were his girlfriend, felt like unusually realistic depictions of abuse.
The sympathetic insights that Na gives us into both characters’ motivations only strengthened this sense. Real-life abusers, unlike many of their fictional counterparts, do have sympathetic aspects of their personalities, situations, and desires, and their victims (like Mina) often feel complicit in creating the problems between them. But no one deserves to have their life controlled by another, and media focus on tools of enforcement like physical violence often obscures the reality of how extensive abuse is.
Instead, Na depicts the complicated and messy world of emotional manipulation, which transforms apparent favors or unexpected kindness into tools of control. The one act of violence that occurs is abrupt and unpredictable, and we see the after-effects of the incrimental process by which abusers get victims to violate their own personal standards.
Jonathon in particular is clearly a master manipulator, and though I suspect Na wants me to feel sorry for the ways he is trapped between the need to live up to his own family’s expectations and to defy stereotypes of the Asian geek, I couldn’t forgive the way he uses what power he has at others’ expense.
The book touches lightly on tensions within the Korean-American community-the successful and comfortably middle-class Kims are much looked up to by Mina’s working-class family-and on Korean-on-Mexican racism. (There are no white characters in this novel.) I personally found it a pleasure to read about an interracial romance in which both lovers are people of color, and familial obstacles are neither elided nor allowed to overwhelm the personal story of two characters falling for each other.
Ysrael, who falls for Mina even as Suna is crushing on him, has his own complicated backstory (so similar to that of a character named Ysrael in Junot Diaz’s Drown that I suspect both were drawn from a real-life case, or this is plagiarism). Ysrael-a “beneficiary” of paternalistic US doctors, who fixed his mutilated face but let his mother die because she was neither a child nor a cause celebre-has sharp words for neo-imperialistic charity. He also has dreams of becoming a musician, and immense tenderness for both Mina, whom he loves, and Suna, whose deafness he parallels to his own disfigurement.
Suna is central to the book, and yet the jacket flap copy presents only Mina’s story. I don’t entirely blame the publisher there, however, as despite all the chapters in her voice Suna remains elusive. Both the present tense (which can easily sound artificial) and the third-person close voice in her chapters have a distancing effect, especially in contrast with Mina’s immediate past-tense voice.
While I think it’s great that Na wrote a hearing-impaired character, Suna acts too young for her age-I personally found it hard to believe that a girl about to enter middle school and anxious about filling out her training bra would carry around a stuffed animal-in ways that made me feel the author was infantalizing her because of her disability.
Adding to this impression is the fact that Suna largely appears as she figures in Mina’s story-as an obstacle, obligation, and object of love. At times I was reminded of much worse YA novel, Luna by Julie Ann Peters, which while ostensibly about a young transwoman is in fact about the stress her existence exerts on her cisgender sister.
While ultimately Na takes a very different tack from Peters to resolve the conflict between the sisters, this otherwise accomplished novel is marred by an abrupt and melodramatic ending. It jolts, and while Mina at last achieves a moment of growth, we readers don’t get to see it happen. (We never get to see, for example, how Mina’s Uhmma reacts to learning the truth about certain lies.) Coming at the end of such a carefully constructed fiction, the end feels feels out-of-place.