Back and Surrendered
The Surrendered
by Chang Rae Lee
(Riverhead Books, 2010)
Over the last three months, I've been cramming this book into my messenger bag and heading to classes to either teach or be taught. I'd reach into my bag and push The Surrendered aside, pull out a lesson plan, a notebook or textbook, and feel a spear of regret. This book came to represent all that I put aside in order to obtain my credential to teach high school English. But finally, all is completed. The Golden State of California agrees with my own estimation of my talents -- that I am indeed qualified to be a teacher of high school English. Now I hang here like a ripe fruit, waiting to be picked by a hungry high school English department.
Finally, no more pushing The Surrendered aside. By now, my copy has become battered. Wine stains on the pages from that night when, tired and typing my 125-page thesis-like document on best teaching practices, I reached over The Surrendered for my wine and missed. Then, there's the watermark on the back cover from where my water bottle leaked, yet again, inside my messenger bag. The edges of the spine are frayed from being jammed amongst books on differentiated instruction and assessments. Clearly, The Surrendered has been through as much as I have. And that doesn't even take into account the pain, love and tears that fill its pages.
The war that rages within each of us as we strive to sublimate feelings of shame and unworthiness drives this novel. Periodically awkward jumps through decades and settings drive the primary storyline of June and Hector, battered survivors of the Korean War. The novel begins with two threads set in the metropolitan NY area. June, a Korean immigrant in her late 40's a Korean immigrant, is dying of cancer and is on a quest to find her troubled, missing son in Europe and unite him with Hector, the father he never knew. Hector is punishing himself daily for crime of surviving not only the war, but a devastating affair with Sylvia, an American missionary who ran an orphanage for displaced children in Korea. Sylvia, tortured by her own memories as a child survivor of Japanese torture in Manchuria, is the sun around whom both June and Hector's stories orbit. And so this novel includes a thick layer of flashback that belongs to Sylvia, a woman long-dead in terms of the novel's timeline, but still too much alive for June and Hector to bear. Lee has true talent for infusing his characters with loneliness, while also allowing tendrils of their loneliness to intertwine in ways that feel simultaneously savage and achingly beautiful. Though love hope and love occasionally flare to bonfire strength within this novel, Lee is thankfully not a romantic who packages these emotions as off-the-shelf cures for our private wars. Instead, love and hope are pain relievers for those who surrender themselves to the act of living.