Drifting House

Jun 23, 2012 Wendy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, unowned

I won a free copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads. Drifting House is a collection of short stories by Krys Lee. This is her fiction debut.

One of the stories in this book a really enjoyed was "At the Edge of the World". It tells the story of Mark Lee a North Korean immigrant and his family. Mark is ten years old and extremely intelligent. He is bullied at school and does his best to entertain his family with true facts. Marks family consists of his mother and step-father. The story tel...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Mark Staniforth rated it 3 of 5 stars

On the face of it, South Korean fiction has the raw materials to make it big: partition, war, dictatorships and economic boom-and-bust, all played out against the backdrop of a deeply traditional, rigidly honour-bound society.
But while the likes of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have succeeded in ushering modern Japanese writing into global favour, their South Korean equivalents have struggled to make such an impressive breakthrough beyond their homeland.
Until now: this has been a stellar...more On the face of it, South Korean fiction has the raw materials to make it big: partition, war, dictatorships and economic boom-and-bust, all played out against the backdrop of a deeply traditional, rigidly honour-bound society.
But while the likes of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have succeeded in ushering modern Japanese writing into global favour, their South Korean equivalents have struggled to make such an impressive breakthrough beyond their homeland.
Until now: this has been a stellar season for South Korean fiction, starting with Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mother, which as well as selling over one million copies at home, was released in 19 other countries, and is the first South Korean novel to be shortlisted for the prestigious MAN Asian Literary Prize.
Now comes Krys Lee's 'Drifting House', a debut collection of nine tight short stories which jab at the heart of her modern nation's struggle to survive the myriad travails of its recent past.
Where Shin's work was predominantly concerned with exploring the rural, matriachal perspective of modern Korean life, Lee's book is very much urban and masculine: most central characters are husbands struggling to hold their families together under such an enormous, accepted weight of responsibility.
Lee's world is one that stretches far beyond the confines of her own nation's borders, to the countless Koreatowns dotting America's west coast, yet her message remains the same. Delicately, devastatingly, she strips away the veneer of post-Olympics, post-dictatorship economic respectability, bringing into focus the almost pathological obsession with work and education that came with it: an obsession ill-suited to such rigidly structured family models.
Lee's characters are people whose biggest fear, beyond family break-ups, beyond even death, is becoming a burden. They will gladly send spouses and siblings across the Pacific to escape it, consigning them all to a life of soullessness in the process, yet anything is better than the alternative.
The desperate period after the 1997 IMF crash which exploded the South Korean economic miracle is most starkly described in 'The Salaryman', in which an unexpected redundancy leads its comfortable, salaried central character into an alarmingly quick spiral of despair, culminating in his abandoning his wife and family and adopting a grotesque existence on the streets, simply unable to face the humiliation of going home no longer with a means to provide for them.
While the first handful of stories in Lee's collection provide the layers of insight
required to begin to understand South Korea's unique society, the second half of the book is stronger. The stand-out, for sure, is the book's title story, a gut-wrenchingly memorable story of abandoned siblings seeking to escape the hell of Kim Jong-il's famine-ravaged north: a tale all too familiar to anyone who read the survivors' testimonies in Barbara Demick's seminal Nothing To Envy.

'The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government's face was everywhere: on the sides of a marooned cart, above the lintel of the gray post office, on placards throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Woncheol's back, their crippled sister, the weight of a few books.'

'Drifting House' provides a superb, overdue insight in a fascinatingly complex culture which, in the context of global literary fiction, has been neglected for too long. Lee, whose forthcoming first novel has also been acquired by Faber, is talented enough to remain at the forefront of this shift-change. If 'Drifting House' is anything to go by, we have not heard the last of Krys Lee's South Korea; not by a long shot. (less)

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Mar 02, 2012 Shirley rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: korea, six-degrees, short-fiction, recently-read-faves, 2012

This collection of moving stories focusing on both Koreas (and on Koreans in America) blew me away from start to finish. The writing is exquisite, haunting, precise, surreal, magical, dark, funny. The stories are fully realized and, although often focusing on the darkest thoughts and actions, have heart and humanity at center. You care about what the characters will do and what will happen to them, even as you flinch because they are in such desperate circumstances. One of the best short story c...more

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Dec 10, 2011 Kim rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

This collection of stories is about the struggle that Koreans/ American Koreans have faced. Each story is sadder then the previous. Some stories are a bit confusing but that may just be a culture difference on my part. This was a very interesting read, but again I say, it was quite sad. The stories were written well but I feel some of the stories were a bit rushed to complete. Some of these stories could have been a novel on their own. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn the...more

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Jun 24, 2012 Albert added it · review of another edition

Shelves: digital, haz

Like the author I was whisked away to this magical land when I was 5, and when I heard her describe it in an interview, I immediately decided to get the book. As with a good deal of Korean films I've seen, there's taboo, raw emotion, and a strain of feminism. The writing didn't blow me away, but they're good stories, and I needed to read them. I kind of wish the Korean-Americans writing prose would go as far out as Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi in poetry. Maybe they're out there, and I just don't...more

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Aug 08, 2012 John Mensing rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, korea, reviewed

_Drifting House_ is a cascade of short stories, each one more delightfully overwritten than the last. As a matter of style, Krys Lee takes an artifact from Korean life – the returnee from America facing reverse culture shock, the homeless man in Seoul Station, the suicide in the Han river – and fashions a backstory with brio, dredging up dozens and dozens of minutiae about Korean life to weave into the story. At times it seems as if Krys is trying to show us the “real” Korea, at other times, it...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Nomad rated it 3 of 5 stars

This has to be one of the most depressing books that I have ever read! It's a short story collection and ALL but ONE of them are wrist slitting depressing. It gets three stars because for all the sadness, anger, insanity and rage contined in this slim volume, it is VERY well written. It's just... not fun at all to read.

Not every book can be fun, but my issue is that if I'm enduring a grueling read I want it to be because I'm learning something, I'm being challanged. However, I already knew that...more

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Feb 14, 2012 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Drifting House – the debut collection of Krys Lee – contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see agai...more The Drifting House – the debut collection of Krys Lee – contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see again. But has she courted her own abuse? Phrases such as “her wounded body continued its ancient song” sum up, in a few sparse words, what the theme of the story is really about.

Then there’s The Goose Father – the traditional name for a father who faithfully sends money to his family overseas. The father – a one-time poet – takes in a young boarder who carries an actual goose with a wounded wing. In powerful prose, the father – Gilho – must come to terms with his true inclinations and his lifetime loneliness and alienation.

The Salaryman is stunning in its understated, naturalistic prose. In this story – told in second person – we watch a solid Korean businessman lose his job, his family, his confidence, and ultimately, his very humanity. It’s like watching a train wreck; it’s hard to look away.

There are many other good ones as well – the eponymous Drifting House, the most surreal of the lot, where two brothers and their very young sister try to escape North Korea’s countryside famine by fleeing to China. Yet they cannot escape their ghosts. And in The Believer, a mentally deranged Korean American woman commits a heinous crime; her daughter tries to comfort her father by performing an unspeakable act.

Ms. Lee is a young writer who is willing to take risks as she focuses her talent on those who are damaged, lonely, yearning. It’s not uplifting – marriages fail, men lose their sense of masculinity, women lose their sense of value, and most everyone feels displaced. Yet it offers amazing insights into the hopelessness and frustration that define a Korea that’s been through war, financial draught, and instabilities.
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Jan 29, 2013 Adam Johnson rated it 5 of 5 stars

With both pinpoint focus and a large communal scope, the stories in this collection flash upon all aspects of the contemporary Korean experience--emigrating, being left behind, prosperity and poverty, crossings and the clash of the contemporary against the traditional. The stories can be subtle, like "At the Edge of the World" in which a North Korean father tries to adjust to a new life and a new family in LA. Or there can be a tour-de-force feel, as is found in "Beautiful Women," which is sweep...more

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Jun 16, 2012 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Krys Lee's first published work is a book of short stories about Koreans in Korea, in America, those who leave and those left behind - "the drifting house". The most effective stories brought individual anguish to sharpest relief against social/cultural tensions running throughout - religion, the war, division between north and south korea, pressure to be the societal construct of the male and female. These were "Salaryman", "The Goose Father", "A Temporary Marriage" - perhaps because those stor...more

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Apr 08, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-own, fiction, short-story-collection

A Spectacular Debut Short Story Collection from A Great New Talent

One of the most memorable story collections I have ever read is written by an author who demonstrates that she can transform simple, unadorned, prose into especially moving fiction conveying ample empathy and understanding for the characters and the settings she depicts. While these stories are about Koreans in North Korea, South Korea and the United States, this is a story collection whose memorable tales defy labeling, moving ea...more A Spectacular Debut Short Story Collection from A Great New Talent

One of the most memorable story collections I have ever read is written by an author who demonstrates that she can transform simple, unadorned, prose into especially moving fiction conveying ample empathy and understanding for the characters and the settings she depicts. While these stories are about Koreans in North Korea, South Korea and the United States, this is a story collection whose memorable tales defy labeling, moving easily between realism and magical realism, written by a writer who writes assuredly as if this was merely one of her latest literary efforts, not her very first book of fiction. Krys Lee’s “Drifting House” is one of the finest recent literary debuts I have read, replete with nine stories told compelling via a lean prose , a most memorable economy of style, that bears some resemblance to William Gibson’s latest (“Zero History”) in its clarity and precision, able to convey much emotion to the reader. Lee’s stories chronicle rootless people, trapped by circumstances beyond their control, often caught in a clash of cultures; between those of North and South Korea, between Korean and American.

One of the best stories in this collection, “Temporary Marriage”, describes how a Seoul divorcee opts for a new life in Los Angeles, finding an unexpected haven in the home of an older Korean-American man as she plots an unexpected reunion with her young daughter, taken from her years before by her former husband. In “At the Edge of the World”, nine year-old Korean American Myeongseok “Mark” Lee contends awkwardly with his awakening sense of love towards a young girl he befriends in school and with the psychological demons haunting his father, a North Korean defector. “The Salary Man” recounts vividly, the frustrations felt by a Seoul white collar worker as though he is the Korean counterpart to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman (“Death of a Salesman”). In “Drifting House”, the title story, a young North Korean boy must make a most fateful and tragic decision as he and his siblings try fleeing North Korea in the dead of winter, hoping to follow their mother into the People’s Republic of China. A young Korean-American woman seeks GOD and finds instead, a most unexpected sexual awakening in “The Believer”. Teenager Mina searches for her long absent father, a soldier fighting in Viet Nam, and her first stirrings of sexuality in late 1970s Seoul in the concluding tale “Beautiful Women”. All of these, as well as the others in “Drifting House”, are astonishingly mature works of short fiction, demonstrating that Krys Lee is indeed a great new talent in American literary fiction.
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Feb 02, 2012 Angela rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ala-2012, the-list

A beautiful and brutal collection of short stories about Koreans and Korean Americans, from the Korean War to the modern day. Lee creates vivid scenes that reveal the consequences of being minority, of being conquered, of loss, and of political and economic disorder. So yes, this is a sad book, but it's also an important one. Not coming from this background, the glimpse of these lives and this culture was eye-opening for me. One thing I kept noticing is that I always assumed that these stories w...more A beautiful and brutal collection of short stories about Koreans and Korean Americans, from the Korean War to the modern day. Lee creates vivid scenes that reveal the consequences of being minority, of being conquered, of loss, and of political and economic disorder. So yes, this is a sad book, but it's also an important one. Not coming from this background, the glimpse of these lives and this culture was eye-opening for me. One thing I kept noticing is that I always assumed that these stories were set in the past, even if I was explicitly told that the year was 2010 or 2011. I kept assuming that the suffering and patriarchal control and shamanism in these stories occurred long ago, because I couldn't imagine that such things still happened today, and in my own country. And I'm not saying that to disparage Koreans or Korean culture--it just brought home to me how sheltered my life is and how much more there is to the world than what I see of it. As with the best books, this collection of stories opened my eyes to the world a little more.
The only faintly "up" story in this collection is "The Goose Father." That's probably why it was one of my favorites. It has Lee's evocative writing but (slightly) less of the heartbreak of the other stories.
"Beautiful Women" gives an idea of what it was like to grow up as a girl in the aftermath of the Korean and Vietnam wars. "A Small Sorrow" is a companion piece, and I believe "The Salaryman" contains a cameo by one of "Beautiful Women's" characters.
Pretty much all of the stories in this collection deal with violence or sex, but "The Believer" is probably the most explicit exploration of both. So, um, you've been warned.
"The Salaryman" is the one unmistakably modern story. The story of financial collapse and one man's relinquishment of his humanity in the face of poverty smacks strongly of America's current financial situation. That seems to be the same everywhere.
Don't give up on "The Edge of the World." It makes a little more sense with "Drifting House," the short story the book's title is from. A little.(less)

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Feb 12, 2013 Steve Williams rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemp-lit-fic-stories

this is an exciting debut. lots of it is promising and fresh. and lee's prose is lyrical, limpid, poetic. but in some ways, lee's writing just isn't as sharp as you'd hope--it probably will be one day, but it's not yet. minor scenes sometimes feel rushed; more climactic scenes occasionally end up feeling underdone or even comical bc of a cliched line (there's a line in 'the goose father' about a shriek that 'shattered the silence'). physical descriptions can be general. lee can't quite do male f...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Izm-i rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another literary karaoke, cliche after cliche of immigrants' stories, sung by a new 'talent.' All stories somehow read funnily identical with the last book of the same category your read and the artificiality of this manufacture somehow wears you out. Or is there any novelty value for those who are not familiar with ethnic lit/world lit/folklore?

My case: I had to rub my eyes to make sure that it was a new book or if I was still reading Chimamanda Whatever's short story collection that I thought...more Another literary karaoke, cliche after cliche of immigrants' stories, sung by a new 'talent.' All stories somehow read funnily identical with the last book of the same category your read and the artificiality of this manufacture somehow wears you out. Or is there any novelty value for those who are not familiar with ethnic lit/world lit/folklore?

My case: I had to rub my eyes to make sure that it was a new book or if I was still reading Chimamanda Whatever's short story collection that I thought I finished a while ago. In a way this made me ponder our time when a book by an East Asian author's fiction reads this identical with what was written by the Nigerian author. I wonder what it was that made it possibly happen. The choice of their subjects? True. That they are both ethnic minority females who went through the misery in immigration in the US? True. Lacking originality? I understand that they are not to be put to blame for this agenda, but greatly true: none of these immigrants stories hardly claim their originality in the time of global/post-colonial English lit market. Everything reads the same, same and same. So it would be ultimately a matter of how the book is handled in the market and what the feature of the commodity would be. The rest is all interchangeable.

It seems that the author is trying to capitalize North Korean subject as her expertise but why so had it not been for the market strategy in US/UK and the global English market? Just because she worked with North Korean through her church does not issue her the license or authority to 'represent' them as she meant to. Or is it the enough reason, depends how you regard it. If she tries to capitalize North Korean because of the proximity she got to the real North Korean (and look how she objectifies North Korean's predicament to butter up US and their anti-China sentiment that has been on the rage), I would rather read read real defectors' stories as soon as their translation comes out. There was something unengaging about this author's treatment of the subject mater that turned me off, I suppose. I was the fool to jump in the hype wagon and checked this book out.(less)

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Feb 28, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

Drifting House by Krys Lee is one of the very best collections of short stories I have ever read. They are right up there with Alice Munroe. The stories are all about Korean people, their culture in Korea and the immigrant experience in the United States. The stories share several thematic elements: loss, separation, solitude, a sense of being out of place and situations of violence that are often painful to read. The author examines the limits of what human beings are capable of and how they en...more Drifting House by Krys Lee is one of the very best collections of short stories I have ever read. They are right up there with Alice Munroe. The stories are all about Korean people, their culture in Korea and the immigrant experience in the United States. The stories share several thematic elements: loss, separation, solitude, a sense of being out of place and situations of violence that are often painful to read. The author examines the limits of what human beings are capable of and how they endure.

In A Temporary Marriage, a woman leaves Korea for the United States in the hopes of finding her daughter who her ex-husband kidnapped. She enters into a marriage of convenience in order to have the correct paperwork to be in the United States. Here, she searches for her daughter in California.

At the Edge of the World is about Mark, "nine years old and he knew everything". He is more like nine years old going on forty. However, he is friendless and the other children his age torment him in endless ways. When a girl his age, Chanhee, moves in next door, they befriend each other. Chanhee's mother is a shaman and Mark's mother is a christian who despises shamanism. When Mark's father visits the shaman, all hell breaks loose in the family.

The Pastor's son is about the cycle of family violence and abuse. After the death of his mother, Jingyu and his father move to Seoul where his father marries his dead wife's best friend, a promise he'd made to his first wife before she died. There ensues a family from hell despite the pastor supposedly being a man of god. The pastor's son says, in a moment of insight, "I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its long ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse".

In The Goose Father, Gilho is a goose father, a man in Korea who supports his family living overseas in the United States. To assuage his loneliness, he takes in a tenant, Wuseong. Gilho's life becomes transformed and reaffirmed in ways he could never have predicted.

The Salaryman is a very powerful story about the financial crisis in Korea and a worker who is let go. He gives everything he has to his wife and children and takes to living in the streets - desolate, lonely and hopeless.

Drifting House is about two young boys and their crippled sister who trek from N. Korea to China to try to find their mother who deserted them. The life of poverty they live is inconceivable; "an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, and the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick". Finding an acorn that can be divided in three portions is a real gift to them. Some of the people in their village have even reverted to cannabalism in order to stave off their hunger.

The Believer is one of the more violent stories in the book. Jenny had always believed in god and was even attending seminary school. However, she loses faith when she comes home to the site of a violent murder committed by her mother. Their family falls apart and despite the excrutiating emotional violence that Jenny endures, her search for god continues.

The stories are all about people who are dislodged from their lives in some way, passing time until something new might possibly occur. Many are waiting for an epiphany that is just beyond reach. They are caught up in the cycle of poverty, the immigrant experience, family violence, and the absoluteness of time. Some are dealing with sexual issues or sexual awakenings. They all live in a drifting house, some carrying their homes on their backs and others going from one land to another. This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it.
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Dec 10, 2011 Silverana rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

This book is broken into different stories related to Koreans and the U.S. rather than presenting information through a single plot. Each story seems very different from the other eight. The common factor is the heartache as characters struggle with marriage, financial loss, loneliness, and acceptance from their families. Mentioned simultaneously with these struggles is war, which devastates the country as these characters move forward.

The author has a very appealing writing style jumping from...more

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Dec 19, 2011 J rated it 3 of 5 stars

There were many different characters introduced at different points in time...some were post-war, some modern Korean Americans, and although all of their identity stories were quite different, they are all presented with incredible difficulties and heartache. Several of these stories were very well written, but at the end when something "big" transpires it almost seems as the ending does not belong to the same narrative thread.

Character development is something Lee is very good at creating both...more

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Jan 04, 2012 Susie Spizzirro rated it 4 of 5 stars

Drifting house was a difficult book for me to read.I gave it 4 stars because the writer has done an excellent job putting the reader in the same room as her tortured souls.
As I said before it is terrible what these familes have suffered through. Yes, I know this book is fictional, but I also know what happens to families & esp. the little ones.
As I think of the little girl who turns away from her mother after her mother has given her all to fine her child. The husbamd who takes his child...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Renee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

** Drifting House by Krys Lee was provided to me free-of-charge by Penguin Canada through a GoodReads, FirstReads Giveaway. **

Drifting House by Krys Lee consists of a collection of short stories depicting the lives and experiences of a diverse group of Korean nationals spanning the post-Korean war era to present day. The stories each tell the tale of how the history of turmoil in Korea has affected generations of individuals and families as they struggle to cope with the fall-out and to rebuild...more ** Drifting House by Krys Lee was provided to me free-of-charge by Penguin Canada through a GoodReads, FirstReads Giveaway. **

Drifting House by Krys Lee consists of a collection of short stories depicting the lives and experiences of a diverse group of Korean nationals spanning the post-Korean war era to present day. The stories each tell the tale of how the history of turmoil in Korea has affected generations of individuals and families as they struggle to cope with the fall-out and to rebuild their shattered lives.

The reader is led through a roller coaster of emotions as we peek through the window of the immigrant’s bleak existence in the United States; as we bear witness to unspeakable horror as children set out to seek their mother in neighbouring China; as we follow the descent of a respectable assistant manager in a large company into a shameful life of destitution and poverty; as we experience the violence of Seoul bred deep into the psyche of those who lived through the Korean war.

I almost need to discuss this book as eight of the stories and then discuss The Believer separately.

All stories considered (minus the Believer), I really enjoyed this book. It is beautifully haunting as Lee weaves stories that are filled with pain and suffering. I have not read much about the Korean culture nor the fallout from the IMF financial crisis in Asia/Korea in 1997 and the Korean war (other than watching M*A*S*H – which isn’t really a very good depiction of the war, is it?). So, on that level, I did get a bit of a history lesson and a vivid description of the suffering experienced by the Korean people.

Lee does a fantastic job of weaving in the themes of shame, immigration, gender roles, women’s invisibility, and cultural violence. Her writing style effectively draws you in to the extent that you feel a great deal of compassion for the characters in the stories. While each of the stories may focus on different individuals, relationships, and settings they are all grounded in the collective history of those who experienced post-war Korea. Further, Lee deepens our understanding of how there is an inter-generational transmission of the trauma experienced by these individuals and families. All this was beautifully done.

I could have done with the story The Believer which covers a taboo subject - (view spoiler). That particular story left such a strong distaste in my mouth that it really affected my enjoyment of the book. I can read a book about people’s suffering. I can even read a book about taboo subjects. That being said, I did feel like that story was either out-of-place or unnecessary for what the author was trying to accomplish. I did not see that coming and was unprepared for how this story progressed.

I took a few days between finishing the book and writing this review because I wanted my reaction to The Believer to dissipate so I could give the book as a whole a more objective review. I’m glad I did, because Lee is a very good writer and the stories are so beautifully written. Overall, I did like the book.
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Mar 12, 2012 Christina (A Reader of Fictions) rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: finishedreviewcopy

Drifting House consists of nine short stories. All of them focus on Koreans or Korean-Americans. The topics of each short story vary greatly, as do the time in which they're set (from the 1970s to roughly the present), but they do have one thing in common. They are all about desperation, of one sort or another. These characters all yearn to be themselves, but are stifled one way or another, broken from the past or tradition or duty.

All of these stories are really, really sad. The writing style i...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Christine rated it 5 of 5 stars

As a second-generation Korean-American, I straddle two worlds and two languages. Yet, sometimes I cannot express myself in either of them. I struggle because my experiences can't be summed up with the words: anxiety, failure, or frustration. I see the shadows of wars, PTSD, and family trauma and abuse when I look at life.

Krys Lee writes so beautifully and she speaks to the stories that are inside me too. I really enjoyed her stories and highly recommend them. The stories are layered and complex...more

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Sep 07, 2012 Meri rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-fiction

Short stories have it rough. They have a lot less space in which to grab a reader. In this case, some of the stories did that, and some didn't. It was an interesting book for an outsider who knows a little about Korean culture, but there was nothing to blow me away. One story about a man who drifts into homelessness was very interesting, but the rest of them failed to overwhelm me, perhaps because of the sparse writing. I wonder if it was written for Koreans, who tend to be able to read a lot mo...more

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Jan 02, 2012 Kristen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: firstreads, contemporary, literary

Much of what is categorized as "literary" is actually pretentious and annoying. Krys Lee's stories are neither. They were outside my comfort zone, but told with such straight-forwardness and luminosity that the book, once opened, was hard to put down.
The title story in particular came back to my thoughts again and again - two boys, abandoned by their mother, attempting to flee famine in North Korea to China.
I won this book through the firstreads program, and it's not the admittedly escapist fi...more

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Feb 23, 2012 PopcornReads rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cross-cultural, general-fiction, history, historical-fiicton, fiction, short-stories, krys-lee

Book Giveaway & Review: We live in a world that grows smaller by the minute, so PopcornReads.com likes to provide reviews of cross-cultural novels. When I saw the publisher’s description of Drifting House by Krys Lee, I realized we haven’t reviewed any books about Koreans and Korean Americans. This looked like an ideal opportunity to learn more about that culture, so I requested a digital copy.

This collection of short stories gives an eye-opening account of what it was like to flee North Ko...more

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Jul 31, 2012 Elaine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: eastasianwriters, ethnic-fiction, shortstorycollections

My review as appears in The Short Review (http://www.theshortreview.com)

For a slender volume of nine stories told in a spare but lyrical style, Krys Lee’s debut collection takes on some heavyweight themes – those concerning the effects of the civil war that had torn Korea into two as well as the price that mercenary Korean soldiers pay for fighting the Vietnam War on the side of the United States. The collection takes on the profound familial, social and psychic dislocation caused by economic up...more My review as appears in The Short Review (http://www.theshortreview.com)

For a slender volume of nine stories told in a spare but lyrical style, Krys Lee’s debut collection takes on some heavyweight themes – those concerning the effects of the civil war that had torn Korea into two as well as the price that mercenary Korean soldiers pay for fighting the Vietnam War on the side of the United States. The collection takes on the profound familial, social and psychic dislocation caused by economic upheavals following the 1997 IMF crisis, or simply the stories of woe and broken dreams caused by migration to a foreign land that promised more opportunities but instead landed its "converts" in low income neighborhoods edged with Korean strip malls.

The characters in these stories respond to their individual conundrums with stolidity and often a strong sacrificial spirit, from the determination of a Korean woman willing to sign herself up for a fake marriage to a Korean immigrant in the U.S. in order to find her daughter (A Temporary Marriage) to an artist wife willfully "turning the other cheek" at her husband’s infidelity and befriending the wife’s mistress (A Small Sorrow), to a Korean man taking to the street after being retrenched, entreating his wife and children to return to the wife’s maternal home where at least they would be fed (The Salaryman). The line between love and sin, or sin and sacrifice, has never been so razor-edged, made blurry with love and desperation.

In the title story, Drifting House, where the above quote comes from, an elder brother carrying his sister across the North Korean border to China in the wake of the devastation of the Korean War, faces a choice few of us have experienced or could even envision. In The Believer, a daughter with a deep religious streak sacrifices herself by engaging in incestuous relations with her father out of "her desire to give back his stolen happiness" following a disturbing asylum visit to mother/wife who had committed the heinous crime of murdering a delivery boy.

Religion, as opposed to spirituality, troll these stories, calling to mind Flannery O’Connor and more than a touch of Faulkner. Religion here is cast as a creature, benign in intention, but often malevolent in effect, leaving dark smudges of guilt and self-inflicted punishment on the psyche of these characters, and without hope of salvation. In A Temporary Marriage, Mrs Shin punishes herself with self-flagellation for having been distracted from her search for her daughter when she engaged in trading sexual favors with her fake husband in exchange for appeasing her own loneliness and social estrangement. The boy in At The Edge of the World, Mark Lee, is the adopted son of the younger brother in Drifting House who had managed to traverse the border from North Korea to China while his older brother succumbed under the weight of his own guilt and anguish. We see the younger brother, now a much older man, still living in the past with his ghosts, willing to consult a shaman who had moved in next door, in order to commune with the spirit of his older brother.

War continues in the psychic halls of our beaten selves, as succinctly phrased by Junho, a boy character in the last story, Beautiful Women, physically abused for years by a father returned from being a paid soldier in the Vietnam War with psychic scars no one could redress. Junho said, "My mother said the war never happened, but it’s still happening to me..."

The stories flirt with fabulism (turquoise butterflies that trail the departure of mother and daughter in Beautiful Women) and surrealism (the goose indeed turns into a woman in The Goose Father), but never descend into magical realism territory, which is wise, in my opinion, because the collection does skirt the rim of histrionism and melodrama, with the stilted exchange between Mrs Shin and her ex-husband in the first story, to the pastor who commits suicide because he can’t stand the way he physically abuses his new wife and his own children (The Pastor’s Son). The fabulism here is dealt a light hand, and leavens the otherwise relentlessly bleak stories (these are not stories to be gulped down in one go; one often has to pause after reading just one to digest its effect).

In The Goose Father, Gilho Pak takes in an unexpected boarder, a boy with a goose "the size of an overfed cat". The boy boarder is convinced the goose is the spirit of his dead mother, which Gilho scoffs at. The boy’s idealism troubles yet tugs at him. It ends up eliciting from him a kind of sexual pull. Krys Lee mines this vein of our limbic response to tragedy, loss and sorrow again and again in several of the stories, flipping it back and forth, revealing at times the darkness of physicality (which in the case of war, is an inescapable diorama) in the fathers who inflict their own physical brokenness onto sons (A Pastor’s Son, Beautiful Women) and at others the subliminal survival instinct (Mina, the daughter in Beautiful Women, who examines her mother’s private parts under the bell hoop of her skirt for signs of sluttiness and then later, fulfils the cliché of "like mother, like daughter" as she becomes the mistress of Seongwon, the artist wife’s husband, in A Small Sorrow.) More brazenly, Krys Lee sets out in horrific detail the scene of a daughter making the first sexual gambit towards her father in The Believer. These sexual aberrations do not feel, and are not meant to be, freeing; rather, they seemed to be the rafting to the surface of unconscious psychoses inflicted by tragedy, war, separation, loss and death.
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Sep 27, 2012 Melanie Ho rated it 4 of 5 stars

My review from the Asian Review of Books:

4 July 2012 — Chang-Rae Lee nothwithstanding, the awareness and popularity of Korean literature and writers of Korean descent in the English-speaking world is still limited, but it recently has seemed to be on the upturn. Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look after Mom won this year’s Man Asia Literary Prize; the Korea Literature Translation Institute recently announced that it would select 15 writers to support in publishing overseas. Japan’s literature is well-...more My review from the Asian Review of Books:

4 July 2012 — Chang-Rae Lee nothwithstanding, the awareness and popularity of Korean literature and writers of Korean descent in the English-speaking world is still limited, but it recently has seemed to be on the upturn. Shin Kyung-sook’s Please Look after Mom won this year’s Man Asia Literary Prize; the Korea Literature Translation Institute recently announced that it would select 15 writers to support in publishing overseas. Japan’s literature is well-known and China’s increasingly so; perhaps it is Korea’s turn and, if nothing else, the development serves as a reminder that in literature as much else, East Asia includes more than Japan and China.

Krys Lee’s debut short story collection Drifting House is a powerful addition to this growing repertoire, with the Korean-American writer (who splits her time between Seoul and California) covering the familiar territory of family, relationships and suffering in a new, complex and moving way.
Alternating between Korea and the United States, the nine-story collection weaves in and out of the lives of post-war Koreans and those who have immigrated to the United States.
The opening story, “Temporary Marriage”, focuses on Mrs. Shin, who immigrates to California to search for her daughter, taken from her by her ex-husband following the end of her marriage. Mrs. Shin is now married to Mr. Rhee, an arrangement—a predicament, writes Lee—that must be documented for immigration purposes. Mrs. Shin is trying to survive losing her daughter; Mr. Rhee, too, is surviving, having lost his children and wife to an American man.
In “Salaryman”, Lee asks readers to walk in the shoes of a businessman who loses his job. The reader— “you”, Lee writes in the second-person—is forced into the downward spiral as a result of a job that no longer exists. “Your” manager explains: “Assistant Manager Seo, once, our company was family for life. But with the IMF… now there are no guarantees.” What follows is a story of pride, dignity, tradition and desperation. But it is also a story with relevance to today’s economic difficulties: the IMF’s imposition of conditions on Korea during the 1997 Asian financial crisis still rankles.
It’s not just South Korea that features in in Lee’s collection, with the title story “Drifting House” describing brothers Woncheol and Choecheol’s escape from North Korea to China in search for their mother. Early in their journey, the elder Woncheol makes a haunting sacrifice, demonstrating the lengths the children are forced to go just to survive.
In “The Goose Father”, there is both the figurative—a man who sends his salary to his family living overseas—as well as the literal, a man with a goose who turns up on Gilho’s doorstep. As the story unravels, it is the small details which make the unexpected ending all the more powerful.

While many of the the collection’s subjects and issues—as well as the use of lighter moments of humor to offset the heavier tone of some of the stories—will be familiar to readers of Asian and Asian-American literature, Drifting House’s Korean-American origins make it subtly different, as do Lee’s unexpected resolutions. Lee’s impressive collection and moving voice leaves readers hoping that more Korean fiction will be forthcoming.(less)

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Mar 26, 2012 Dee at EditorialEyes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction, reviewed-on-my-blog, short-stories

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For this review and others, visit the EditorialEyes Blog.
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3.5 out of 5

Drifting House by Krys Lee is a spare, lyrical, heartbreaking collection of short stories about the Korean and Korean diaspora experience. The book presents a mosaic, each tile a sad portrait of unique characters and a different set of difficulties.

Lee’s stories use the political upheaval of North and South Korea and the personal upheaval of leaving your home country behind you and going somewhere new as a backdrop for he...more ~*~
For this review and others, visit the EditorialEyes Blog.
~*~
3.5 out of 5

Drifting House by Krys Lee is a spare, lyrical, heartbreaking collection of short stories about the Korean and Korean diaspora experience. The book presents a mosaic, each tile a sad portrait of unique characters and a different set of difficulties.

Lee’s stories use the political upheaval of North and South Korea and the personal upheaval of leaving your home country behind you and going somewhere new as a backdrop for heartbreak, threading ideas of ritual and tradition throughout to give her characters’ lives structure. The first story, “A Temporary Marriage,” sets the tone for the collection: Mrs. Shin saves up money for three years in order to leave Seoul and go to California, chasing after her abusive husband, who has used his money and power to abscond with their small daughter and his mistress. The story focuses not just on the difficulties Mrs. Shin has in getting the American police to take her seriously, but also on the length of time it took to gather the resources to leave South Korea, the arrangements with Mr. Rhee to create a fake marriage in order to stay in the US, and the affair she settles into with her strange false husband. The story ends with pain, heartache, and no real resolution, as messy as real life.

The collection includes several standout stories, all in the middle of the book.In “A Small Sorrow,” a forward-thinking artist couple in 1988 leave Seoul to move into a traditional house near the Demilitarized Zone that divides Korea. Eunkang thinks the move will get her husband, Seongwon, away from his many affairs without having to compromise her desire not to become like her nagging, accusing mother. She of course finds him with Mina, a girl “as long as a grain of brown rice [who] looked as if she would stay a glorious eighteen forever” (p. 130), who has come to their home to be Seongwon’s protege. She follows Mina home one day in order to confront both the girl and her own fears and failings. “Is my house your tourist attraction?” Mina asks, and Eunkang replies, “And my husband, yours?”

“The Salaryman,” perhaps the saddest of the lot, is written in a daring and well-executed second person perspective, inviting you, the reader, to live through the downfall of a young man. In a society where job-for-life was once the norm, the main character loses his job and cannot face the shame of going home to his family. He elects to become homeless instead, even as his wife asks him to come home to her and the children. Through his eyes, the reader sees the throngs of unemployed all competing for the same job, falling from grace, living in subways and parks. The main character wastes away, and even as he finds new friends and his place in the pecking order of homeless, he becomes more like an animal, losing all sense of hope, purpose, and humanity.

One of the few stories in the collection with a glimmer of hope is “The Goose Father,” about a man named Gilho who has sent his family on to live in the West and is still in Korea, making a living and sending money to help support them. He takes in a border named Wuseong, a strange, unselfconscious young man with a penchant for beauty and a pet goose with a broken wing. Even as his uneventful life continues on, he finds himself more and more drawn to Wuseong in ways he has trouble understanding. The growing attraction is shown through spare, lovely scenes, and Gilho’s palpable, confused longing is a thing of beauty itself.

The trouble with Drifting House is that it wears you down with its varied settings of sadness, its rigid traditions that break the spirits of its characters, with the death and fracturing of lives, of difficult relations between parents and children, of difficult experiences in new countries. The bleakness and gloom that are so striking in individual stories get lost in the work as a whole. A little more hope, a little more happiness, or a hint of humour would actually work to provide contrast for the sorrows of the other stories and make the collection more effective. The unrelenting hopelessness of the title story, about the flight of young siblings from North Korea, or of the plight of Jenny in “The Believer,” whose mother loses her mind and commits an unspeakable act, and who in turn commits an unspeakable act to try to heal her damaged family, become just another drop in the bucket.

A little happiness would temper this, and would perhaps provide a more poignant and truer picture of the Korea that Lee is giving us a peek into. Beautifully written though it is, Drifting House might best be read in small bites, mixed in with happier material.(less)

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Feb 18, 2012 Isidro Rivera rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone wanting to learn about contemporary Korea.

This collection of short stories brings into focus the complex social and political tensions of Korea in contemporary times. Lee writes powerful stories that delve into the soul of contemporay Korea. The stories provide vignettes that reveal the human factor, the everyday existence of people caught in difficult situations. Some stories are very sad, gripping tales of lives wasted and withered. Others provide hope for the future. As a whole, the varied content and style is disconcerting at times,...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Shannan/GirlsInTheStacks.com rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am in love with short stories lately. I think it is because I don't freak out if I have to put down the book to cook dinner or listen to my kids talk about their day. It also brings several stories, ideas, and characters to me within a 250 page book. I like it. Also, if I am not entirely excited about a story, I only have 10 pages to read and then I get another chance to be enthralled with a new one.
Krys Lee challenges my boundaries and what I am used to reading in these beautifully written y...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Jaclyn Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

http://wineandabook.com/2012/03/11/re...

"After a few minutes he reappeared from the kitchen with a low table heavy with rice, soybean paste soup, beef rubs marinated in honey and soy sauce, and pickled vegetables. There was her favorite banchan: beef-stuffed chili peppers and candied lotus flower roots. Men rarely entered the kitchen; the store-bought banchan arranged on small plates was his usual plea for forgiveness.

'I made dinner for you,' he said.

As she sat on the floor and ate his lie, he w...more

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