If You Leave Me in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 10, 2018 Beverly rated it really liked it

Shelves: asia, historical-fiction, cross-cultural, 2018, newtome2018, korea

This was a 3.5 read
thoughts coming shortly

2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2019 Ra rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-book, scribd, meh

This book should have an alternative title (The Miserable Life of Resentful People). I listened to the audio version so I am looking up the correct spelling of character names.
The story is narrated from the various perspectives of four main characters. Haemi begins the naration at sixteen. She shows her rebellious nature as she takes nightly excursions with her childhood friends Kynghwan. Both are refugees from the war that split Korea. The atmosphere in Haemi's home is grim. Her mother suffers This book should have an alternative title (The Miserable Life of Resentful People). I listened to the audio version so I am looking up the correct spelling of character names.
The story is narrated from the various perspectives of four main characters. Haemi begins the naration at sixteen. She shows her rebellious nature as she takes nightly excursions with her childhood friends Kynghwan. Both are refugees from the war that split Korea. The atmosphere in Haemi's home is grim. Her mother suffers in her widowed existence, as she tries to protect her sickly youngest son. Haemi has to quit school and instead of marrying her childhood sweetheart who survives on wits and petty thievery, she ends up a wife to his slightly older and richer cousin Jisoo. He was the one with the money and provided the brother with medicine. Jisoo wanted to marry Haemi before enlisting in the war to give him a motivation for return and a sense of continued life.

The destinies of these four characters continue their way. Their lives are difficult but they all somehow fail to shake off the feeling of being stuck in their individual suffering, some of which was simply of their own making. Haemi and her husband have a family of three girls but their life is not happy.
Jisoo returns from war with a disabled arm, yet he fails to get over it and be grateful for surviving at all. The story mentions that his mate, more horribly disfigured, died before reaching home. Ironically, that solider was the one who took his injuries lighter, and was grateful to go home. Haemi fails to appreciate her survival from the refugee camp, her ability to find work during and after the war. Her relationship with her husband and children is ambiguous for no reason. She keeps feeling that her life is ruined. The brother survives his illness yet he somehow fails to appreciate and honor his life and his sister's sacrifice. Kynghwan's course of development is equally wasteful, although outwardly successful. (view spoiler)
The negative attitude of all the characters left me dissatisfied. I wondered why the single positive character the author portrayed was a former field nurse who went on to work at an orphanage after the war. She was the one who nursed Jisoo during his war injury and later refused his unwanted attention as he turned to her to escape his contentious marriage. She ended up leaving Korea with an American soldier who fell in love with her. Was that a statement about the morose and joyless Korean reality ? Nothing in the book inspired admiration for the people of South Korea who managed to survive the war, and created one of South East Asia's miracles.
Every single person in the book had unspoken resentments and they acted on it against all principles of logic, goodwill and peaceful acceptance. Even Haemi's eldest daughter (who narrates her own parts too) finds an episode to spew her judgmental and unexplained hatred against her mother (view spoiler) and against some unnamed schoolmate who she imagined in a compromising position with a teacher.

If this played in North Korea I would have understood the story as a propaganda piece against the ills of communism. I cannot explain the overall atmosphere of doom. I do understand that war and suffering leave deep scars but please there should be some silver lining somewhere. One person who survived and made something out of his/her life. In this story the only people who managed to turn their life towards the positive are those who left South Korea. I feel this is somehow insulting and condescending to a whole nation who pulled itself up from its bootstrap. What would North Koreans say? ...more

Like · see review