Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity.

The Yoo family’s background is taken almost directly from my own family’s experience. The one major exception is that my father was not a “goose father,” like Pak was. I first heard about the goose-father phenomenon about ten years ago and have been fascinated by it. It seems like the ultimate in parental sacrifice, putting the child’s needs above the parents’ own lives, which is one of the major themes of this novel. To a lesser extent, I think almost all immigration is an act of extreme parental sacrifice, as it involves the parents giving up a major part of their identity—their family and friends, their careers, and (as this passage emphasizes) their language and sense of self-competence. Children tend to become fluent in the new language much more quickly than their parents, which results in the parents becoming infantilized and the children taking on an authoritative role, as they become the family speaker and translator.