REVIEW Julie Lee's novel remembers migration during Korean War
The cover of "Brother's Keeper" by Julie Lee / Courtesy of Julie Lee
The 1950-53 Korean War is arguably the least-remembered of wars that involved the U.S., and in both academia and the popular imagination it is sometimes called the "Forgotten War." Commencing not quite two years after the division of the Korean Peninsula into the South and North in August and September 1948, respectively, the war claimed the lives of millions of combatants and civilians alike, as well as prompting migration of countless refugees from North to South, most of them never again to see family members who remained in the North. "Brother’s Keeper" by Julie Lee is a fictional account of one such journey, based on the author’s mother.
The novel opens in a mountainous village 50 miles north of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, on the evening of June 25, 1950. The schools have closed until further notice and 12-year-old Pak Sora and her 8-year-old brother Youngsoo are having dinner with their parents and a neighbor couple. The neighbors wish to escape to the South, knowing that their privileged background will render them vulnerable to the North's staunchly anti-elite ideologies. The children’s father has a sibling and spouse living in Busan at the far southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, and the neighbors wish to connect with them at the end of their journey, ideally in the company of the Paks.
Their journey southward begins in November 1950, but shortly after their departure the group of escapees are targeted by a fighter jet. Which side is it on? The escapees are not sure: some see a white star on its underbelly and assume it’s American; others see a red star and identify it as communist. Does it really matter? “To the Reds we were traitors,” thinks Sora. “To the Americans we were communist.” Sora watches as something drops from the plane, and there follows a deafening blast and a blinding explosion.
Separated from their parents by the aerial attack, Sora and Youngsoo continue south, following numerous other refugees and encountering U.S. forces and then South Korean soldiers, and arrive in South Korea only to learn that the arrival of troops from China have helped the North turn the tide of the war. The two children must then join a tide of refugees and clamber atop a train bound for Busan. The novel ends as it starts, with Sora and Youngsoo, reunited with their family, returning from a day of school.
Researched by means of testimony, interviews and the experience of the author’s mother, who guided a younger sibling to safety during the war like in the novel, the book contains unsparing details of the refugee experience, a journey undertaken in the dead of winter through a barren, unpopulated landscape, requiring passage across a major river. Contextualizing the narrative are an author’s note, a selection of photos of the author’s family, a glossary and a timeline of the war, the latter reminding us of the story's timeless relevance, since the two Koreas failed to agree to a formal treaty ending the conflict, and technically remain in a state of war. The author's note concludes with these words: “While the movement toward remembering the Korean War continues, the stories of refugee survivors remain largely untold — narratives full of courage, hope, and love. … let us listen to their stories and never forget."
"Brothers’ Keeper," published in 2020, is among the latest of a new flowering of Korean American — and increasingly Korean Canadian — young adult (high school) and juvenile (middle school) novels, a rich body of work dating back almost a century to Younghill Kang’s "The Grass Roof" and flourishing in the new millennium in fiction by Sook Nyul Choi, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Helen Kim, Patti Kim, Marie Lee, An Na and Helie Lee. That almost all of these authors are women is striking evidence of the progress made by women writers in Korea and among Korean diasporic communities as they surmount the gender role limitations imposed on Korean women by neo-Confucian ideology.
Bruce Fulton is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently the novels "One Left" by Kim Soom (2020) and "Togani" by Gong Ji-young (2023), and editor of "The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories" (2023), the first volume of modern Korean literature among Penguin UK’s 3500-plus World Classics.