Source of book: Audiobook from the library
One of the traditions my wife and I started before the pandemic was to go out for classy drinks and go over the year’s books on NPR together. We would discuss the summaries, and figure out a few we wanted to put on our respective reading lists. (And consider nominating for one of our book clubs.)
In fact, most of my modern fiction (and some non-fiction) reads come from either the NPR list or the LitHub list. While most of the books on any list are not ones I am likely to read - genre fiction has a very limited appeal to me, and my kids are now too old for the kid books - there are always gems that I might not have discovered otherwise.
I have found this method useful for choosing audiobooks. As often as not, I will be coming up on a cycle of out-of-town music gigs and need something to make the miles go by.
Anyway, Nuclear Family was on my list, and happened to be available after I finished my last audiobook.
The title is a double entendre - not a naughty one, though. The book is all about the Cho family, Korean immigrant parents and American-born children, living in Hawaii. (Very much like the author’s family.) They run a small chain of fast casual restaurants that they hope the kids will someday take over.
But, as the children grow into adults, things come apart. Jacob, the favored eldest child, is gay, but hasn’t told his family. At odds with himself and eager to get away, he moves back to South Korea to teach English.
Meanwhile, Grace is drowning her cultural discomfort, second-class status in the family, and dislike of the restaurant business in a pot smoking habit.
Things take a really crazy turn, however, when Jacob becomes possessed by the ghost of his grandfather, and under that influence, tries to cross the DMZ. This causes a huge news story and scandal that pretty much wrecks the Cho restaurants.
The second meaning of “nuclear” refers to the framing story, the real-life false alarm in 2018 where it was briefly broadcast that North Korean missiles were heading to Hawaii.
That’s kind of the broad, back of the book, outline. But there is quite a bit more. Han has an ambitious goal, that of tying the US conquest and colonization of Hawaii to the Korean War and the displacement that occurred as a result.
Oh, and also generational trauma, the immigrant experience, and so on.
This leads me to what I see as the biggest issue I had with the book. For most of the book, the first 6/5ths or so, there is a non-linear story from the point of view of different characters. It mostly centers on Grace and Jacob, but the family history back four generations is eventually told. This includes the way the war trapped family members on different sides of the wall, so they never saw each other again.
So far, fine. I thought it was a good story, magical realism and all. The grandfather is a great character. His morally questionable actions in leaving his first family behind in North Korea, starting a new one in South Korea, and then getting trapped on the “wrong” side of the wall after death, is a fun conceit, and hilariously told. I mean, he totally deserves it, but you feel bad for him anyway.
The other characters are realistic and compelling. The parents who are workaholics like so many first-generation immigrants, who grow apart from their children both due to culture and to neglect. The other grandparents who drown their trauma in booze and religion respectively. The native Hawaiian friend who feels as displaced as the immigrants, but for different reasons. The families separated by geography as well as politics.
That said, once we get to that certain point in the story, it feels like the book is almost done. The author just needs to wrap it up or at least leave it at a point and end it.
BUT NO!
Instead, there is nearly an hour of preachy bloviating about his point about colonialism and US meddling in Korea and the Cold War and…well, a lot of things. But it isn't a story at this point, it’s just preaching and ranting and a seemingly endless list of last names.
When this finally burns itself out, we get a brief epilogue explaining what happened to everyone years later.
And at that point, all I could say was, “What?? Well, what happened to get the characters there.”
I mean, I wanted to know about how Jacob went from in the closet to having a spouse who the family accepted. And I wanted to know how Grace found her way from her goal of grad school to an interesting niche and a different life path.
These would have formed a great interesting story to hear too!
So I was disappointed that the book essentially skipped a bunch of good stuff, instead inserting a pedantic sermon. I wonder if the author just ran out of time and needed to end it? Or didn’t know how or where to end it?
In any case, the saddest part to me is that I think he made his preachy points just fine in the body of the novel, showing rather than telling through the narrative itself. If he really needed to make the points stronger, he could easily have inserted them at appropriate intervals in the narrative without blocking the flow of the story with them all at once at the end. I suspect plenty of readers just skipped past that part.
The rest of the book, though, was really good, and I think with a better editor, it could have been even better.
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