Moving beyond childhood trauma
Shelter, a debut novel by Jung Yun, at first seems to be an unoriginal tale of domestic drudgery and financial woe. Those are the rather commonplace problems tormenting Kyung, our protagonist, and his wife Gillian.
The two also struggle, as many parents do, with raising a child, in their case an overly sensitive 4-year-old boy. Yet their lives are thrown into disarray when Kyung’s parents suffer a home invasion by two sadistic criminals. Yun then unexpectedly harnesses this shocking incident to further tax Kyung’s already strained relationship with his father. As the now slightly disorienting story unfolds, the author’s emotional perspicacity and tensile prose combine to turn it into something deeper than mere family melodrama.
Kyung resides with Gillian and their son Ethan in a small town outside Boston. (The author, who was born in South Korea and raised in North Dakota, also lives in Massachusetts.) He is of Korean parentage — and profoundly conflicted about that fact, in part due to the beatings his then-tyrannical father Jin, a star university professor, meted out to his mother Mae when Kyung was a child. (To make matters worse, his mother would then rough him up.) Today, an emotionally scarred and insecure 36-year-old Kyung cannot fully connect with his son, Ethan. “The part of him that wanted to be a good father was constantly at odds with the part that didn’t have one,” writes Yun, “leaving him with only two defaults as a parent — correcting Ethan or keeping him at a careful distance.”
Though she has no qualms about pointing at patriarchal aspects of Korean culture, the author reveals, in a finely nuanced turn, that Jin’s psychological makeup is what explains his cruelty to Mae when Kyung was a child (and possibly even now). Jin has long felt that Mae, whom he wed in an arranged marriage, is his intellectual inferior and a social liability around his sophisticated university colleagues. Intriguingly, Kyung has since developed his own harmful complex about himself and his wife — but it’s nearly the opposite of his father’s, for “whatever impulse he has to fight for them is checked by the knowledge that this person he loves . . . would be better off without him.”
Given the far-reaching ramifications of Jin’s brutalization of Mae (and her subsequent mistreatment of little Kyung), Shelter would have benefited from more immediate, in-your-face flashbacks on the part of its adult protagonist. And there’s no question that Yun periodically foists somewhat run-of-the-mill marital trials upon Kyung and Gillian, such as his brush with infidelity.
Yet, despite these drawbacks, Shelter emerges as rich and multi-layered. Yun movingly portrays an otherwise stoic man succumbing to lingering childhood traumas and searchingly explores the various and unexpected effects this has on his fragile, disintegrating family.