Guide to surviving in a strange land
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES Min Jin Lee Loot.co.za (R199) Apollo
REVIEW: JENNIFER CROCKER
CASEY Han is an immigrant Korean whose father fled Korea during the partition.
Born of immigrant parents Joseph and Leah, she is back in their small apartment in Queens, with a Princeton degree under her belt, but no job yet.
She is gorgeous, quirky and wilful. All things that drive her father – who manages a laundry for a fellow Korean who has made it into the mega-rich stakes – to distraction.
His wife Leah who has the voice of an opera star – if only she had had the chance – works alongside her husband and manages her home.
They go to church, and Leah sings in the choir.
Tina, the younger daughter, is set to study as a doctor.
It all explodes for Casey at a family dinner, when she stands up to her father.
The result is that she leaves her home, after sneaking a cigarette on the roof of their building, and flees to her white boyfriend, Jay Currie.
Jay is one of Casey’s “lies of omission” to her parents, who are deeply traditional and regard “marrying out” to be a bad thing.
Tina, at least, is going out with a Korean man. Casey’s friend Emma is engaged to Tim, a seemingly nice Korean boy. But Casey is different:
“Now it was Saturday night in June, a week after Casey’s college graduation.
“Her four years at Princeton had given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic’s closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics.
“But she had no job and a number of bad habits.”
Free Food for Millionaires is an extraordinary book, and a book of many parts.
On one level, it is the story of an immigrant family, and the closed society many of them live in.
For the Hans, it’s about working hard, but with little joy, raising children in a country where the norms and values are almost beyond their comprehension.
For Joseph, it is a life of small humiliations and disappointments – he was bundled out of Korea by his family, who were wealthy, to escape the partition of his homeland, and in the process was sent away from a wealthy family to a life of seeming drudgery.
Leah is younger than Joseph, and beautiful, and wise, but she lives her life according to the old ways and traditions.
Her joy is in singing – and in her daughters.
Casey is trapped between the struggle of living in New York in the 1990s and all that this entails for a young woman starting out.
You must have the smartest clothes, although admittedly she may have a bit of a fetish in this regard. You have to go to the right clubs and restaurants, and you have to play the men at the game in the office where she eventually starts working.
You have to worry about going to business school and the mounting debts you have.
And you have to negotiate your way through relationships.
Min Jin Lee has bravely opened the door on some of the deepest secrets and experiences of immigrant life.
She goes where very few would in dissecting the disconnects between pleasing your community and family, and being able to live the life of the country you have been raised in. She makes mistakes. But for the reader, this is like opening a veritable “how-to” guide on surviving as a stranger in a strange land you call home.
Joseph as a character is flawed in many ways, but he is doing his best to carve out a narrow life and to understand the changes that he sees in his daughters’ lives.
He has lost his parents, his life in Korea and he has pride, although some of the saddest moments are when he cannot summon it up in front of his wealthier friends.
Then there is Dr Shim, an eye specialist and the widowed father of Casey’s friend Emma. One of the kindest and nicest men I have met in a novel for a long time.
He supports his daughter, and he tries to support Casey when she will let him.
Ella seems the perfect young Korean immigrant – she is marrying a wealthy man, she is beautiful and she is rich.
But in this book full of storylines, the reality of sexism and patriarchy will raise its head in Ella’s life in the most shattering way, leaving her feeling unclean.
How she will recover is part of the story of making your way in a foreign land, but there will be conflict between her and the highly-strung Casey.
Because although Casey’s life is a mess financially and in many other ways, she is not easy to help. An older friend, Sabine, tries to assist, but Casey turns on her time and time again, and not without reason.
There is an element where Sabine’s assistance does seem too controlling.
For Leah, the church and its choir are everything, and when a new choir director takes over, she finds herself torn between tradition and how things are done.
She has forgotten how to shine, and in the one moment when she does, a tragedy occurs in her life.
Casey will come to the rescue in an unexpected way.
Fine Food for Millionaires covers so many themes that it almost seems that it should not work as a novel, but it does, on every level. It is beautifully written, full of detail, with compelling tales, a wisdom of seeing and a bravery of disclosure. It is without doubt one of the best novels I have read in many years.
On one level, it is the story of an immigrant family and the closed society many of them live in