I WENT TO SEE MY FATHER

The fully rounded character of an elderly father—a man of few words but many tears, now mildly confused—is explored during his adult daughter’s return.

It’s been more than two years since novelist Hon last visited her family home in J—, a village in South Korea, having stayed away from her parents since the death of her young daughter. But with her mother in Seoul for medical treatment, Hon is back to keep her father company, and so begins an episodic excursion into the past, focused on Father’s hidden existence and experience. On one level, this novel is a recent history of South Korea, as Father was born in 1933 during the Japanese occupation, experienced the war at age 17, and later lived through enormous financial, social, and material shifts. On another level, it’s an almost banal account of a minor life; Father was “born in a completely ordinary farming house...in the middle of nowhere in southern Korea, prevented from setting foot in school and never leaving home except for survival itself, living a life of dust.” But behind this facade of Father’s are complexity, suffering, deception, generosity, and striving—to support a wife and six children, with commitments to giving them all a college education despite his unreliable income from farming. And there are secrets, too. Shin, whose work has previously considered roots, rural life, literature, and generational shifts, mines not unfamiliar territory but uses a wider perspective here, considering Father from multiple directions, although principally Hon’s, while incorporating letters and memories into the contemporary flow. It’s a gentle yet piercing technique, with family dynamics unearthed affectingly: Hon was a favored child; Eldest Son was loaded with expectation and responsibility; Second Son, saved from death by his father’s intervention, carries a different psychological burden. Ultimately, Father finds the words, just 11 of them, but enough.

A sensitively crafted family portrait that's both specific and universal and, above all, humane.