The few times the story starts to introduce something interesting or insightful about Korean-American life, it doesn't keep pulling the thread. There is a part where Mrs. Lee observes that Americans think you need special breakfast food for breakfast, but Koreans just eat soup and rice or whatever they were eating the night before. Okay, but what of it? Stay with that for a second. Likewise, we see Mr. Lee reading Chosun Ilbo, maybe the most conservative of the mainline Korean newspapers. You can't have him reading that and not have it matter, but it doesn't. Other than disappointment in his son for being a drug addict, Mr. Lee doesn't show any real conservative tendencies. He's old-person conservative, not politically so.
In the end, it's another story where immigrants and their families in America have psychological issues because of a divided identity. That's got to be the most common theme in immigrant literature. This story is linguistically dull and uninventive and overall lacks any ambition. It's a story that's been told a thousand times, and not in terribly different words. It's the second story from the New England Review I've read written by a Korean-American writer about Korean-American life, and both times I felt that the editorial staff got duped by a dull story that they couldn't tell was dull.
I did not read the story as primarily a Korean story. That was the context, the setting, but the story was really "about" the relationship between a mother and her adult son. I thought the author nailed it beautifully.
ReplyDeleteShe nails what beautifully? She nails what in a way that hasn't been done to death already?
DeleteUnhinged review lol. I found it to be more about generational trauma
ReplyDeleteYou say that as though the existence of generational trauma would make the story better, instead of that just being another notch on the second-generation-immigrant-story bingo card.
DeleteAnd what authority do you have to say what is an authentic Korean immigrant experience? Are you Korean? This story felt very real to me, and it brought me to tears with its beautiful way of illustrating complex familial and cultural themes with a relatable and matter of fact way.
ReplyDeleteWhere do you get off calling this AI? Sounds like someone is insecure about their own writing. Are you published in "The Best Short Stories of 2025? Didn't think so.
"If you know so much about writing, why don't you write?" is one of the oldest fallacies in criticism. Criticism and writing are two different skills. Hardly anyone is doing real criticism of stories like those in BASS, at least not anywhere accessible, which is why I try to fill that void.
DeleteI'm not Korean. I do speak Korean well, and I've lived in Korea and spent a lot of time with Korean immigrants, including generation 1.5, 2.0, and third generation kids. I made my living for twenty years by knowing something about Korea. To think I have to be Korean to have enough familiarity with Korean immigrant experiences to have an opinion on them is the kind of identity orthodoxy that has so few people even reading literary fiction now. This story does traffic in a lot of cliches about Korean-American life, and neither the original editors of the story from NER nor the editors of BASS recognize those markers enough to be good critics of the story. Which is one of the main problems with the "let's try and get a balance of ethnicities into the anthology" approach. It guarantees that some stories will be outside the cultural competency of the judges to assess.
If it brought you to tears, I'm not going to say you're wrong. I've been brought to tears before by stories I knew weren't good, and I felt stupid while crying, but something about a moment in them caught me off guard. I will say that even if it does cause a moment of vicarious sadness, that doesn't mean it's a good story. It didn't do that for me, maybe because I have a lot more experience with this kind of story than you have.
By "might as well be written by AI," I mean what I said in the first sentence: it's boilerplate, which possibly means AI would include some of the same things if you asked it to write a story about a Korean-American immigrant experience.
I didn't say it wasn't authentic. Authenticity isn't enough to make a good story. The experiences are easily recognizable as those of a Korean-American family of that generation. That's the problem. It can, of course, try to take old material and make it new, but it didn't. It just relied on this being new for enough readers that it wouldn't matter.