The evening hero

Review by Booklist Review

The latest from adult and YA novelist Lee (Somebody's Daughter) tells the story of Yungman Kwak, an aging physician and Korean immigrant who is thrust into retirement when his hospital closes abruptly. What follows is two stories: one of Yungman coping with the burdens of his past, and one of him facing the inevitability of his future. Lee seeks to cover a lot of ground with The Evening Hero: the American dream, work ethic and values, the casual and outright aggression immigrants deal with in the modern world, the racing nature of time, and more. This ambitious scope means the novel sometimes lacks focus, never quite deciding what story it's trying to tell. Where Lee's writing shines is in the details, as she flexes her creative muscles to fill Yungman's story with historical accuracy and a true-to-life depiction of the depth of humanity. Wholesome and engaging overall, The Evening Hero ultimately results in a captivating tale of human struggle and survival.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Lee (Somebody's Daughter) returns with an ambitious story charting the travails of an elderly immigrant doctor in Minnesota after the hospital he works at closes down. Thirsty for a new purpose to life, Yungman Kwak takes a job with his son's employer, SANUS, a healthcare company with several retail outlets in the Mall of America. Yungman isn't much of a match for SANUS's startup jargon ("medical professionals are divided into service providers--the DRones--and the MDieties," his son, Einstein, explains about their boss's philosophy, which also involves classifying Einstein as a "Doctorpreneur"). Eventually, Yungman enlists in Doctors Without Borders, an endeavor that brings him back to what is now North Korea, where he was born in 1940. Peppered throughout are stories from Yungman's early life there: his experiences of poverty, war, striving for education, and courtship of his wife, who was raised in an elite circle within his village. Sometimes the prose is a bit awkward (a pie has a "seductively glistening surface"), and the minutia of Yungman's work routines can drag a bit, but Lee offers touching details of Yungman's nostalgia for the Korea of his youth, where "small dandelions... carpeted the grass like stars." It's a little bumpy, but fans of immigrant stories will appreciate Lee's labor of love. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (May)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Noted particularly for her YA fiction (e.g., Finding My Voice), Lee is cofounder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and that rare U.S. journalist granted a visa to visit North Korea. Here she introduces Dr. Yungman Kwak, who left Korea for Minnesota after the Korean War and has since worked as an obstetrician at Horse Breath's General Hospital. He's living the life he always wanted, but it's built on a lie that a letter arriving from someone left behind is about to expose. With a 35,000-copy first printing

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Korean American doctor is forced into retirement and a confrontation with his past when a secret he's kept about his family surfaces. Yungman Kwak, who came to the U.S. after the Korean War, has been the only practicing obstetrician in Horse's Breath, Minnesota, for decades. When the holding corporation that runs the hospital where he works closes its doors, he's lucky to escape with his pension. His son, Einstein, who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and son, works for the same company and encourages his father to take a job in the emerging field of "Retailicine" to pass the time. Einstein fulfilled his parents' traditional expectations of graduating from Harvard and becoming a doctor himself. But he's also enamored with an entrepreneurial tech-bro ethos Yungman doesn't understand. A good portion of the book is a biting critique of a predatory American health care system and the economy at large. As a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, Lee has long been a leading voice in the literary world. She organizes this saga into five sections, each more gripping than the last, as the story travels through time and across continents to describe the many obstacles Yungman faces on his journey from a boy forced to flee his village to a medical student in Seoul competing to woo a charismatic classmate to a man who leaves his home country for greater opportunity elsewhere. Lee delves deeper into Yungman's roots and explores myriad aspects of Korean history, not least of which is an overdue accounting of the suffering America's occupation and war caused. Yungman is a survivor, and the novel explores how the choices so many immigrants make, the secrets they keep, the risks they take, big and small, can lead to good fortune or failure. The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person's lifetime--their body, mind, and memories--no matter how far in the past it may seem. This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue Prologue His name was Yungman. The components of his name were, as custom dictated, selected by his paternal grandfather, just as his father's had been selected by his grandfather, and so forth back to the origin of the clan. The grounding character "Yung"--"Hero"--cemented him to all his cousins (Yung-jo, Yung-ho, Yung-chun, Yungbok) in this twelfth generation of Kwaks, whether he knew them or not; "Man" meant "Evening." "Evening Hero" would thus be carved into all the family trees on male Kwak headstones henceforth, chipped into his jade name-stick--his legal signature. Yungman's place as first son was evident by contrast to his younger brother Yung-sik, "Vegetable Hero." To his patients, he was no Evening Hero but Dr. Kwak. A little Asian man (certainly short of stature, at 5'4"), the hospital's obstetrician. He was distinctive to the white townspeople not just by being Asian but by being the first doctor from somewhere, anywhere, else. First North Korea, then South Korea. In America, a year first in Birmingham, Alabama, repeating his internship, as all foreign-trained physicians had to do. And though he was a graduate of the "Harvard of Korea," no hospital even bothered to reply to the American job search of this man from Asia, a region of the world America had decided it didn't want and made laws to ban and expel. Yungman would end up so desperate for employment that he would drive straight north with his wife and infant child to this Arctic Circle of the US--the Iron Range of Minnesota--where winters were almost lightless, where schools closed for blizzards only when temperatures fell below minus fifty degrees. Horse's Breath, so named because the only way the early settlers (49ers who got lost on the way to California) could discern whether their horses were still alive that first winter was by checking for their breath, or alternatively, the name was a white man's mangling of the Anishinaabe word ozhaawashkwaabika : the purplish undertone on the area's rocks--signifying iron--which gave these speculators a reason to stay. Towns in this area were spaced apart, individual stars in a constellation. A person from the next town over, Apple's Gate, whose main characteristic to the Horse's Breather was the unholy smell of rotten eggs from the paper plant, was a stranger. Movement between towns was rare. Into Horse's Breath's mix of the descendants of the immigrants brought to work in the iron ore mines (Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, in that order; a Dane, three Icelanders, Slovakians, Slovenians, Serbians, Germans, Croatians, Poles, an Italian, and an Irish or two, and admixtures thereof) came Dr. Kwak, William (Will, I am) on his official documents; his Korean wife, Young-ae; and his Korean-ish son, Einstein. Excerpted from The Evening Hero by Marie Myung-Ok Lee All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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