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A review by ndrsmoon
Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
It’s been two weeks since I read Folklorn. I cried, I closed it, I sighed, and then started ruminating how to speak about it. It has accompanied me to the grief of recent events, it has been in the back of my mind when I watched the Spanish trailer of Minari without a trace of a Korean word in it. This novel has opened a lot of bottled emotions that I didn’t know where to put them. That has been Folklorn to me.
As a child of Korean immigrants in Spain, I’ve always have had trouble with the concept of home. An insane obsession, like the portal fantasy trope of voracious reader that finds refuge in fiction, to shield themselves from reality. Now this novel, this hit home. Not the idealistic version in which I would like to be, but the real, gritty and flawed home that my own identity inhabits. Sometimes I see my kid singing to “Let it go”, or “Into the Unknown” to the top of her lungs and feeling it, but to me, the Elsa that adventured on the hidden places of my own self is Elsa Park, main character of Folklorn.
We meet Korean American Elsa Park reminiscing her mother and her Korean folktales, giving us her own description and image of a key part of her own self. After that quick glance, we move with Elsa to her present—she’s an experimental physicist looking for neutrinos (ghost particles) in the South Pole station. Loudmouthed, navigating racism with her own prejudices and bias, overt and upfront against sexism, she’s a force to be reckoned with, that’s for sure. But the stitches of the wound healed by her excellency are plain to see: “you are like one of us”, they tell her, displacing her from the here and there, forcing her to inhabit those liminal spaces in-between (one of the major themes of the novel, and the big reason it hits home). Sleep deprived and exhausted, Elsa starts hearing a bell. After discarding it as tinnitus, she decides to skip a party to get the rest she needs, but it in that moment, she’s reunited to a childhood imaginary friend that embodies her mother’s Korean folktales. She will then embark in a journey of self-discovery within the darkness of the big shadow cast by those before her.
Folklorn is a beast. Korean folklore is seamlessly interwoven in the story, playing and enhancing the great amount of layers that the story offers. Angela Mi Young Hur uses Elsa’s little microcosmos to unravel, unpack and showcase some of the nuances and experiences of what Korean diaspora means. Her parents generation, with their hustles, the trauma they directly or indirectly caused in search of a better life; her brother Chris, who has some of the scenes that will live freely and forever in my brain, who has to make sense of who he is after being told the lie that A+B will get you to C, but that, after all, he’s incredibly devoted so that her sister can shine; Swedish Korean adoptee Oskar Gantelius (hottest Korean in fiction as of now), who provides the excellent contraposition between the differences in racism between the American experience and the colorblind European experience, while also giving way to describing the particularities of what it means to be othered, to belong, to be oneself in the adoptee experience.
It was really hard to find a metaphor to describe Folklorn, but now I feel that the answer has been in front of me all the time: Taeguk. As Wikipedia says, not to be confused with the Pepsi Globe, a representation of the Taeguk is in the center of the South Korean flag. Red and blue forces interlocking and forming a new entity—and Folklorn is that, a tapestry of dualisms that showcase the Korean diaspora experience. The differences between the good daughter and the good son, the hyonyeo and hyoja, offered both in the form of traditional folktales (like Shim Cheong), and with the translated or derived forms embodied by Chris and Elsa. Mythomania against a harsh reality ridden with trauma, with all the characters trying to make peace with their grief and all the pieces that are part of their own selves… And like the swirl of the Taeguk, Hur is capable of loading the present-story with a lot of symbolism that is from the ‘source material’: the bells, the tinnitus, Shim Cheong’s father and Elsa’s… There are lots of details here and there that move your guts while also fill your brain with awe. It is that good.
Folklorn doesn’t shy away of the violence. Like traditional folktales (and not the exaggeratedly sweetened versions we are force-fed in mainstream media), there’s a history of emotional abuse, inadvertent or overt. All characters are not saint-like heroes or plain victims—they made their choices, they made their mistakes, and sometimes they own them and try their best. There’s hustle, fighting, survival, but not in a preachy-tone. It is just what it is. And like the dualism pointed before, Hur also offers a lot of poignant humor, punching fists to everything in her way, even daring to break the fourth wall just to make a point (and give you the laugh). Yes, she’s in control, and WHAT. A. RIDE.
It’s March but I know that this novel is going to be my favorite of this year. This review is my feeble attempt to give it the sixth star that it deserves.
Thanks to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for providing me an eARC of this book
As a child of Korean immigrants in Spain, I’ve always have had trouble with the concept of home. An insane obsession, like the portal fantasy trope of voracious reader that finds refuge in fiction, to shield themselves from reality. Now this novel, this hit home. Not the idealistic version in which I would like to be, but the real, gritty and flawed home that my own identity inhabits. Sometimes I see my kid singing to “Let it go”, or “Into the Unknown” to the top of her lungs and feeling it, but to me, the Elsa that adventured on the hidden places of my own self is Elsa Park, main character of Folklorn.
We meet Korean American Elsa Park reminiscing her mother and her Korean folktales, giving us her own description and image of a key part of her own self. After that quick glance, we move with Elsa to her present—she’s an experimental physicist looking for neutrinos (ghost particles) in the South Pole station. Loudmouthed, navigating racism with her own prejudices and bias, overt and upfront against sexism, she’s a force to be reckoned with, that’s for sure. But the stitches of the wound healed by her excellency are plain to see: “you are like one of us”, they tell her, displacing her from the here and there, forcing her to inhabit those liminal spaces in-between (one of the major themes of the novel, and the big reason it hits home). Sleep deprived and exhausted, Elsa starts hearing a bell. After discarding it as tinnitus, she decides to skip a party to get the rest she needs, but it in that moment, she’s reunited to a childhood imaginary friend that embodies her mother’s Korean folktales. She will then embark in a journey of self-discovery within the darkness of the big shadow cast by those before her.
Folklorn is a beast. Korean folklore is seamlessly interwoven in the story, playing and enhancing the great amount of layers that the story offers. Angela Mi Young Hur uses Elsa’s little microcosmos to unravel, unpack and showcase some of the nuances and experiences of what Korean diaspora means. Her parents generation, with their hustles, the trauma they directly or indirectly caused in search of a better life; her brother Chris, who has some of the scenes that will live freely and forever in my brain, who has to make sense of who he is after being told the lie that A+B will get you to C, but that, after all, he’s incredibly devoted so that her sister can shine; Swedish Korean adoptee Oskar Gantelius (hottest Korean in fiction as of now), who provides the excellent contraposition between the differences in racism between the American experience and the colorblind European experience, while also giving way to describing the particularities of what it means to be othered, to belong, to be oneself in the adoptee experience.
It was really hard to find a metaphor to describe Folklorn, but now I feel that the answer has been in front of me all the time: Taeguk. As Wikipedia says, not to be confused with the Pepsi Globe, a representation of the Taeguk is in the center of the South Korean flag. Red and blue forces interlocking and forming a new entity—and Folklorn is that, a tapestry of dualisms that showcase the Korean diaspora experience. The differences between the good daughter and the good son, the hyonyeo and hyoja, offered both in the form of traditional folktales (like Shim Cheong), and with the translated or derived forms embodied by Chris and Elsa. Mythomania against a harsh reality ridden with trauma, with all the characters trying to make peace with their grief and all the pieces that are part of their own selves… And like the swirl of the Taeguk, Hur is capable of loading the present-story with a lot of symbolism that is from the ‘source material’: the bells, the tinnitus, Shim Cheong’s father and Elsa’s… There are lots of details here and there that move your guts while also fill your brain with awe. It is that good.
Folklorn doesn’t shy away of the violence. Like traditional folktales (and not the exaggeratedly sweetened versions we are force-fed in mainstream media), there’s a history of emotional abuse, inadvertent or overt. All characters are not saint-like heroes or plain victims—they made their choices, they made their mistakes, and sometimes they own them and try their best. There’s hustle, fighting, survival, but not in a preachy-tone. It is just what it is. And like the dualism pointed before, Hur also offers a lot of poignant humor, punching fists to everything in her way, even daring to break the fourth wall just to make a point (and give you the laugh). Yes, she’s in control, and WHAT. A. RIDE.
It’s March but I know that this novel is going to be my favorite of this year. This review is my feeble attempt to give it the sixth star that it deserves.
Thanks to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for providing me an eARC of this book
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs
Moderate: Racism
Minor: Death of parent