When Horse’s Breath General Hospital suddenly closes, Dr. Yungman Kwak doesn’t know what to do next. Dr. Kwak, the protagonist of Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, has been the only obstetrics specialist in his region of northern Minnesota for decades, and he’s ill-equipped to occupy his newfound leisure. He doesn’t golf or fish, doesn’t have religion or hobbies, prefers staying home to travel. His best friend, Ken, another veteran M.D. from Horse’s Breath, encourages Yungman to create a “bucket list,” everything he wants to experience before he dies. Less romantically, Yungman’s son Einstein urges him to work in “Retailicine” (“retail plus medicine”), perhaps in a “Mall-Based Retail Outlet” or “M-BRO.”
Further troubling his mind, Yungman feels that his wife Young-ae is becoming estranged. She is impatient at home and spends her free days volunteering at a church in the Twin Cities, odd behavior for a woman previously uninterested in religion. After a tense Thanksgiving with Einstein’s family and a brief, humiliating time doing laser hair removal, Yungman senses that major change is imminent. Still, he’s surprised when Young-ae announces her own, one-item bucket list: She wants to go home, to a place called Water Project Village, in North Korea.
Lee’s novel shuttles between the Kwaks’ tumultuous past in Korea and their relatively peaceful decades in Minnesota. The dual narrative reveals that the stability they enjoy in the U.S., a period Yungman describes as “odd in its calmness,” is the product of sacrifice and betrayal. When readers learn about the losses he endures before immigrating, we understand why, even in times of prosperity, “he was always preparing for the next disaster.”
For the novel’s first 100 pages, Yungman’s name, which translates as “evening hero,” sounds ironic. A caring doctor who advocates for his patients, he endeavors elsewhere to be unobtrusive, preferring to remain silent when he experiences prejudice, as when fellow doctors pronounce his name “Quack.” Yungman believes that their livelihood in America “depended on his being agreeable, never making anyone mad.” Frugal and dutiful, he lives defensively, trying to protect his modest home from the upheavals that haunt all human history.
In the Korean episodes of Yungman’s youth, he learns firsthand how geopolitical forces can destroy a family. His small village — where Young-ae also grows up, though in more comfortable quarters — endures Japanese occupation and the heavy hand of the American military, all before the Korean War breaks out in 1950, forcing everyone in his community south to Pusan. His mother works desperately and creatively to keep her family together, but the lines separating allies from enemies keep changing. They return to Water Project Village only to find that “the war had ripped up the fabric of their old life.” The beginning of the war separates his father from them. Eighteen years later, when Yungman immigrates to America, he goes alone.
These Korean scenes show Yungman not as acquiescent and passive, but as scheming and adaptable. Facing privation, he learns to scavenge and barter. From American soldiers, he picks up a smattering of English; when he finds work at the military base as a “houseboy,” he acquires enough English to impress the masters at a local school. Step by step, Yungman raises himself from shivering on dirt floors in a tin shack to attending a prestigious preparatory school, all part of the plan his father laid out for him to become a doctor.
Lee structures The Evening Hero around dramatic scenes when her characters face impossible dilemmas that have never-ending ramifications. Yungman guards his home so tenaciously because he is keenly aware of what he paid to achieve it. Retirement offers too many quiet moments when voices from his conscience, which he has successfully compartmentalized, demand attention. In this “age of abrupt endings,” when his losses include “his ability to sleep through the night, his job, his ability to urinate without thinking about it,” Yungman reckons his regrets. Could he have been a better father? Could he have been a better brother?
Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, Lee keeps the pace brisk and the tone remarkably light. A number of set pieces, including the Kwaks attending parties hosted by other Korean Minnesotans, are played for broad comedy, welcome relief from the pall of darkness cast by the Korean War and its aftermath. Lee spices the text with details of Korean culture — food, language, attitudes — that offer insight into the national character, traits that persist long after immigration.
The Evening Hero is partially a study in systemic injustice — racial bigotry and the inequities of American health care — but it’s equally a story of triumph. Yungman may not appear heroic if you saw him at home, a 5’4” retired doctor mowing his lawn in rolled-up slacks and undershirt, but, as the poignant ending demonstrates, he has a heart strong enough to carry any burden.
Sean Kinch grew up in Austin and attended Stanford. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas. He now teaches English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville.
Tagged: 2022 Southern Festival of Books, Book Reviews
Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir, the second book by Knoxville native Darius Stewart, takes readers on a journey of self-discovery as it unearths the complexities of his childhood and investigates life after addiction and an HIV diagnosis. Stewart’s experiences serve as a multigenerational mirror and window for life as a Black gay man in the South.
Stewart’s debut poetry collection, Intimacies in Borrowed Light, was published in 2022, and his essays and poetry have appeared in a plethora of literary magazines, including The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, The Potomac Review, Salamander, storySouth, and others. Stewart is currently a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa. He answered questions from Chapter 16 by email.
Chapter 16: After experiencing several traumatic health and personal challenges, you really poured those experiences into healing on the page. What advice do you have for authors who might be struggling to find their voice amidst navigating life’s obstacles?
Darius Stewart: Navigating life’s obstacles is already challenging enough, but as a writer, finding your voice amidst the turmoil to express it all can feel especially daunting. But it’s precisely within these experiences that a unique voice resides, or at least one that can be cultivated. It may take years of sifting through the messiness, unpacking the emotional baggage that makes for great material once it’s been properly ironed out, before a writer can identify what their voice is. But once you know it, you know it because it will feel honest, authentic, but, most importantly, when you say to yourself This is the only way I know to write this, you will know that you’ve found it.
At the end of the day, if you’re like me and faced with multiple traumatic experiences that were certainly self-imposed, embrace the messiness that caused it all, and put it down. You can tidy it all up later. And as you’re figuring out how to do it, be patient and kind to yourself in the meantime. Enjoy the journey that, if writing is your passion, will consist of a lifetime of experimenting, making mistakes, and, the best part, seeing all the wonderful ways you continue to evolve as a writer.
Chapter 16: When determining the best voice for this project, you said that you were deeply drawn to the romanticism of Walt Whitman and Jack Gilbert, as well as the confessionalism of Essex Hemphill and Sharon Olds. How vital was it to tap into these emotions for the writing of Be Not Afraid of My Body?
I was always very deliberate in how to incorporate their influences without imitating or over-relying on their styles. I found it infinitely more important — and pleasurable — to find in their work a sense of defiance against conventional ways of articulating difficult subjects. I needed their voices to better access my own if I was ever to create something artful and push me to see how far I could transgress the boundaries of conventional memoir.
Chapter 16: Can you explain the intention behind including white space throughout this book?
Stewart: White space serves a dual function in the lyric memoir. As a poetic technique, it allows meaning to emerge through juxtaposition, to represent the silence surrounding what is inexpressible. This invites readers to actively participate by contemplating both their personal response to the text and what the white space implies about our understanding of the narrator. Simultaneously, as a narrative device, white space manipulates the concept of lyric time by deviating from conventional temporal structures. It can be used to affect narrative pacing, to demonstrate how our memories tend to function, especially the limits — or even refusal — of memory to cooperate chronologically when we attempt to retrieve them. Often memories must be triggered, or else we wait for memories to materialize in flashes or fragments. Memories are not unlike the white space of a developing Polaroid picture.
Chapter 16: In the chapter, “Etymologies,” there is a focus on how words and language shape our very experiences. Do you think this technique can be applied in all instances of creative writing? Why or why not?
Stewart: I like to think that all writing, especially creative writing, inherently focuses on how language — and by extension words — shape experiences. When I wrote the essay that became the chapter “Etymologies,” I was struck by how “etymologies” — as a form of linguistic study — can delineate not only where words and language originate, but I realized that I could use “etymologies” symbolically to offer the initial glimpses into a narrator we will see evolve in nuanced ways over the course of the book. And since I was writing a memoir that deliberately deviates from traditional linear narrative, engaging with language in this way became the perfect technique for character development, thematic exploration, and plot progression — to the extent there is a “plot.”
And while this technique may not be applicable to every instance of creative writing, as it depends on the author’s intentions and the story’s specific needs, the example of “Etymologies” demonstrates how language can be used strategically to enhance both narrative and character depth.
Chapter 16: Be Not Afraid of My Body is a universal and timeless coming-of-age, self-discovery story. What does the next coming-of-age chapter look like for Darius Stewart?
Stewart: I appreciate how your question broadens the idea of “coming-of-age.” It reminds us that these moments of self-discovery and transition aren’t limited to the experiences of youth. We’re always evolving and reshaping our lives.
My next project certainly speaks to this. It’s a speculative memoir exploring infidelity and the ways pleasure and desire complicate monogamy within Black gay relationships. I’m still developing the particulars, but I’m eager to explore this familiar yet deeply personal and often traumatic experience. I hope to offer a fresh perspective on love and intimacy and the challenges we face in navigating long-term commitments.
Tonya Abari is a Nashville-based independent journalist, author, essayist, book reviewer, and homeschooling parent. Her words have been published in the Nashville Scene, Essence, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Parents, Good Housekeeping, PBS Kids, and many more. You can find her hanging out on Instagram @iamtabari.
Tagged: Nonfiction, Q&A
