Centuries of Korean diaspora | Review of Paul Yoon’s ‘The Hive and the Honey’

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A sense of sadness, loss and regret runs through the seven stories in Paul Yoon’s The Hive and the Honey. They grapple with themes of identity, belonging and escape, and cast a light on the experiences of the Korean diaspora. We see their lives play out not only in different parts of the world — New York, London and Russia — but also in different periods of time, going all the way back to 1608 in one story.

In all the tales, there is a journey. A teenager goes in search of his elusive father. A samurai in 17th century Japan is tasked with reuniting a young Korean boy with his countrymen. The void of being childless propels a man to go looking for a runaway he briefly encountered. A woman sets out to meet a young man who may be the son she left behind when she defected from North Korea. A man goes from New York to Canada in search of better prospects and becomes one of “those who leave their hometown and never look back”.

There are no happy endings for most of these people. Their travels lead to unmet expectations, yearning, remorse and quiet grief. These people are displaced twice over — geographically and emotionally.

Violence rears its head suddenly in quite a few of the lives. Tellingly, in the first tale, the protagonist who is in jail outside Korea, is informed that he will be left alone as Koreans have a reputation for hitting rather than getting hit. Soon enough, he beats another man mercilessly. Then there is the man who beats the boy he has reared as his son so badly that the latter runs away. In the title story, an epistolary ghost story, a Korean settlement pays the price for their barbaric punishment of an innocent woman. There are reasons that dictate why these people behave the way they do; the violence, however, is brutal and unsettling.

The lives delineated here are marked by violence, longing and sorrow. Yoon’s superb craftsmanship as a writer makes these characters stay with you for a long time.

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor.