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Title: A Cab Called Reliable : A Novel About Growing Up In America by Patti Kim ISBN: 0-312-19030-1 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: 15 June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.26 (23 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: beautifully written
Comment: the content is real, moving, touching, emotional, humorous, and takes you back in time and yet it pulls you in and out. patti kim really has done something interesting-- the writing is beautiful and playful prose that reflect some of the thought process and creativity that flows from the protagonist (ahn joo)'s head.
and i really liked it that this book doesn't have to be a "korean-american book" since the story seems to transcend that cultural realm into something more human: of growing up, coming to terms with your reality and wants, of relationships with people in your life, etc.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good book!
Comment: After reading Chang-rae Lee, this book is a breath of fresh air. The writing style is impressionistic and not a tightly written narrative and prose, and that allows for you to get much closer to what Ahn-Joo's interior and emotional world is like, things which of course don't come neatly packaged. I feel that her ability to get in touch with this painful interiority is what enables and inspires her to survive and strive. She is able to capture the interminable sadness of her father's life and what is a common Korean drama of mourning the legacy of abusive and repressed Korean fathers. The stilted writing of Chang-rae Lee's writing reflects the dilemma of his repressed characters but it also seems to close the door to trying to figure out a way that they might transcend being repressed, afraid and self-hating. Somehow Patti Kim achieves that.
I think it's wonderful that she has found the strength to tell her story in a way that isn't contrived. What is really frustrating about Asian American literature is NOT that it's just a way to mourn the difficulties of growing up in a white culture (a very white-centric view), but rather that any Asian American is trying to use the dominant culture's literature and point of view to express their own point of view. This poses frustrating paradoxes but Patti Kim does a great job of weaving in lots of different ways of describing her life.
If a lot of Asian American literature sounds like a lot of whining about white culture then please come up with a better way to express the Asian American point of view in the absence of any distinctive "Asian American Culture" outside of white culture. Maybe this "whining" is a way of feeling one's place out in in the dark: the emotional and psychological side of what it means to belong to both a dominant culture and ethnic subculture, both of which you can never really put your finger on except for the fact that both often hurt you and make you feel permanently rejected by other people who don't understand. An Asian American writer is further burdened with the responsibility of speaking for all of those voices that never get heard, especially from all the people who live incredibly painful and stunted lives because of the immigrant process and barely know how to stand up for themselves. It means that the literature (and many second-generation lives) have the burden of trying to make up for all of that, and of course nothing is ever going to be comprehensive enough or able to capture the immense sense of loss and muteness of millions of immigrants.
What I love about this book is that the narrator seems to stay true to herself and how she feels and what she sees. You can actually feel her submerging at times to her father's stories and imagining an entire Korea she only knows through him and she becomes obsessed with trying to make sense of them. The same thing seems to happen with her father and how she tries to interpret American culture that only she can really grasp, even if tenuously: the only way he can make sense of it is to work ridiculously hard and hope his daughter's life will make sense of it for him--which it can't. But either way, it seems she's trying to write a personal landscape that makes more sense to her and that's what seems vital, rather than mourning that she'll never fit in.
Rating: 4
Summary: no model minorities here
Comment: The main character, Ahn Joo, writes a short story in middle school which wins first place. In it, she lists phrases that her Korean mother, who has abandoned her, says to her as a child--sharp, mean, and brutally vicious words. Afterwards, a classmate whispers to her that it was way too dark, depressing, weird. In a sense, so is this novel.
This is not a book for children, although the protagonist is a child. But it really is a portrait of a dysfunctional immigrant family with lots of sexual, mental and physical abuse. At times, Kim almost goes overboard with the listing and the descriptions, but she always pulls back a little and you find it to be a pretty engaging read, and short enough to not get bogged down in despair.
She apparently wrote this for a college literary journal, and it does have that morose, over-obsessive quality to it; but make no bones about it, this novel somehow pulls it off despte being bleak, bleak, bleak. I think she portrays the alcoholic father, especially toward the end, with some sympathy and affection as he struggles to carve out a living and a home for the two. I actually enjoyed reading how he manages to save money and keep trying to work his [backside] off for the two of them. And the mother's psycho behavior is explained with a little twist at the end, a perfectly dark explanation for all this dysfunction.
In the end, I would say it was a very well-written and interesting read. Unfortunately, it points more toward the author's own neurosis and mental health than anything else--you wonder if any of this is autobiographical b/c it's so spare and brutal--and what major issues she must have undergone to come up with someting so utterly dreadful and dysfunctional. The child is definitely gonna need counseling since she's a bit cuckoo already. But it does have power and it is different from your average Asian American fare. For bold, fearless venturers, it's a short detour through immigrant hell.
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Title: When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon by Frances Park ISBN: 0786886455 Publisher: Miramax Pub. Date: 13 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: House of the Winds by Mia Yun ISBN: 0140291946 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Foreign Student : A Novel by Susan Choi ISBN: 0060929278 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Interpreter by Suki Kim ISBN: 0374177139 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee's Search for Her Roots by Katy Robinson ISBN: 042518496X Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 06 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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