Love and life through time: Book recommendations

By Samantha Pak
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

The Apology

By Jimin Han
Little, Brown and Company, 2023

Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the burden of having to uphold her family’s name. This is why she sent a young woman to the United States to cover up an illegitimate birth—all in the name of preserving her family’s reputation.

But this long-kept secret comes back to haunt her when at the age of 105, she receives a letter that could tear her family apart. It turns out her actions from decades earlier could be the very thing to destroy them.

Hak travels from South Korea to the United States in an attempt to “fix” things, but finds herself thrust into the afterlife a mere 10 days later after being hit by a bus. Now as a ghost, she must make her way back to the living and reach her relatives to head off a potential curse that could devastate them for generations.

Spanning a century, “The Apology” follows a family through multiple generations and their complicated relationships. From Hak’s infuriating sisters, to the estrangement with her son that lasted until his early death, Han’s characters are complex and multifaceted. I especially enjoyed Hak and her sisters, because while they are all centenarians, we see that sibling dynamics don’t always mature with age. If anything, they just intensify the older you get, which is really amusing. These women may be more than a century old, but that doesn’t stop them from being petty and (sometimes intentionally) pressing each others’ buttons.

As someone who has lived through Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and South Korea’s technological and economical boom, Hak offers a perspective we don’t often see in literature (or most other forms of media). Having lived more than a century, many of her views are very traditional and can be seen as rigid. There were times I was frustrated with Hak and her focus on acting and being a certain way because the things she’s worried about aren’t as big of issues nowadays. But that just shows readers how much has changed in society in the span of just one (admittedly, very long) lifetime.

A Quantum Love Story

By Mike Chen
MIRA, 2024

Still grieving her best friend-slash-stepsister Shay’s recent disappearance and presumed death, neuroscientist Mariana Pineda is ready to start over. Beginning with her career as she’s just about to hand in her resignation at her job—after one last week consulting on a top secret particle accelerator at a big fancy science lab.

Then she meets a man on that Thursday who claims they have met before. Carter Cho knows her name, who Shay is and what happened to her, and why Mariana is at the lab. And more importantly, Carter needs her to remember all of this—because time is about to loop.

Before she knows it, she’s waking up on Monday morning again and realizes Carter was right. Together, the pair relive the same four days over and over again as they try to figure out how to break the loop. Inevitably, as the only two people in the world aware of what’s happening, Mariana and Carter become close and, of course, start developing feelings.

But just as they’re figuring things out, Carter’s memories of the time loop—and Mariana—begin disappearing and Mariana realizes the only way they have any chance of being together is to break out of the time loop.

Before this, I had never considered cozy science fiction as a genre, but that’s exactly what “Quantum Love Story” is. With the world on a time loop, the stakes may seem pretty high—and they are. But what really propels Mariana is the idea of saving the relationships that are important to her—a key element in any cozy subgenre. As someone who doesn’t read sci-fi too often, this is a great entryway into the genre. It’s not overly complicated with the “science” and world building and focuses more on the characters—which is what I prefer in a story of any genre.

Real Americans

By Rachel Khong
Knopf, 2024

The year is 1999 and 22-year-old Lily Chen is working as an unpaid intern at a travel website who has to take odd jobs just to keep a roof over her head. Then she meets Matthew, who is everything she’s not—good looking, a native East Coaster, and rich (specifically, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire, as she soon finds out).

It seems highly unlikely for Matthew and Lily, the broke only child of two scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to fall in love. But they do.

In 2021, 15-year-old Nick Chen is living on an island in Washington state with his single mother, Lily. Having never felt like he ever belonged anywhere, he feels there’s something his mother’s hiding from him.

So when Nick sets out to find his biological father, it sets off a chain reaction and long-held secrets are slowly revealed.

Told from various points of view, over the span of several decades, “Real Americans” is a multi-generational story about a family that is simply doing their best with the cards they’re dealt. The characters are complicated, multifaceted, flawed, and far from perfect. But then again, so are we as readers. Khong does a great job of portraying a family filled with their ups and downs (more downs than ups, honestly) as they try to find their way back to each other. I found the characters’ perspectives when they become parents especially interesting as they show how even the best of intentions can go awry—just as it does in real life.

Khong also does a great job of portraying events in history, from China’s Cultural Revolution, to the Y2K hysteria, to the attacks on 9/11. This gives the story a real sense of time and space that will have readers really feeling and understanding what the characters are experiencing.