‘free Food For Millionaires Hit Bookstands
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It’s like skipping a stone on water ― a small stone seems to merely tag the surface of the water but it creates ripples. That was how reading “Free Food for Millionaires” by Lee Min-jin felt.
The novel, which is about a Korean immigrant’s life in the United States, brings to mind another Korean-American writer Chang-rae Lee. Both hit hard especially after one puts the books down. But while the ripples caused by Chang-rae Lee’s novel are bigger and wider, Lee seems gentler as she prods readers to think or rethink about love, family, young pride and life choices.
The book, which was published to great success in the United States in 2007, is now available in Korean. The New York Times book review said Lee’s debut novel,
“Unfolds in New York in the 1990s with an energetic eventfulness and a sprawling cast that call to mind the literary classics of Victorian England … a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls it off with conviction.”
The protagonist is a class of 1993, who graduated magna cum laude in economics from Princeton. She has a white boyfriend, is something of a shopaholic, but is without a job. Her parents, immigrants who manage a laundry store, are not happy with their eldest daughter, whereas their younger daughter seems to be a model one who marries a Korean guy and is going to med-school. After a fight with her father in their apartment, she is kicked out. She goes to her boyfriend’s apartment only to find him busy with two sorority girls. From there, the protagonist strikes out on her own, sometimes finding luck in friends who offer her a room, a mentor who wants to pay for her business school tuition and a job interview through her friend’s fiance.
The book at first reads something like a chick-lit novel ― a young, smart, tough cookie of a girl in her early 20s trying to come into her own joins mainstream New York. But as the book progresses the story widens to give slices of the lives of other characters around her. There is the story of her sheltered mother and her late, brief romance, her rigid father whose share of pain would find resonance among many Korean men of his generation. Then there are her Korean and Caucasian friends, who live out different lives based on choices governed by character as well as socio-economic backgrounds.
The characters in the book are too ideal in a sense. But the writer explained that she handed them all gifts “to see what they would do with their ambitions.” And she throws them life’s troubles to see, if “race, class, immigration, and gender politics affect them.”
There is a lot of drama in the stories. Abortions, gambling, infidelity, unemployment, date-rape and more. Yet, what sets this book apart is a sense of compassion to the human foibles and life’s curve balls. Like one character says “If you want to sing about redemption, you have to recognize the sin,” the author accepts with warmth that people, like life, are not perfect.
