Book Review: “Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories” by Cho Nam-Joo
The Kims
Korean culture has reached a broader audience in recent years, whether through the ultraviolence of Squid Game and the excellent zombie film Train to Busan, the Oscar-winning Parasite, or the pop music genre named after the peninsula. It’s about time that the spotlight be turned over to the realm of literary fiction. Enter Cho Nam-Joo’s Miss Kim Knows. It’s a collection of eight short stories that are not quite interlinked but sometimes are by having a character with the surname Kim. Doing some Googling on this choice reveals that Kim is a common surname in Korea, akin to how Smith is a common surname in English-speaking parts of the world. This means that this collection reveals what accounts for the ordinary person in navigating this unfamiliar territory of Korean-ness. Like most short-story collections — and repeat after me — some stories run on all cylinders, and some sputter and fail. Still, Miss Kim Knows is an engaging read, and the gems are so good that they outweigh the duds. You must get through the duds to get to the gems, as much of the collection is backloaded.
That’s also not to say that the front is loaded with unexploded ordinance. The opening story, “Under the Plum Tree,” is quite touching — it’s the tale of an elderly woman watching her sister die in a hospice care center. “Runaway” is enjoyable in a Haruki Murakami-esque way: the piece is about a father who leaves his family and mirrors what his only daughter tried to do in running away from home and all its responsibilities earlier in life. However, the better stories are generally found towards the end of the set. The most extended story here, “Night of Aurora,” is a poignant tale of a nearly 60-year-old woman who travels from Korea to Yellowknife, Canada, with her mother-in-law to witness the aurora borealis. It’s a story about inviting a stranger (or the strange) into your home and the relationship between a mother and her daughter (and one of a mother and daughter-in-law). It’s perhaps one of the few stories that read like a novel. The best story is hands-down the final one: “Puppy Love, 2020,” which is the tale of two young students who try and fail to see each other during the COVID pandemic. It is utterly heartbreaking, as it shows the cascading effect on relationships of a virus from a set of parents right on down to all of their children.
Miss Kim Knows is a collection of brevity: this can be either an asset or a liability, depending on your point of view. And the thread of having the occasional character named Kim (as a surname) doesn’t seem to weave its way through all the stories (unless I’ve missed something), which leaves one to wonder why it was even used in the first place if it wasn’t meant to be used in every tale. But this should all be of no matter and be of limited import. Miss Kim Knows is a pretty good collection. There’s stuff here that reveals the socioeconomic divide of Korea in ways that Squid Game and Parasite do. Reading a book about another culture is richly rewarding in its own way: we learn of the pressures of children to study mathematical and language concepts a grade or two where they are not to risk being left behind with students who cannot afford private “cram schools.” There’s a lot to digest here and take in. The book does an excellent job of revealing that the more things seem to be culturally different, the more they seem to be the same between different races. This is something the MAGA crowd might want to keep in mind.
Ultimately, Miss Kim Knows is an intriguing concoction. Its author has written at least two novels, so this collection probably exists as a holding pattern while she finds the material for her next “full-length feature.” Still, while this collection isn’t entirely consistently successful as some of the stories seem to be divorced of context from one another, and I would have liked more from the male point of view to shake things up, it’s still worth a read. If anything, Miss Kim Knows shows that Korea is a place of great creativity, and it’s coming into its own as an Asian exporter of fantastic fiction and film. That’s probably all the reason to recommend this, mainly if one is interested in slice-of-life stories from another cultural viewpoint. If that sounds up your alley, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here in bite-sized, easy-to-manage pieces. This is rewarding for Asian fiction fanatics.
Cho Nam-Joo’s Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories will be published by Liveright / W. W. Norton on October 29, 2024.
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