Blog Posts
Love doesn’t make life easy. This family suffers loss, imprisonment, war, injury, and discrimination – the lasting social stigma placed on “Zainichi” – Koreans living in Japan.
If we ever ended up in the same YMCA pool, Lidia would swim me out of the water. But we both know what it means to show up.
The way she tells it, it’s happening before you know it’s happening, much the same way the character is plunged into the sea or down a steep drop or into the vortex of an irrevocable relational tangle. The prose is swift and unexpectedly physical.
Two women, one kitchen; much tension. It’s a classic recipe for a good story, one that turns out beautifully in “Mother Land,” a novel by Leah Franqui.