Book Review: *Everything Asian* by Sung J. Woo

Back of the book blurb:  You’re twelve years old. A month has passed since your Korean Air flight landed at lovely Newark Airport. Your fifteen-year-old sister is miserable. Your mother isn’t exactly happy, either. You’re seeing your father for the first time in five years, and although he’s nice enough, he might be, well–how can you put this delicately?–a loser.

You can’t speak English, but that doesn’t stop you from working at “East Meets West”, your father’s gift shop in a strip mall, where everything is new.

Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim.

She is Too Fond of Books’ review: When I started reading Everything Asian I  flipped back to the jacket flap a few times to confirm that this was a work of fiction.  Sung J. Woo writes so adeptly through the eyes of a 12-year-old immigrant that I thought that “David Kim” might be an anglicized version of his name and that this novel was indeed a memoir.  It is a work of fiction, although I can’t help but wonder if any of it is based on Woo’s personal experience.

Each chapter can stand alone as a vignette about the Kim family and life for the proprietors of the various shops in the Peddlers Town strip mall.  The majority of the chapters are told from the perspective of David Kim, whose parents own the “East Meets West” import shop.  Other points of view are given by the shopkeepers of such caricatured stores as “HiFi FoFum,” “Animal Attraction,” and “A Second Chance.”

Everything Asian is the story of two families: The Kims’ nuclear family who have joined the patriarch in America after a five year separation, and their extended family of merchants at Peddlers Town.  Both families celebrate joys, console each other after disappointments, and offer support in times of transition.

Since so many of the scenes are set in the mall itself, not every aspect of the immigrant’s transition is addressed.  Many of challenges are felt more acutely (or, perhaps just shown more acutely) by the women in the Kim family.  The chapter that introduces In Young Kim, David’s mother, shares her thoughts as she struggles with American food:

As if hamburger weren’t bad enough, In Young Kim was now being subjected to a thin, triangular piece of bread covered with melted cheese and tomato sauce.  She picked it up like the way she’d seen her husband do it, folded it in half by the crust, but she hadn’t counted on the orange-colored oil dripping off the crease and plopping onto the paper plate.

Her kids had called it pizza, an unpronounceable word.  The best she could do was peeja because there was no such sound as ts in Korean, but this was not important.  When it came to food, only one aspect mattered, and ths particular dish tasted greasy and salty and just plain awful.  If only she could chase each fatty bite with a mouthful of kimchi – but that wasn’t a possibility.

In Young placed the slice back on the plate, and as if alive, the piece slowly unfurled back to its original flatness.

Her husband said they couldn’t eat kimchi at the store because it stunk.  Americans found the smell unappetizing, though nothing disgusted In Young more than to walk by the cheese aisle in the supermarket.  How anyone ate anything so rank and continued to live was anybody’s guess.

I really liked the structure of Everything Asian; writing a year in the Kims’ life as a novel in stories allows Woo to show many perspectives while focusing on David.  Quirky characters and a mix of amusing and thought-provoking situations show many sides of the immigrant experience.  The subculture of life in a New Jersey strip mall offers another detour in the quest for assimilation in America.

About the author: Sung J. Woo’s fiction and essays have been published in several journals including McSweeney’s and The New York Times.   He, like David Kim, lives in New Jersey, the setting for Everything Asian, his first novel.  More information can be found on Sung J. Woo’s blog (among other entries are haikus for episodes of Mad Men), and on twitter at @sjwoo.

FTC disclosure: review copy provided by the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program