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Jinbhum Shin
Pangs of Love and Other Stories, The
David Wong Louie (1991)
For this, his first collection of short fiction and his
first published book, DAVID WONG LOUIE received
the First Fiction Award from the Los Angeles Times
Book Review and the John C. Zacharis First Book
Award from Ploughshares. The collection was also
named a Notable Book by the New York Times Book
Review and a Favorite Book by the Village Voice
Literary Supplement. One of the stories in the col-
lection, “Displacement,” was selected for inclusion
in The Best American Short Stories of 1989. Ta k e n
together, the 11 stories of the collection exhibit
Louie’s impressive capacity for invention, as well as
considerable range in his topics, themes, and styles.
The issues of race, gender, and class are intertwined
in these stories of love, language and selfhood.
The title story is narrated by a Chinese-Ameri-
can man, whose mother continually and unsuc-
cessfully urges him to find a good Chinese wife,
even though he longs for a lover very different from
the one his mother imagines for him. The mother,
who speaks little English even though she has lived
for four decades in America, is a comic-pathetic
figure. In her loneliness, she develops a sense of
emotional connection with late-night television
host Johnny Carson, even though her very limited
knowledge of English idioms leaves her incapable
of understanding most of his humor.
“Displacement” is a character study of a Mrs.
Chow, a woman from an aristocratic family in
China who has been reduced in America to work-
ing as a domestic servant for a difficult old woman
much given to uttering ethnic slurs, which Mrs.
Chow pretends not to understand. In “Bottle of
Beaujolais,” a Chinese-American waiter in a Japa-
nese sushi-bar becomes infatuated with a woman
whom he sees repeatedly while caring for an otter
kept in the window of the establishment. In “The
Movers,” a man takes possession of an empty home
but begins to reconstruct from small clues the
identity of the previous owner and then even to
assume that identity. In “Disturbing the Universe,”
the central conceit is the supposition that the game
of baseball originated in China.
Martin KichPark, Frances (1955– )
and Park, Ginger (1962– )
Frances Park and Ginger Park are Korean-Ameri-
can sisters who write books for both children and
young adults on universal themes such as love, loss,
and war. Frances was born in Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, and raised in Washington, D.C.; Ginger
was born and raised in Washington, D.C. They col-
laborate easily; one sister starts with the idea and
creates a draft, which is edited by the other. While
Ginger likes to write and tell stories about her
Korean-American background and her parents,
Frances enjoys perfecting the details and dialogue.
They pass the manuscript back and forth until it
is a completely polished work, never once sitting
down together and discussing the manuscript.
The Park sisters’ books are mostly inspired by
their family’s experiences. Although they knew
their father was a high-ranking politician in South
Korea, they did not know the details of his life,
especially his youth as a poverty-stricken child.
After his early death in 1979, they began research-
ing their family’s and Korea’s histories. They retell
their parents’ experiences growing up in Korea in
the love story TO SWIM ACROSS THE WORLD, which
takes place before, during, and after the Korean
Wa r. The Royal Bee is a picture book about their
maternal grandfather’s determination to obtain an
education despite the obstacles of poverty and class
discrimination. The sisters oversaw certain aspects
of the illustrations for cultural and historical accu-
r acy. Good-bye 382 Shin Dang Dong, which is titled
after their parents’ former address in Korea, is a
picture book about a little girl named Jangmi who
is hesitant to leave her home in Korea for a new
home in New England. Their mother’s flight from
North Korea, as described in To Swim across the
World, is told for younger children in picture-book
format in My Freedom Trip.238 Pangs of Love and Other Stories, The