70
brother, escapes to the American zone in Korea
during the turmoil of the Japanese occupation of
Korea. It is 1950 and Echoes opens with 15-year-
old Sookan, her mother, and her younger brother
Inchun living in a refugee camp atop a mountain
in Pusan, South Korea. Choi’s protagonist reveals
the harsh and bare existence of life as a refugee, as
well as once again suffering from a forced sepa-
ration from her beloved father and older broth-
ers. Echoes explores the war experience through
the eyes of innocent victims who attempt to flee
the death and destruction and become refugees:
“Famished, frostbitten, and dirty, we made our
way to the base of the refugee mountain. In our
tattered, filthy clothes, we stared up at the steep,
jagged, red-brown mountain looming above us”
(21). Sookan tries hard to come to terms with
her refugee status and begins to rebuild her life
amidst the ravages of a war-torn country. Sookan
enters young adulthood with a brief, heartfelt, yet
bittersweet romance with young Junho, a hand-
some young man who captures young Sookan’s
heart. Choi captivates the reader as Sookan and
Junho talk about their dreams for the future and
what they envision life to be like, free of war and
hardship. The novel ends with the armistice and
Sookan and her family’s return to Seoul to begin
rebuilding their lives. Sookan begins the steps to
fulfill her dream of studying in America.
Choi’s Echoes continues the theme of quiet de-
fiance against repression, established in her first
novel, and of the importance of family and honor
in the hope for a better life. Choi’s novel illumi-
nates the repressive atmosphere of war and its ef-
fects on young people with her refreshingly honest
observations. Her characters are inhabited with
vitality and strength despite their circumstances,
and they are a testament to the special powers of
hope and courage to rise above adversity.
Bibliography
Choi, Sook Nyul. Echoes of the White Giraffe. New
York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1993.
Debbie Clare OlsonEnglish Patient, The
Michael Ondaatje (1992)
MICHAEL ONDAATJE’s best-known novel, which
shared the Booker Prize in 1992 and became the
basis for a multiple–Oscar-winning film by An-
thony Minghella is, in the author’s words, “a book
about very tentative healing.... It’s also two or
three or four versions of a love story.” Much of
the action takes place in a temporary hospital in
an abandoned Tuscan villa in 1945. There, Ca-
nadian nurse Hana cares for her last remaining
patient, a severely burned man with no appar-
ent identity; he is ultimately revealed to be Laszlo
Almasy, a Hungarian explorer, cartographer, and
alleged double agent. Hana is joined by a former
thief, Caravaggio, who has lost both thumbs at-
tempting to protect his secret identity, and also
by Kip, an Indian sapper, who begins a tenuous
relationship with Hana. The allegedly “English”
patient, however, remains the focus for the other
major characters: for Hana, whose desire to heal
and help now revolves exclusively around nursing
the burned man; for Caravaggio, in that morphine
and history carry both men to a place beyond bor-
ders and allegiances; and for Kip, whose character
also interrogates the viability of single narratives
to encapsulate historical truth.
The novel gradually reveals the title character’s
past, especially his romantic relationship with
Katherine Clifton, the wife of a fellow explorer. The
two share a brief but passionate relationship, and
even after their affair ends, both remain emotion-
ally tied, despite Katherine’s marriage to Clifton.
Clifton, however, has already learned the truth, and
attempts to kill all three in a plane crash. Kather-
ine barely survives, while Almasy’s attempt to find
help eventually leads him to betray his knowledge
of the North African desert to the Nazis. He fails
to save Katherine’s life, and soon nearly perishes in
his own flying accident.
Ondaatje’s novel weaves past and present, fic-
tion and history together, in a hallucinatory, post-
modernist rendering of scarred bodies, lives and
nations. His commitment to cosmopolitan world-
views is expressed by his eponymous character70 English Patient, The