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keywords

1. • value: post c 1945
2. • value: Modern
3. • value: Contemporary

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Lee, Marie Myung-Ok
   • bioText: Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the young adult novel Finding my Voice, thought to be one of the first contemporary-set Asian American YA novels. She is one of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family.
   • name: Marie Myung-Ok Lee

publishDate

2022-05-24T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Evening Hero

fullDescription

A "moving and captivating" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) novel following a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he's worked so hard to build come crumbling down.
Dr. Yungman Kwak is in the twilight of his life. Every day for the last fifty years, he has brushed his teeth, slipped on his shoes, and headed to Horse Breath's General Hospital, where, as an obstetrician, he treats the women and babies of the small rural Minnesota town he chose to call home.

This was the life he longed for. The so-called American dream. He immigrated from Korea after the Korean War, forced to leave his family, ancestors, village, and all that he knew behind. But his life is built on a lie. And one day, a letter arrives that threatens to expose it.

Yungman's life is thrown into chaos—the hospital abruptly closes, his wife refuses to spend time with him, and his son is busy investing in a struggling health start-up. Yungman faces a choice—he must choose to hide his secret from his family and friends or confess and potentially lose all he's built. He begins to question the very assumptions on which his life is built—the so-called American dream, with the abject failure of its healthcare system, patients and neighbors who perpetuate racism, a town flawed with infrastructure, and a history that doesn't see him in it.

Toggling between the past and the present, Korea and America, Evening Hero is a "soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel" (The New York Times) about a man looking back at his life and asking big questions about what is lost and what is gained when immigrants leave home for new shores.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2021
     

     Noted particularly for her YA fiction (e.g., Finding My Voice), Lee is cofounder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and that rare U.S. journalist granted a visa to visit North Korea. Here she introduces Dr. Yungman Kwak, who left Korea for Minnesota after the Korean War and has since worked as an obstetrician at Horse Breath's General Hospital. He's living the life he always wanted, but it's built on a lie that a letter arriving from someone left behind is about to expose. With a 35,000-copy first printing

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 15, 2022
     A Korean American doctor is forced into retirement and a confrontation with his past when a secret he's kept about his family surfaces. Yungman Kwak, who came to the U.S. after the Korean War, has been the only practicing obstetrician in Horse's Breath, Minnesota, for decades. When the holding corporation that runs the hospital where he works closes its doors, he's lucky to escape with his pension. His son, Einstein, who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and son, works for the same company and encourages his father to take a job in the emerging field of "Retailicine" to pass the time. Einstein fulfilled his parents' traditional expectations of graduating from Harvard and becoming a doctor himself. But he's also enamored with an entrepreneurial tech-bro ethos Yungman doesn't understand. A good portion of the book is a biting critique of a predatory American health care system and the economy at large. As a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, Lee has long been a leading voice in the literary world. She organizes this saga into five sections, each more gripping than the last, as the story travels through time and across continents to describe the many obstacles Yungman faces on his journey from a boy forced to flee his village to a medical student in Seoul competing to woo a charismatic classmate to a man who leaves his home country for greater opportunity elsewhere. Lee delves deeper into Yungman's roots and explores myriad aspects of Korean history, not least of which is an overdue accounting of the suffering America's occupation and war caused. Yungman is a survivor, and the novel explores how the choices so many immigrants make, the secrets they keep, the risks they take, big and small, can lead to good fortune or failure. The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person's lifetime--their body, mind, and memories--no matter how far in the past it may seem. This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance.

     COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 28, 2022
     Lee (Somebody’s Daughter) returns with an ambitious story charting the travails of an elderly immigrant doctor in Minnesota after the hospital he works at closes down. Thirsty for a new purpose to life, Yungman Kwak takes a job with his son’s employer, SANUS, a healthcare company with several retail outlets in the Mall of America. Yungman isn’t much of a match for SANUS’s startup jargon (“medical professionals are divided into service providers—the DRones—and the MDieties,” his son, Einstein, explains about their boss’s philosophy, which also involves classifying Einstein as a “Doctorpreneur”). Eventually, Yungman enlists in Doctors Without Borders, an endeavor that brings him back to what is now North Korea, where he was born in 1940. Peppered throughout are stories from Yungman’s early life there: his experiences of poverty, war, striving for education, and courtship of his wife, who was raised in an elite circle within his village. Sometimes the prose is a bit awkward (a pie has a “seductively glistening surface”), and the minutia of Yungman’s work routines can drag a bit, but Lee offers touching details of Yungman’s nostalgia for the Korea of his youth, where “small dandelions... carpeted the grass like stars.” It’s a little bumpy, but fans of immigrant stories will appreciate Lee’s labor of love. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 15, 2022
     The latest from adult and YA novelist Lee (Somebody's Daughter) tells the story of Yungman Kwak, an aging physician and Korean immigrant who is thrust into retirement when his hospital closes abruptly. What follows is two stories: one of Yungman coping with the burdens of his past, and one of him facing the inevitability of his future. Lee seeks to cover a lot of ground with The Evening Hero: the American dream, work ethic and values, the casual and outright aggression immigrants deal with in the modern world, the racing nature of time, and more. This ambitious scope means the novel sometimes lacks focus, never quite deciding what story it's trying to tell. Where Lee's writing shines is in the details, as she flexes her creative muscles to fill Yungman's story with historical accuracy and a true-to-life depiction of the depth of humanity. Wholesome and engaging overall, The Evening Hero ultimately results in a captivating tale of human struggle and survival.

     COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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1. • code: en
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subjects

1. • value: Fiction
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3. • value: Humor (Fiction)

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05/24/2022

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shortDescription

A "moving and captivating" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) novel following a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he's worked so hard to build come crumbling down.
Dr. Yungman Kwak is in the twilight of his life. Every day for the last fifty years, he has brushed his teeth, slipped on his shoes, and headed to Horse Breath's General Hospital, where, as an obstetrician, he treats the women and babies of the small rural Minnesota town he chose to call home.

This was the life he longed for. The so-called American dream. He immigrated from Korea after the Korean War, forced to leave his family, ancestors, village, and all that he knew behind. But his life is built on a lie. And one day, a letter arrives that threatens to expose it.

Yungman's life is thrown into chaos—the hospital abruptly closes, his wife refuses to spend time...

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Evening Hero

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Simon & Schuster

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4. • code: FIC043000
   • description: Fiction / Coming of Age