ONE THOUSAND CHESTNUT TREES
By Mira Stout
Riverhead Books, 319 pages, $23.95
When Anna, the young Korean-American narrator of Mira Stout’s debut novel “One Thousand Chestnut Trees,” visits Seoul for the first time, she finds herself sharing a cab with two stone-faced businessmen. Anna keeps quiet as well, fearful that the red-necked driver will eject her at any moment, with her Korean language skills pitifully limited to “Hello,” “Good-bye” and, “Please give me an apple.”
While this small scene may depict any traveler’s experience of feeling hapless in a foreign land, it also illustrates the greater predicament of those who’ve gone through life checking the “Other” box when questioned about race: How, exactly, do you define identity, especially when crossed cultures are involved? And are there words for that situation in any language?
That this quandary arises at all is the narrative center of “One Thousand Chestnut Trees.” Fundamentally, this is a story about how one family’s fate is irrevocably changed by turbulent 20th Century history. Told in the alternating voices of Anna and her mother, Myung-ja, a concert violinist, we learn how a once-prominent, scholarly Korean family is separated by a succession of wars.
Anna herself embodies the result of cultural exile and estrangement: As the daughter of a Korean woman and a Caucasian American man, she is the product of two cultures and good intentions, however complex the mix.
Unlike many coming-of-age tales, however, this is not a novel about mother-daughter strife and misunderstanding. Rather, Anna and Myung-ja function more as reporters at the scene of events contemporary and historical.
As the book opens, Anna remembers her first real exposure to things Korean as a teenager. Her Uncle Hong-do, an apparent oddball with peculiar speech and appalling table manners, comes to visit the family in Vermont. Anna sees her mother blossom in Hong-do’s company, chatting animatedly in Korean and laughing about secret jokes.
Later, Anna becomes closer to Hong-do when both of them end up working in New York. A struggling painter, Anna has a job at an antiquarian book store and finds her only respite from urban insanity in her uncle’s company.
Stout’s depiction of Anna’s whirling life as a revolving door of grim sublet apartments and unsuitable men makes up the book’s most amusing and earnest moments. (Anna’s encounter with two Wall Street types named Tom Morgan and Wen Stanley–” `Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know,’ “–is a particularly well-rendered and funny episode.)
Soon disillusioned, however, Anna flees the city and decides to visit Korea. Because her mother is away on a recital tour and unavailable to practice on, Anna resorts to learning Korean via cassette language tapes:
“The concentration required was strenuous in the extreme; like trying to cut something by first melting down a knife, recasting it into a pair of scissors and waiting for the metal to cool each time you needed to cut with it, the scissors turning back into a knife as soon as the immediate task was complete.”
Meanwhile, Uncle Hong-do has returned to Seoul and acts as Anna’s host when she arrives. He puts her up at the home of her cousins, the Parks, and hires a student, Miss Cho, to serve as a companion on cultural outings.
The rest of the novel is narrated by Anna’s mother, who provides the familial, cultural and political underpinning to the younger woman’s search for identity and meaning.
The second of three children, Myung-ja comes from a proud family whose men were schooled in a classic Confucian tradition–scholarly training that later marks them for potential persecution by communists. Myung-ja sees her world gradually dismantled and then violently destroyed by World War II and the ensuing Korean War.
These passages serve as valuable history lessons, especially for Westerners, for whom the wars in Asia were remote events. Stout ably conveys the claustrophobia and fear Myung-ja’s family experiences when, in 1950, they are forced to go into hiding after the communist North Koreans cross the 38th Parallel and seize control of Seoul.
Eventually, Myung-ja goes to Columbia University to study the violin. Much to the dismay of her father, she marries an American and moves to Vermont.
Unfortunately, Myung-ja’s narrative seldom engages the reader in the same way that Anna’s does when she finally hits her stride in New York. Too much of Myung-ja’s story begins to resemble material gleaned from an encyclopedia; still, this is important background for us, especially as Koreans become an increasingly stronger presence in contemporary America.
Most of the characters of “A Thousand Chestnut Trees,” even Anna, slip from our grasp; for example, we never know what it is that makes Anna a painter or ever witness her making sketches.
Still, the book’s weaknesses as a novel are compensated for by its overall educational qualities. The reader truly comes away with a fuller picture not only of what turmoil Koreans have experienced this century but also of what defines Koreanness. For example, Anna tells how Miss Cho politely admonishes her for lying down on the grass in a sunny Seoul park. Sitting up, Anna points out that many people are sprawled out; Miss Cho simply replies that Koreans consider it too overtly sexual for a woman to lie down in public.
Such customs only make it more apparent to Anna that despite the familiar food and faces, Korea will forever remain a mystery to her. Also, much to her disappointment, many members of the family she came to find are either dead or unreachable in North Korea.
The title chestnut trees become a symbol not only for Anna’s longing for understanding but also for a country’s grief over its uncountable losses. Anna notes while on a train trip, “Miss Cho, following the direction of my gaze, said that the planting of new timber represented `a filial yearning for the deceased.’ “
In this regard at least, Anna discovers a part of herself that is very Korean indeed.
