I chose to read White Mulberry because the author told her grandmother’s story, as I did in one of my own novels, and I wanted to know how she treated her family history.
Miyoung, a poor Korean country girl living during the Japanese occupation of Korea just prior to World War II, has the opportunity to move to Japan to live with an elder sister. Once in Japan, she faces many formidable experiences: Japanese prejudice against Koreans, sexism, religious persecution, the loss of a beloved husband, and the birth of a son. She has been exposed to Christianity while in Korea and converts to that religion in Japan. She cannot afford to continue her education, so she seeks a job but must assume a Japanese name and pretend to be Japanese to accomplish that. She becomes a nurses’ aid, marries, and has a child.
Easton handled the conflicts well as well as some aspects of Miyoung’s growing pains and her longing for her home country, her family, and Korean foods and scents while in Japan. She also has the gumption to give her grandparent a sex life, though it is quite modest and understated. However, there isn’t much of a plot beyond the day-to-day meandering through a young woman’s life. There is a lot of repetition of Miyoung’s desire for education, how she misses her mother, etc. At times the dialogue is not particularly well-rendered and doesn’t flow well. The use of Korean and Japanese phrases, in small doses, may flavor the scenes, but it seems overdone, especially since the translations of these phrases into English in the next immediate sentence felt clunky and pulled me from the story. Mostly, the entire novel seemed a bit “one-note” without significant changes in pace to accentuate the highs or lows of Miyoung’s life. The characters themselves were not substantially different from any other tale of a poor, smart girl overcoming obstacles to warrant much engagement with them. The ending also was quite abrupt. All that said, I did enjoy the insights into Korean and Japanese life before World War II.
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White Mulberry (Lake Union Publishing, December 1, 2024) is available through:
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