Secondhand World
by Katherine Min
Wonder Years
A review by Helen Zia
If you could go back to that
time in life when one becomes the
center of a world that seems new and open with endless possibilities, would
you dare? Secondhand World will
transport you, not in a nostalgic haze,
but with a clarity that exposes the
nuances of reaching the precipice of
womanhood.
With this absorbing tale, Min recreates
the atonal and uncomfortably familiar rhythms of a postwar
suburban American home, full of
honest dysfunction, unspoken hurts,
stifled feelings and other foibles of
the nuclear family. Through the eyes
of Isa, an upstate New York teenager
racked by self-doubt, Min captures
the adolescent's sense of awe and
idealism, uncertainty and excitement, as she teeters toward finding
her own truth.
Yet here is no ordinary family. Isa
must constantly translate
the world around
her, reconciling the
distracting ways of her
Korea-born parents with the disconcerting
and sometimes racist
encounters she has at
school. Not that her
parents aren't devoted:
Isa's scientist father
tries to teach her math,
science and Korean. At
bedtime, her mother
serenades her with "Que Sera Sera";
when she arrives at the lyrics, "Will I
be pretty? Will I be rich?" her mother
whispers, "Both, Isa. You'll be both."
But her mother's beauty only makes
Isa feel ugly in a world where her
Asian features don't fit, and so, with
her mother's encouragement, Isa begins
to save money for eyelid surgery
that will someday give her "round"
eyes. Then the accidental death of her
younger brother fractures her world.
As her parents shut down and the anguish
of survivor's guilt is piled onto
her already confused sense of self, Isa
is left to interpret life's fault lines
through her own clouded lens.
In the struggle for her own voice
and sense of worth, Isa becomes a
wild child in the sex/drugs/rock 'n'
roll of the times, while maintaining a
good girl façade at home with her
emotionally absent parents. She
finds support among other smart,
misfit kids who are all white, though some are whiter than others. Her
first love is an albino boy named
Hero, a match that Isa believes
works because they're both freaks
and outcasts.
Being in love allows Isa to love
herself and assert her individuality,
but her growing assuredness comes
with the absolute self-righteousness
that also marked the generation that
came of age in the tumultuous '60s and
'70s. She attributes all
that is wrong in her
life to the lies,
hypocrisies, secrets
and silences of her
parents, who try to
love her in their way,
even when she is finally
caught at home in
flagrante delicto with
her boyfriend. But her parents carry their
own conflicted emotions, complicated
by the cultural alienation and displacement
of immigrants from a
war-torn and divided homeland.
Too young and too sure, Isa has
not yet developed compassion or understanding
for anyone,
especially her
mother. The gossamer threads that hold her
wounded family together
begin to disintegrate
as the righteous
Isa acts on her judgment
of her mother's
failings. Min's artful realism seamlessly conveys
all the emotional
twists of a girl's coming
of age and this family's
final downward spiral.
Isa realizes that the sound and fury
she imagined as new and fresh are
hand-me-downs for her to relive. Min leaves the reader breathless with
questions about one's own capacity to
forgive.
Helen Zia is the author of Asian
American Dreams: The Emergence
of an American People.
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