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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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