The latest novel of Chang-rae Lee, The Surrendered, is populated by valiant but somewhat unsavory characters. Lee unravels the lives of his three main characters and the tread that pulls them together: June, a Korean orphan; Hector, an American soldier in Korea; and the most scarred of all three, Sylvie, the wife of a missionary.
Three Narrative Voices: June, Sylvie and Hector
June has an enormous resolve to survive no matter what it takes. She survives when all of her family dies during a harrowing escape from northern Korea to the south at the end of the Korean War, even when it meant leaving her dying brother. However, she longs for her family and grows to care deeply for those she allows herself to love: Sylvie, Hector and eventually her son Nicholas. Her determination helps her to push ahead as she transitions to life in America.
Sylvie is the daughter of missionaries who preferred to be called aid workers in Manchuria when the Japanese took over. She saw her parents murdered, and afterwards she is so scarred that she refuses or is unable to heal or find hope. Instead, she numbs her psychological pain with narcotics. Though she marries a missionary on his way to Korea to manage an orphanage, her output towards the management of the children is done like a sleepwalker. June adores her, but is jealous of the affair that Sylvie and Hector carry on during her husband's frequent absences.
Hector is a man who has lost hope and escapes his memories by doing constant manual labor at the orphanage. Donna Rifkind's book review in The Washington Post, fleshes out the character of Hector, "Named for an epic hero and raised in the Upstate New York factory town of Ilion, Hector has mysterious self-healing qualities: He bar-brawls but never gets hurt; he drinks without getting drunk. He lives with the guilty Greek-tragic certainty that he is condemned to immortality while serving unwillingly as 'the dooming factor for everyone but himself.' "
Resolution and Absolution
After many years, June gets in touch with Hector in the U.S. He is not pleased to meet the girl turned woman who he married briefly. June and Hector are able to resolve the past during their seemingly haphazard trip to Italy to find Nicholas (after she tells Hector, he is his son). The process of June emptying her soul to Hector in Italy and Hector's growing patience produces some easement and catharsis during June's last days. It is through surrendering that June lets go and obtains a peaceful death. and, it seems that Hector's ability to reach out to her leads him to embrace life for the first time. They are able to do what Sylvie, the other member of their damaged trio could never do: to let go of the past and reach absolution.
The Surrendered is narrated by all three main characters; whereas, Lee's other novels are in the first-person narration of one character: Henry Park in Native Speaker, "Doc" Hata in A Gesture Life and Jerry Battle in Aloft. June is the only character in The Surrendered who stands out as she charges through the pages displaying her indomitable will. Sylvie remains an enigma beyond her scarred soul which lacks purpose, but Hector, in spite his purposelessness, pulls himself together by letting go of his "doomed" to fail self-image to reach out to June to ease her guilt towards ways that she feel she has failed her son and others.
Chang-rae Lee is not a historical novelist. Though he was born in South Korea and moved to the U.S. when he was three, Korea is not the main backdrop of his novels, rather it is one of the threads or backdrops. In The Surrendered, the place names include towns in New York, Korea, Manchuria and Italy. Lee is a cosmopolitan writer whose novels explore human nature in terms such as the destructive effects of war or the debilitating effects of a life without purpose. This novel is his most expansive to date.
Sources
Lee, Chang-rae. The Surrendered, New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
Rifkind, Donna. "Book Review: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee," The Washington Post, March 9, 2010.
Carmen Sterba - Carmen Sterba has a B.A. in Far East Asian Studies and an M.A. in Literature. She is keen about Japanese history & Asian American ...
