Written by Rich Rogers
Still Life with Rice by Helie Lee
Trade paperback, 320 pages, $16.00
Young Helie Lee finds herself chafing under pressure from her mother and grandmother–Hongyong Baek–to get married. Born in Korea, Helie left at a very young age, and for all intents and purposes grew up American. A conversation with her mom and grandmother leaves an impression on her–they took her away from the Cold War and a divided Korea, for America so the kids could be more Korean in America and grow up without the fear of war always hanging over their heads. In a rash adventurous moment, Helie heads to Seoul, South Korea, without any plan to find out more about her family’s past. She meets uncles and cousins she’s never heard of, and learns more about her grandmother’s past. Stunned, Helie decides to learn even more, flying to China to investigate the Korean community still there, and finally back to California to talk to her grandmother directly.
After returning to California, Lee interviewed her grandmother about her life, and then wrote her story, in her grandmother’s voice. Still Life with Rice falls into the category of the late Alex Haley’s Roots. Given that she was writing for her grandmother, some, if not most, of the conversations are fictional, as Haley referred to his own story–it’s fact-tion. (Jimmy Buffett’s term is “fictional facts, and factual fictions.”) It has all the facts correct, but has some fiction mixed in there, so one can assume it’s mainly conversations.
What follows is an engaging story that opens the door to Korean life in the first half of the 20th century.
Lee tells of a headstrong girl in a well-to-do Korean family. A girl who loved going fishing with her father, but had a hard time controlling her tongue and was often beaten by her mother. Her marriage was arranged, and eventually she came to love her husband. At the time, Korea was under Japanese rule, and it was difficult for Koreans to be Korean at the time. So the family moved to China to join the Korean community living there because the country was so large the Japanese left them alone.
And that’s when the story really gets interesting.
During their time there, Baek and her husband run a successful restaurant and become very wealthy. Wanting more money, she also started running an opium smuggling operation. In the same period, she also converted from Buddhism to Christianity. She learned the Chinese healing art of ch’iryo, which she practiced there, and reestablished in Korea and America.
Being Korean, she gives an interesting view of World War II from where she was living in China. They were ecstatic over the Japanese defeat, because it meant the yoke of the cruel Japanese rule was finally broken. But that also opened the door for the Korean War.
Baek and her family moved back to what would become North Korea after the end of World War II and bought a lot of land and once again became prosperous land owners, with what would be the Korean equivalent of serfs or indentured workers on their land. War found them again. For me this was one of the most interesting parts of the book, learning about what was going on in North Korea during the war: The propaganda they were being fed by the government, saying the South attacked first, when it was the North. It’s also one of the most heartbreaking sections as you learn of the suffering the family endured. Their journey to the south was truly harrowing. The North Koreans and the Chinese accused the West of bombing innocent civilians. What they didn’t say was the military was using columns of fleeing civilians as human shields to transport weapons and war materiel in those same columns. (Hamas must be reading from the same play book.)
Whenever I put it down, I couldn’t wait to get back to reading it. I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up book about Helie tracking down her uncle who was left behind in North Korea.
