A Daughter’s Love Letter

Seems like everyone I know is buzzing about Theo of Golden by Allen Levi or The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. They’re on my list! But today, I’d love to tell you about a stirring novel I recently read with a law school book club: Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim.

Miracle Creek – a literary murder mystery and courtroom thriller – wades in deep on the topic of familial love. How far will a parent go to give his or her child a chance at a better life?

The story begins in a courtroom. A woman is on trial for the murder of her young son in the “Miracle Submarine,” a hyperbaric oxygen chamber used as an alternative treatment for certain mental and physical conditions including autism. The chamber exploded into flames on the one and only day she didn’t join him inside it – and physical evidence ties her to the cigarette that started the fire. She’s awfully quiet, but is she guilty? Lawyers both seek and distort the truth as the trial progresses.

Pak and his wife Young, Korean immigrants, own the Miracle Submarine; they sacrificed everything to come to America and give their adolescent daughter, Mary, a brighter future. She unfortunately hates everything about her new life. As the trial progresses, Pak comes under suspicion for negligence and more. The outcome of the trial will determine not only his future, but also his family’s. Secrets and lies abound.

Parents suffer willingly and wholeheartedly for their children – this we all know. Miracle Creek also painfully illustrates how children still suffer, despite and sometimes because of their parents’ best efforts.

Consider the mother and daughter at the heart of this story – Young and Mary. Young is a traditional Korean wife and mother who obeys her husband, Pak. Pak sends her and Mary to America before he can join them, a common arrangement at the time (the novel is set mostly in 2009). Working 7 days a week at a tiny inner-city convenience store owned by another immigrant family, Young feels tremendous anguish as her relationship with her daughter deteriorates. When Pak is able to join them in America, Mary draws close to him instead.

In interviews, Angie Kim reveals that she had a difficult relationship with her mother when her family immigrated from Korea to the U.S. Yet in this ensemble cast of complex and rich characters, the mother stands out as the most fully developed and most admirable. Miracle Creek seems to me Kim’s love letter to her mother – the beautiful and generous work of a daughter seasoned by time and her own experience of parenthood.

Over the course of the novel – as the trial progresses and the truth emerges – Young comes into her own voice. She has become the family’s moral compass.

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In addition to everything else, Miracle Creek is a novel of ideas. What if each person in the cast of characters had done one thing differently on the day of the explosion? Or – what if one person had done one thing differently?

As Young reflects: “But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together – one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad – every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness – resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

Kim’s novel asks: how in the world are we to behave in a world like this… a conspiracy of accidents?

In only one of her interviews that I’ve read does she refer to her Catholic upbringing. Yet a moral and even religious sensibility suffuses her novel. The only way to survive in such a world, perhaps, is to choose your moral compass, and let it be your North Star. All the rest must simply be accepted.

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I bought this music box for my mother in the airport in Seoul a month before she died. I suspected it would only be hers for a little while. When you turn the rabbit, it plays “Somewhere over the rainbow.”