THE LIBERATORS

A multigenerational novel centered on a Korean woman who flees the South Korean dictatorship and immigrates to California in 1983.

The novel opens with a death and a marriage. Soon after her father is killed under the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk marries Sungho, a boy in her year at school. Sungho moves to San Jose not long after, leaving Insuk—now pregnant with a boy, Henry—behind with his difficult mother, Huran. A year later, Sungho sends for Insuk and Huran, and the whole family relocates to California. Insuk struggles with a difficult transition and befriends Robert, a Korean activist advocating for the reunification of North and South Korea. Snatches of conversation and throwback segments strewn throughout the novel impart snippets of modern Korean history, including the 1945 sinking of the Ukishima Maru, a passenger ship that exploded during a trip that was supposed to repatriate thousands of Koreans from Japan at the end of World War II; the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, which followed widespread protests after the South Korean general Chun Doo-hwan assumed power and imposed martial law; and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when doves symbolically released for peace were burned alive by the Olympic cauldron. As the novel unfolds, the reader encounters various stakeholders' perspectives conveying what it felt like to live through these events. Quiet attention is paid throughout to the role of American imperialism in modern Korean history and the violence it has wreaked, but the novel's pedagogical elements never tip it into didacticism. Koh’s poetic prose delights with surprising metaphors and a cast of skillfully rendered characters.

A mesmerizing, delicately crafted novel about survival in the wake of civil war and transpacific imperialism.