SECONDHAND WORLD

In Min’s troubling yet lovely debut, a Korean-American burn victim circa 1976 tries to make sense of the house fire that killed her parents.

While recovering from burns over 30% of her body, 18-year-old Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa for short—looks back on her life and the life of her parents to understand why one of them set the fatal fire the night before Isa was to graduate from high school. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor in Albany, had always seemed cold and remote. Her docile mother, a beautiful former ballerina lightly scarred from a fire in her own childhood, had returned to college to study poetry. Isa, an only child since her younger brother died in a tragic accident, rejected much of her parents’ Korean culture and rebelled against her father’s authoritarian rules. Ambivalent about standing out, she wanted to be fully American. She spent more and more time at her friend Rachel’s house, drawn as much by Rachel’s messy but relaxed parents as by Rachel. Isa became romantically involved with another outsider at school, Hero, a blind Albino who imagined himself the next Johnny Winter. After his parents threatened to send him to a special school for the visually impaired, Hero convinced Isa and Rachel to run away with him to California. The three shared a moment of sexual experimentation that titillated yet frightened them before they were apprehended and brought home, their relationships shattered. Still distraught at losing Hero, Isa caught her mother kissing her poetry professor. She told her father, who was, of course, crushed. After the fire, Isa assumes her father’s responsibility until she reads his journal, which makes clear that he was incapable of such violence. Isa recognizes that her mother set the fire, but realizes that placing guilt matters less than appreciating her own survival. Isa’s parents remain cloudy but powerful mysteries.

Min evokes period and place as well as characters with stringent attention and honesty.