The year-old disappearance of a Korean immigrant woman in Los Angeles is still a mystery to her family when a dead Black man with a letter addressed to her appears in their yard.
Sunhee “Sunny” Kim did not seem like the kind of mother who would vanish without a word from the lives of her daughter, Ana, a college graduate, and her son, Ronald—but there is much about the family's situation that is, as the title of Kim's second novel suggests, hidden from view. Sunny's relationship with her husband, John, a man deeply damaged by the atrocities and dislocations of the Korean War, is far from nurturing, and the family has not recovered from the burning of their gas station during the Rodney King riots. The complicated timeline, moving between the end of 1999 and earlier periods going back to 1977, very gradually provides answers to myriad questions: Why did Sunny leave? What was her relationship to the dead homeless man, Ronald “RJ” Jones, after whom she named her son, letting her husband believe it was for Ronald Reagan? Why was RJ estranged from his daughter, Rhonda, whose quest for answers about the father she never knew becomes entwined with Ana and Ronald’s? What was the exposé RJ was working on about the LAPD, where he was a janitor in the 1980s, and did he hide his evidence with Sunny, and is this why people are being mysteriously followed and murdered in the days after his death? If it sounds very complicated, it really is, and Kim doles out answers very, very slowly, spending a great deal of time reviewing and rereviewing the thoughts of each character, often having them consider stiffly phrased political questions. “While she had been speaking with Priscilla, the realization—that Ana, too, was a beneficiary of this specific system under which so many like RJ had been harmed—crept throughout her body. She had worked hard, yes, and up until high school, displayed excellence in all the subjects that centered the perspectives and accomplishments of gatekeepers (mostly, straight white men).” When answers to our questions finally come, in intense, violent scenes at the end of the book, it is a welcome relief.
A potentially propulsive tale suffers from a slow reveal and too many public service announcements.