If history is made of culture’s collective memory, novelists have an important role in enlarging and complicating that memory — especially when it comes to the lesser-known chapters, even the ones that seem best forgotten. Crystal Hana Kim does exactly that in her courageous new novel, “The Stone Home,” which peers into the darkest corners and dares the reader to look.
In the years leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, South Korea ran a number of institutional “reformatories” ostensibly designed to “rehabilitate” vagrants and other marginalized people. That history serves as the foundation for Kim’s novel, which begins in 1980 with 15-year-old Eunju and her mother, who are living a hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth existence when they are abruptly seized by police and locked in an internment camp called the Stone Home. They are given no explanation, no recourse and no information about this place, but they quickly learn they are being held in a state-sponsored hellscape that will take them all their daring and resilience to survive.
The story of Eunju interweaves with that of Sangchul and his older brother, Youngchul. The teenage boys also were captured. Unlike Eunju, they have a home and a family they believe will rescue them; instead, they become prisoners, given no access to the outside world, and no details about where they are or how long they are to remain. Sangchul and Eunju share similarities — they are wily, intelligent, filled with grit and a fierce resolve to escape. They work together in one of the reformatory sweatshops; each has a kind of grudging admiration for the other, but in many ways they’re too alike to become friends.
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Intersecting these stories is another narrative line. In 2011, a strange woman appears at Eunju’s doorstep holding a knife. The woman says that the knife belonged to her father, who recently died, and that she has come in search of information. Stunned, Eunju recognizes the knife, an artifact of her past; at the same time, the identity of this visitor begins to dawn on her. Raised in the States, this young Korean American woman named Narae has almost no information about her biological family, but her father has indicated that Eunju holds the answers.
“The Stone Home” is, at its heart, an excavation of family secrets and a claiming of the truth, as Eunju suddenly finds herself unearthing repressed memories. In retelling these traumatic events to Narae, Eunju relives all of them.
The stories are horrific. The inmates of the Stone Home endure inhuman conditions at the hands of deranged individuals, such as Warden and Teacher. The prisoners are starved and beaten, the children are made to work long hours, laboring to meet impossible quotas, churning out fish hooks and sneakers that will be exported and sold overseas. Alliances between the inmates shift; friendships are made and betrayed. Eunju and Sangchul are both bolstered and frustrated by their incarcerated family members. Sangchul chafes against his older brother’s gentler nature, insisting that it’s only through brute strength that one can survive. Eunju frets endlessly over her mother, who will do anything to protect her daughter. More than 30 years later, Eunju despairs of ever being able to adequately convey these experiences to young Narae:
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“Her American impatience, her want to find a neat answer she can hold upright in her palm.
“I’m telling you what he wanted you to know. I point to the deepening sky, as if the answers are written.”
Eunju wishes she could soften these memories for Narae but believes she owes the young woman the unvarnished truth. “The Stone Home” is relentless in its account of brutality: Sometimes the writing is so emotionally overwrought and fragmented that it’s difficult to follow the chain of events. Still, the beauty of Kim’s prose creates a lyrical counterpoint to the atrocities she depicts, heightening the sense of poignancy, intimacy and horror.
Some fiction is both story and testimonial — a bearing witness to lessons that must not be forgotten. Haunting and elegiac, “The Stone Home” is fearless in its clear-eyed recounting. It asks readers to consider our own secret histories, to allow hard truths to be heard and, in so doing, to never let such barbarity happen again.
Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of “Birds of Paradise,” “Origin” and the culinary memoir “Life Without a Recipe.” Her most recent book is “Fencing With the King.”
The Stone Home
By Crystal Hana Kim
William Morrow. 352 pp. $30
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