Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories by Drake University professor Carol Roh Spaulding is well-deserving of winning the 2022 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, utilizing a masterful short story cycle structure spanning four generations of a Korean American family.
Add this to your fall TBR list. I believe you, too, will read the book in one sitting.
Standing around 200 pages, the collection is a flowing, fast-paced read about the Song family. Spaulding doesn’t shy away from striking commentary within different characters’ point-of-views about the racism the Korean family experiences in America. While centering around Gracie Song, the stories also transports us into the headspaces of her family members, providing a fuller view of their lives, individuality and culture over the 20th century.
“Day of the Swallows, 1924” details Gracie’s mother Changmi’s reflection on immigrating to the U.S.: “I leaned into the forward movement, into the wind and sky, urging the ship onward, utterly filled with, if blind to, my future. I licked the spray from my lips like tears.” Then, heartbreakingly and cruelly, the Immigration Act shatters her dreams of returning home, wherein she dubs herself “an exile.”
The story cycle continues with her children. Most interestingly is the story titled “A Former Citizen” in the point-of-view of a Song child who died young. The child observes her siblings — specifically her baby sister, Gracie, with whom she feels a kindred connection. Utilizing a ghost as narrator gives us a different sort of immediacy into the Songs’ lives that I enjoyed.
Then the title story “Waiting for Mr. Kim” shows a teenage Gracie coming to terms with the expectations placed on her for marriage. In “White Fate, 1959” Gracie’s father witnesses his daughter’s transformation in attending college and provides his blessing for her to marry a White man. “Typesetting, 1964” situates us in the Beatnik/counterculture movement and Gracie’s clever way to humiliate her fetishizing racist boss. “Made You Look, 1979” jumps to Gracie’s daughter Evie’s perspective and her growing understanding of sexuality.
In the longest section of the cycle, titled “The Inside of the World, 1997,” the fourth generation is reached with Adam, Gracie’s blonde-haired grandson she takes care of at Evie’s request after a period of estrangement from her daughter. (Here we get mentions of Iowa!) This moving story completes the cycle with an older Gracie teaching Adam about his Korean ties and coming to face her thoughts on family, love, sex, Asian-American identity and growing old.
Eventually, Gracie and Adam journey to her parents’ homeland: “She wondered about the person [her father] was in that limbo, that traveling self that was neither the person you had been nor the person you were about to come. She thought about both the willing and unwilling traversal of distances that had made her life — and Adam’s life — possible.”
With this poignant, beautiful moment and more in its pages, Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories is the perfect read for autumnal reflections.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.