#korean american novelist

by REERA YOO

When Korean American novelistPatricia Park first read Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian novelJane Eyre at the age of 12, she was struck by how the titular heroine was scorned by society and her relatives solely because of her orphan status. “Orphan” was a word Park often heard her mother throw around whenever she misbehaved as a child.

“My mother used to say to me in her limited English, ‘You act like an orphan!’ This never made sense to me,” Park, 34, tells KoreAmvia email. “How do you actlike an orphan? You either are one or you aren’t.”

After reading Brontë’s 19th-century tale, Park realized that her mother’s generation of Koreans—those who grew up during the Korean War—perceived orphans as outcasts with questionable lineage, morals and manners. To “act like an orphan,” Park realized, meant you behaved in a shameful way that proved to others you didn’t receive a “good family education.”

“My mind drew the link between the Victorian construct of the orphan and the Korean post-war one, and ReJanewas born,” Park says.

Released in hardcover in May, Park’s debut novel is a modern retelling of Brontë’s classic tale, only set in New York’s sprawling outer boroughs and South Korea in the early aughts. Jane Re is a half-Korean, half-Caucasian recent college graduate who, since childhood, has lived with her strict uncle and his family in Flushing, a neighborhood Jane describes as “all Korean, all the time.”

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