25 Oct / The Lucky Gourd Shop by Joanna C. Scott [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
The phenomenon of transracial adoption is literally changing the face of – for lack of a better word – ethnic literature. Check out the recent titles: Darin Strauss’s Chang and Eng, a biography about the world’s most famous Siamese twins, Adam Fifield’s A Blessing Over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother, a memoir/biography about Fifield’s adopted Cambodian-born brother, and Karin Evans’ The Lost Daughters of China; Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past, written by the Caucasian mother of a Chinese daughter in which she touchingly constructs the possible story of her daughter’s birth mother’s life.
Now comes an entire novel, Joanna Catherine Scott’s The Lucky Gourd Shop, in which, through fiction, the author breathes life into the young woman who gave birth to her three adopted Korean-born children.
The novel opens almost 11 years after the adoption, when the oldest is now 17; the three children and their adoptive mother have received a dead-end letter from Korea which offers no new information about their birth mother. But it is enough to prompt the oldest child, a son, to finally let loose the memories he has held onto alone for too long. With “a writer’s instinct,” the mother pulls out pen and paper.
The story she constructs is a tragic, heartbreaking tale of inevitable lost chances. Mi Sook, abandoned at birth, is raised by a succession of women who run the coffee shop behind which she was found. These women care enough to feed and clothe her during the day, but never enough to take her home to their families at night. She grows up in the shop’s back room, a naive, beautiful young woman with dreams of independence and achievement. She becomes involved with a married man, Kun Soo, who eventually marries her when she is pregnant with their third child, but the union is embittered and violent. When Kun Soo dies, the grandmother realizes that Mi Sook cannot support the family, and in a last desperate act of caring, she abandons the children in the safety of an orphanage just before she dies of utter exhaustion and grief.
Surprisingly well-researched, the novel is certainly a first – more of its kind will undoubtedly follow. If there was one complaint, however, it is not so much literary as it is emotional: in the opening framing story, Scott continuously refers to the children as “the boy,” “the girl(s),” and I only want to ask, at what point will these children be claimed as “my son,” and “my daughters”? At what point will all these adopted children finally be claimed?
Review: aOnline website, October 25, 2000
Readers: Adult
Published: 2000