Words of a Bibliophile

This is the third Lisa See novel that I've read after Peony in Love and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. While she mostly writes about China, this time she turns her attention to Jeju island in South Korea. I know about Jeju as a tourist destination and have heard a bit about the haenyeo — the island's all-female traditional divers — but this book helped me learn so much about them, the island in general, and the dark history of the Jeju uprising.

After reading several of See's novels, I've noticed that her strength is the extensive and in-depth research that allows her to put a lot of details about a period of history into her books. Unfortunately, those same details can make her writing feel dry with too much telling. The characters' speech also have the awkward tendency to sound like translations of historical texts or a collection of proverbs.

Plot-wise, one thing that bothered me in this book was the use of a soap opera-ish cliché which I will call the failure to explain. This is when a character, after being accused of doing something wrong that causes a rift with another character, tries to apologize and says, "You've never given me a chance to explain what really happened!" And then the character... talks about something else instead of explaining what really happened. Of course this is done to advance the plot because otherwise the conflict would be resolved immediately and we'd have no story, but it's always annoying.

Despite the above shortcomings I was still absorbed in the story, which includes brutal episodes in Jeju's history that was suppressed for decades (it reminded me of similar dark chapters in my own country's history). The violence can be difficult to read, but I think the historical events are an important topic to tell the world and fiction is a great vehicle to do so. But what fascinated me the most while reading this novel was learning about the haenyeo's peculiar position in Jeju's matrifocal or female-focused society which, in my opinion, still puts them secondary to men at the end of the day. I think this would be a fruitful discussion topic not just for book clubs but also multiculturalism, sociology or anthropology classes.