Happiness Falls

“It’s funny with siblings, how you think of them as just there, but then something great or awful happens that unearths and makes visible what Koreans call jeong. It’s hard to explain in English; it’s not any particular emotion—not affection or even love—but a complex bond defined by its depth and history: that sense of belonging to the same whole, your fates intertwined, impossible to sever no matter how much you may want to.”

Angie Kim uses complex syntax and asyndeton, or the omission of a conjunction between parallel structures, to emphasize the complexity of the concept of jeong. The sentence itself performs the difficulty of defining the term, which is significant to the novel’s theme of the inexplicability of family connection.

“Even before I saw the police uniforms through the peephole, I had the feeling of everything changing. Their flashing lights must have been on, the red-and-blue strobe beams slicing through the faux-sunset backdrop and setting my senses on edge. I don’t remember seeing the lights, but I must have. That’s the only explanation I have for what I did next. I scooped up the pile of Eugene’s dirty clothes and rushed to the laundry room to throw them in the washer with heavy-duty detergent. I pressed Start. As the doorbell rang again, I ran back to Eugene, whispered ‘come on,’ and led him into the bathroom. I turned on the shower and told him to get in. I put soap on a sponge and handed it to him, pointed to his fingernails. I mimed scrubbing, told him to scrub hard. Get everything off. Wash it away, clean.”

Kim employs vivid imagery, which highlights the striking visual of the police lights and the sunset, but the passage undercuts the reality of those images: The phrase “flashing lights must have been on” suggests that they maybe weren’t, and the “faux-sunset backdrop” feeds into the motif of masks (See: Symbols & Motifs) to paint the sunset as a fake theatrical prop. Similarly, the fact that the instruction to “get everything off. Wash it away, clean” is in indirect discourse rather than in dialogue suggests that Mia is unsure exactly what she is saying in her heightened emotional state.

“Details were jumping out at me, from the way I grabbed salt at breakfast and Dad said, ‘Mia, you should taste it before you assume it needs salt’ (trying to teach me one last life lesson?), to him making real bacon instead of our usual tofu bacon (a last-meal treat, knowing cholesterol issues would soon be moot?). But even more those specifics I noticed only in retrospect there was a different feel to the breakfast as a whole—a bit off, or rather, too on, everything 5 percent brighter than usual. Eugene’s smile, for one, seemed less nebulous, directed at and connected to specific comments and people, his happiness rising and waning in waves rather than remaining steady at one level. Once, he laughed at a joke Mom told. He often laughed when everyone else laughed, but that morning, I noticed him looking at Mom directly, his eyes in focus, like he got the joke and was laughing at that rather than due to some contagion effect.”

The use of parentheticals in this passage highlights the numerous possibilities of Adam’s disappearance. Further, these syntactical choices indicate an additional layer of hindsight, as Mia thinks about these events after the fact. Ascribing Eugene’s sometimes involuntary laughter to a “contagion effect” has a dual meaning, emphasizing the novel’s pandemic