Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2011: Tradition, love, and sacrifice--in Samuel Park's novel, This Burns My Heart, these immensely powerful forces propel the struggles of Soo-Ja Choi in post-war South Korea. Soo-Ja starts out as a privileged young women straining against the suffocating traditions of her family and culture, yet it is her own allegiance that drives her to enter into a loveless marriage rather than break tradition and marry the man who knows her heart. Soo-Ja's marriage is a yoke she cannot shake, crushing her with familial servitude and hardship, but, like the culture itself, she perseveres--and true love follows her through the years like a message in a bottle waiting to be washed ashore. A heartrending story with a remarkable heroine who is both maddening and humbling, Park's elegant prose resonates with the quiet force of love in all its guises and a country struggling to be reborn. --Seira Wilson Amazon Exclusive: Janice Y.K. Lee Interviews Samuel Park Janice Y.K. Lee is the New York Times best-selling author of The Piano Teacher, which was also a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Richard and Judy Summer Read pick in the UK, and published in 24 languages. Janice Y.K. Lee: Samuel, it's a pleasure to be e-interviewing you. I only wish we could do it in person. I really enjoyed your book and found much to admire in it. Samuel Park: Thank you, Janice. It's an honor to be doing this with the author of The Piano Teacher. JL: Many elements of this book resonated with me; I think it speaks to a Korean experience common to both Koreans and Korean-Americans. This is your mother's story, you have said. Tell us about the process of novelizing it. SP: I was inspired by a real life event that happened to my mother the day before her wedding: another man asked her to choose him instead of her fiance. My mother, of course, turned him down, but once her own marriage deteriorated, she often wondered, "What if." So the question that intrigued me was, What does it mean to pick X instead of Y? Do you still have the life you were supposed to have, or is it another life altogether? The book is about the consequences of the choices that we make. JL: Korea as a country experienced incredibly rapid growth and transformation in the 20th century. How did you feel about having to write about such enormous changes in one book? Did you do research to find out what life was like in Korea in the mid-twentieth century? SP: I did a lot of research. I wanted to capture the excitement and uncertainty of living through a sea change in a country's history. Soo-Ja's personal metamorphosis becomes a microcosm for the events happening around her. What happens to Soo-Ja, in essence, is what happens to South Korea: As Soo-Ja fights to escape poverty and become a successful businesswoman, her country too struggles to move from the devastation of the Korean War to its rise as one of the so-called "Asian tigers." She herself may be unaware of this, but her own experience is very much emblematic of the cataclysmic shifts. JL: How do you think a non-Korean reader, tabula rasa in terms of Korean customs or family traditions, will react to the book? SP: So far, the reaction I've got is that readers are intrigued by the cultural details of the book. Like hanbok, the traditional Korean gown that is often mistaken for kimono, but is quite different. Unlike kimono, which allows for little freedom of movement, hanbok is loose at the bottom, and you can practically run in it. This speaks to the paradoxical nature of gender norms in Korea, where mothers hold exalted, glorified positions, but until 1977 could easily lose custody of their children JL: Family dysfunction is a common theme in novels. Can you talk a little bit about the inimitable Korean brand of family dysfunction? In particular, I'm thinking of the very illogical ways in which family members interact with each other, never telling each other facts that might solve problems, or brewing in martyrdom when everyone would benefit from a little honesty. You know what I mean! SP: I know what you mean. In the novel, the father sacrifices much of his fortune to help his daughter. It's a very dramatic gesture, but it's also his only means to express love in a culture that isn't verbal or demonstrative of one's feelings. I'm generalizing here, but I think Koreans often use money as a means to express emotions otherwise kept repressed. I was interested, then, in exploring not only the way money corrupts family relations, but also how it creates powerful bonds between people. Koreans often measure the extent of their love by the amount of sacrifice they perform for the other person. It's beautiful and maddening at the same time. JL: What did your mother think about the book? SP: She hasn't read the whole book, but she liked the parts she read. At the end of the day, the book is a work of fiction, and my mother has a healthy separation between the character and her. She knows that she inspired Soo-Ja but is not Soo-Ja, if that makes sense.
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