The Queens of K-town

By Angela Mi Young Hur
MacAdam Cage

Considering the historically high rate of suicide among Asian American women, Angela Mi Young Hur’s first novel, The Queens of K-town, utilizes clock time and astrophysics in order to deconstruct the vertigo of depression, the syntax of falling and the mechanics of Cora’s bilingual, bicultural coming of age as an American-born daughter of Korean immigrants.

The novel is set alternately in Manhattan’s Koreatown during the summer Cora is sixteen, and one week ten years later when Cora returns to New York City to reach for her friend, another young Korean woman, who committed suicide that summer ten years ago.

As the daughter of a Thai immigrant mother, I am no stranger to Hur’s characterizations—the absent mother, the prodigal daughter—as well as the pressure to succeed that a first-born girl must bear, along with the inexpressible feelings of guilt, inadequacy, failure, shame and silence. While The Queens of K-town reminds me of such works as Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Hur’s twist on a common Asian American theme involves her focus on the psychological desires behind depression and suicide—the material aspects of which appear more often as caution and legend rather than as actual lived experience.

Against the backdrop of K-town mafia and upper class New York, Hur centers the Korean experience, exploring mixed race and interracial tensions both internalized and externalized. Her narratives ride the edge of sex, violence and power, hurling down an impossible path away from the pavement, away from death.

Suicide becomes a way to talk about the immigrant loss. The divided country of Korea parallels Cora’s divided family of orphans and refugees, and the absence of her parents is a mirror in which she sees her own displacement. While Hur illustrates Cora’s sexual interactions with men, Cora’s bisexuality is delicately noted in the intimacy she exchanges with her Korean friends, which arises from a deep need she is struggling to communicate. It is in the closeness she approximates with these girls, juxtaposed against the strangeness of her own family, that their strangeness becomes familiar and even desired.

Hur carves a place for mourning and grief within Cora’s experience, and that of many other daughters of Asian immigrants, within a culture taught to hide thought, need, love and sadness. Cora begins to learn how to communicate in these languages, to reach for the absent and the dead.

Review by Alysha Wood

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The Queens of K Town