In 1949, Yungman and his brother, Yung-sik, are still children. Though the village has only a single, precious well for its 20 families, it becomes famous in Korea for selling its water-rumored to have healing properties-to pay for a local school. The novel leaps back in time, and we see Yungman’s childhood in Water Project Village, a remote hamlet in the high mountains. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Unbeknownst to Einstein, or to Yungman’s wife, Young-ae, he has been keeping a lifetime’s worth of secrets.
At Thanksgiving dinner, while Einstein and his wife bask in their seeming wealth, Yungman is preoccupied by letters he’s been receiving from Seoul, and hiding, unread, in a copy of Shogun. Should he exceed maximum care time with any client, he is fined for “wage theft.” Clients barely register his presence, since they’re hooked up to virtual reality headgear, with one woman reduced to pawing the air “like a kitten.”Ĭhapter by chapter, sometimes even line by line, the absurd and tragic mesh. At Depilation Nation, “where unwanted hair comes to die,” a nameless, undocumented worker shows Yungman how to operate the Defolliculator II, which interfaces with Yungman’s SANUSwatch.
A “doctorpreneur” and shareholder of SANUS, he secures Yungman a job in the Mall of America. Einstein lives in an estate called King Arthur’s Court, complete with moat and drawbridge, in a development named Custom History Valley. Set in the year 20XX-a not quite parallel but not quite future time-Yungman’s Minnesotan life is portrayed with a hard satirical edge.
As Yungman tells his “Korean-ish” son, Einstein, “You can hardly call it medicine.
SANUS, its new parent company, is embracing retail medicine, filling the Mall of America with outlets like Speedee Dialysis, Vaccines R US, and At Your Cervix. Yungman Kwak, MD, ob-gyn, wakes up one day to find Horse’s Breath General Hospital, where he’s worked for decades, shuttered. What begins as the narrative of an immigrant doctor’s forced retirement-setting in motion a stream of memories-becomes instead a story of adventure through a war-torn, and also farcical, world. Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s The Evening Hero is a universe of trap doors.
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