Although the stories in Paul Yoon’s latest collection range from northern Vermont and the Costa Brava to the Russian Far East, and chronologically from 17th-century Japan to more less the present day, with stops along the way in Tsarist Russia and the Cold War, they all feature protagonists who are Korean in one way or another. But the superficial complexities in The Hive and the Honey belie the simplicity of Yoon’s language and his skill at his craft. The seven stories in this (all too) brief collection provide ample justification for Yoon’s reputation as a stylist.
One story, and one of the best, “Person of Korea”, appeared and was reviewed in the Asian Review of Books separately two years ago. Vivid and laconic, it takes place mostly in Sahkalin, “950 kilometers long and 160 kilometers wide. It is like a giant, leaping fish.” The story, and the telling, is spare. Maksim’s father is away working in Sakhalin as a guard at a prison. Maksim, still a teen, has been living on the mainland with his uncle, who has died. With such money as there was having run out, Maksim sets off with his dog to find his father, which first requires finding a boat. Yet when Maksim hears his father laugh for the first time in years, “it is like ash being thrown over a small fire inside him.”
History, whether geopolitical or personal, may not weigh heavy in Yoon’s work, but it is omnipresent. All the stories deal with people coping with being out of place and sometimes out of time: stories about identity, immigration and escape, yes, but the combinations are far more intricate than normal. In “Komarov”, a North Korean refugee who now works as a cleaner in Barcelona in, one supposes, the 1980s, is contacted by Korean security agencies because her son is a boxer for the USSR and is making his first appearance in the West.They had been separated and the boy ended up with a Korean family in Uzbekistan (such is the complexity of the Korean diaspora).
“At the Post Station”, which takes place in Japan in 1608, is similarly complex. A Korean child, orphaned as an infant in a Japanese invasion and brought up in Japan, is being returned to representatives from Korea, a place he no longer knows, speaking a language now foreign to him.
At the opposite end of the collection are “Bosun”, about a Korean immigrant ex-con who tries to make a new life for himself in a tiny community in Vermont, and “Cromer”, which takes place in a run-down English seaside tourist town.
The settings and situations are so interesting, or at least out-of-the-ordinary, that Yoon’s understating prose can slip by unnoticed. The mother in Barcelona
had a thousand questions … but every time she attempted to pluck one out, the questions slipped away. She felt like she was trying to catch kites whose strings she had lost.
The stories rarely end as one might expect; some hardly end at all. Yoon quotes a song (whether real or otherwise):
Every night, the moon rose from here, and fell, and shattered. And then built itself back up again.
The Hive and Honey is a bit like that: as one story rises and falls, Yoon builds a new one to take its place.