Krys Lee's short-story collection "Drifting House"

All the lonely people








Drifting House

Krys Lee

3.65
1,113 ratings199 reviews
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An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.

Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.

In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants' unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter.

In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.

GenresShort StoriesFictionAsiaLiterary FictionAsian LiteratureLiteratureAmerican
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224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012
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About the author


Krys Lee7 books115 followers

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Krys Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in California and Washington, and studied in the United States and England. She was a finalist for Best New American Voices, received a special mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Conde Nast Traveller, UK (forthcoming). She lives in Seoul with intervals in San Francisco.
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3.65
1,113 ratings199 reviews
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 199 reviews


Kristen
180 reviews · 7 followers

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January 3, 2012
Much of what is categorized as "literary" is actually pretentious and annoying. Krys Lee's stories are neither. They were outside my comfort zone, but told with such straight-forwardness and luminosity that the book, once opened, was hard to put down.
The title story in particular came back to my thoughts again and again - two boys, abandoned by their mother, attempting to flee famine in North Korea to China.
I won this book through the firstreads program, and it's not the admittedly escapist fiction I prefer - fiction with insight, grace, and historical realism; yet fiction firmly in the Hollywood tradition of happy endings.
Lee's stories are slices of life so real that a reader longs to drop into the story and put things right. Just as a slice of your life doesn't have an ending - happy or unhappy - so Lee's characters don't have happy or unhappy endings. They rather dissolve into the human condition, full of sin and longing and either focusing on survival or, when survival isn't at stake, misdirecting their energy towards the ephemeral, feeling the wrong feeling and thus saying the wrong thing. There is a magical kind of sorrow here, and also surreal humor, all of it adding up to a glimpse of the drifting house that is the life of the expatriate, or the life at home when home has fallen apart. Worthwhile reading.
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Shirley
272 reviews · 215 followers

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March 3, 2012
This collection of moving stories focusing on both Koreas (and on Koreans in America) blew me away from start to finish. The writing is exquisite, haunting, precise, surreal, magical, dark, funny. The stories are fully realized and, although often focusing on the darkest thoughts and actions, have heart and humanity at center. You care about what the characters will do and what will happen to them, even as you flinch because they are in such desperate circumstances. One of the best short story collections I have read in some time.
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Queralt✨
474 reviews · 139 followers

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May 3, 2021
Drifting House is a collection of short stories focusing on the two Koreas, separated families, and the Korean diaspora.

The Salaryman and Drifting House were my absolute favorite stories in here. The first one relates to South Korea's 'economy first' mentality which links people's values to their jobs and efficiency and, if things turn sour, they are invisibilized by society (which often leads to suicide). Drifting House is about two brothers attempting to escape North Korea carrying the weight and guilt of their sister's death.

I'd like to mention I had never seen Itaewon mentioned so often in a book. Me likey.

Anyways, quotes I highlighted for some reason:
"Once, his father had believed in the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il the way the Korean immigrant community around them believed in God." (At the End of the World)

"A woman leaned over the counter, outraging Gilho's aesthetics with her silicone monstrosities." (The Goose Father)

"Do Chinese people really eat children's brains?"
"They don't need to," he said. "They are a land of rice bowls the size of you. (...) They eat rice every day there." (Drifting House)
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Jason Lundberg
70 books · 155 followers

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July 25, 2013
An astonishing collection, beautifully written, even as it describes incredible pain and sadness. Several of these stories broke my heart.
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Jessica
57 reviews · 20 followers

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August 15, 2014
There were many different characters introduced at different points in time...some were post-war, some modern Korean Americans, and although all of their identity stories were quite different, they are all presented with incredible difficulties and heartache. Several of these stories were very well written, but at the end when something "big" transpires it almost seems as the ending does not belong to the same narrative thread.

Character development is something Lee is very good at creating both archetypes (patriarchal male, subservient wife, dutiful children), and she has also created some rebels (the wife in the drifting house; the shaman family in At the End of the World). I truly cared about many of these characters, particularly the children.

My personal favorite was the Salaryman for the gut-wrenching nature of money lost is having in our current society, although I was thrown by Lee's narrative decision to have the story told in the second person. It made this story stick out like a sore thumb.

I wanted to love this book and hoped that it would be a true exploration of Korean-American culture. While I did find some of that here I also found sensationalistic endings that brought the stories far beyond what their limits should have been. I think alienation could have been handled just as hauntingly without including incest or murder. For this reason I could not remain glued to this book and I found it very difficult to finish. That said, I have rated this complete work a three but there were some five star stories in here most notably, A Temporary Marriage and At the Edge of the World.
I am looking forward to hearing more from Krys Lee.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free through the GoodReads First Reads giveaway.

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Jess
762 reviews · 42 followers

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April 10, 2017
This collection of short stories gave me all the feels. If you liked Jhumpa Lahiri's Intepreter of Maladies or you're looking for something to read after Pachinko, this is a great book to pick up.
2017
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Jill
1,215 reviews · 1,849 followers

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February 15, 2012
The Drifting House – the debut collection of Krys Lee – contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see again. But has she courted her own abuse? Phrases such as “her wounded body continued its ancient song” sum up, in a few sparse words, what the theme of the story is really about.

Then there’s The Goose Father – the traditional name for a father who faithfully sends money to his family overseas. The father – a one-time poet – takes in a young boarder who carries an actual goose with a wounded wing. In powerful prose, the father – Gilho – must come to terms with his true inclinations and his lifetime loneliness and alienation.

The Salaryman is stunning in its understated, naturalistic prose. In this story – told in second person – we watch a solid Korean businessman lose his job, his family, his confidence, and ultimately, his very humanity. It’s like watching a train wreck; it’s hard to look away.

There are many other good ones as well – the eponymous Drifting House, the most surreal of the lot, where two brothers and their very young sister try to escape North Korea’s countryside famine by fleeing to China. Yet they cannot escape their ghosts. And in The Believer, a mentally deranged Korean American woman commits a heinous crime; her daughter tries to comfort her father by performing an unspeakable act.

Ms. Lee is a young writer who is willing to take risks as she focuses her talent on those who are damaged, lonely, yearning. It’s not uplifting – marriages fail, men lose their sense of masculinity, women lose their sense of value, and most everyone feels displaced. Yet it offers amazing insights into the hopelessness and frustration that define a Korea that’s been through war, financial draught, and instabilities.


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Susie Spizzirro
70 reviews · 24 followers

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January 5, 2012
Drifting house was a difficult book for me to read.I gave it 4 stars because the writer has done an excellent job putting the reader in the same room as her tortured souls.
As I said before it is terrible what these familes have suffered through. Yes, I know this book is fictional, but I also know what happens to families & esp. the little ones.
As I think of the little girl who turns away from her mother after her mother has given her all to fine her child. The husbamd who takes his child to visit her mother in an aslyum.The daughter who willingly climbs in to her fathers bed. These are all horrible stories but we daily close our eyes to them.
One of the most touching was the little boy on the ice encouraging his little brother to keep running. the boy that killed his sick little sister. So sad.
Drifting House is a book of fiction but Krys Lee has done an excellent job of bringing her stars to life. I recommend this book.
Susie Spizzirro

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Sharon L. Sherman
80 reviews · 3 followers

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December 30, 2011
Krys Lee's portrayal of North Korean women and their children is an important read, especially in light of recent events surrounding Kim Jong-il's passing. Following several stories that alternate between different children's and parents' views of life in Korea versus the U.S., an "American" reader is invited to come to terms wiht the immigrant experience of war refugees and the longing for a place to belong.

Lee has published some of these short stories separately, but this collection proves insightful because what is familiar anywhere in the U.S. suddenly appears out of place--whether in Seoul, or in Koreatown, CA.--because it imposes on another way of life. Kudos to the author for developing a range of voices to tell stories that need to be heard.
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Chelsea
31 reviews · 5 followers

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February 1, 2018
I can't decide if this is a 3 or 4 star book for me...there were stories I loved - Beautiful Women, Drifting House, The Pastor's Son, A Small Sorrow - that captured the Korean, Korean immigrant and Korean American experience in a way that was raw, gritty, dark, complex, and then there were others that felt a little too forced toward an ambiguous end. I will say Lee's writing is lovely and I know there are stories I will revisit; stories that were haunting and heartfelt and tragic. Be warned, however: very little about this collection of short stories is light - there is beauty but the subject matter can be challenging and the characters deeply flawed.

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All the lonely people
Identity, loneliness and survival pervade Krys Lee's short-story collection "Drifting House"
Apr 11th 2012
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By J.P.O'M
Apr 11th 2012, 11:08 BY J.P.O'MTimekeeper IDENTITY, loneliness and survival haunt “Drifting House”, Krys Lee's debut collection of short stories. The tales are set in America, South Korea and North Korea, unified by the theme of immigration and its demoralising struggles. As someone who has led a peripatetic life herself, Ms Lee draws on first-hand knowledge. Born in Seoul, she moved to America at the age of four, then attended York University, and has spent the years since back in South Korea.Ms Lee has a natural gift for storytelling and her writing displays a rare clarity. The dark images embedded in these stories reveal a world ravaged by pain and conflict, and explore what drives human beings at their most primordial.The collection also poses questions about the hierarchy that exists in the traditional institutions that bind society together, such as government, family and the church. We spoke to Ms Lee about confronting taboos in literature, documenting the lives of lonely immigrants, and why she can never enter North Korea.What is the significance of the title of your new book?“Drifting House” is a very lonely image. There's a loneliness that we all carry, and for me that's symbolised through that image. It's also a very private symbol for me, because I spent most of my childhood moving house. I had a very restless father who didn't seem to be able to settle down.What attracts you to writing about characters that are marginalised and failures in life?I'm much more personally interested in the failures of people, just because it feels closer to me. I think it's really important to understand why that failure happens, because we all fail in different ways. In the apartment I grew up in, you could hear people every night beating each other, and part of that is to do with the economic pressures and the lack of dignity that comes with immigrant life. Immigrants have nostalgia for a country they have lost, and often expect to have a better life in the new country they have come to.The poverty that you write about in these stories—did you experience something similar growing up?Well, my family grew up without health insurance. My parents had a very minimal salary. Then my mother died of cancer. There were very traumatic experiences surrounding that, and a lot of scrambling for money, begging, and charity from hospitals. We went into great debt and lost our house. Also because my father was a pastor he was expected to give back to the church.Is this where all the religious imagery in the book comes from?Religion comes back into my work when I don't want it to. When you write fiction you find out what your own obsessions are, and one of mine is definitely religion. I see myself as someone that is no longer religious, but who is yearning for religion. When I step into a church, I feel a longing for something much greater than myself. I do feel that religion has given me a very strong moral core, but I don't know how I feel about God at this point, it's a constant negotiation.The central—and eponymous—story, “Drifting House”, is set in North Korea. What's your relationship with the country?I became friends with some North Korean activists and defectors, and out of those friendships I started to gain an interest in the country. The testimonies and the documents that I started to read, and some secretive video footage that I became exposed to, just made me furious. I think if you become engrossed with something long enough you end up writing about it. I've never been to North Korea and will probably never be allowed to go, because of an article in the LA Times regarding my work with a defector on the border area.What was your reaction to Kim Jong Il's funeral?I think Orwellian is a perfect description of it. When I think of North Korea, I always think of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. There were people in that crowd that were sympathetic, but not so many. Kim Jong Il lost the respect of many people when millions starved in the famine that happened there in the 1990s. There are people who believe in their government and people who don't. North Korea is no different to anywhere else. The problem is you can't demonstrate, speak, or write about it. It's so dangerous that you're lucky if you can share your political views with your own family.The collection has a darkness to it; does this reflect your state of mind when you were writing?At the time I was so haunted by the history of my country and my family. I was also ambivalent about how much you can reach beyond your own past, how great a hold the past has, on both the individual and a country. I'm in a slightly different place today, and my new novel will reflect that perhaps more than this short story collection does. Although my novel is still pretty dark and violent in places as well, but I think there is definitely more hope at the end.In the story “The Believer” you describe quite a disturbing incest scene. What made you want to confront such a taboo in your book?That story is not autobiographical, but for me it was an act of mercy from daughter to father. However, the form that it took definitely disturbed me, the sense of how love can take the strangest of shapes. I was almost in a trance when I wrote the incest scene between father and daughter, and when it was there, I was shocked by what I had uncovered in my own mind. I was incredibly moved and almost tearful in the process of the writing. For me this was a very true moment.What influences you to write?Greek plays, “The Odyssey”, Shakespeare, John Donne, John Ashbery, and the Bible. Just a mouthful of language, no matter what it's saying. Sometimes I'll just write and let the language lead me to whatever I am trying to hide from in my own brain.All the lonely peopleECONOMIST.COMAll the lonely peopleIDENTITY, loneliness and survival haunt “Drifting House”, Krys Lee's debut collection of short stories. The tales are set in America, South Korea and North...====
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