When Jung Yoon's ex-boyfriend contacts her for the first time in eight years, she assumes it's to deliver bad news. Jung, currently mourning her mother's recent death, is unprepared to learn that their former professor, with whom they both once shared a strong bond, is now dying. The news causes a host of memories to resurface--of college life, of young love and of the fragile world they once shared. This wave of introspection is the driving force behind I'll Be Right There, by South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin.
Though the story unfolds within the tumultuous political climate of 1980s South Korea, Jung's recollections of college life often seem indistinguishable from a contemporary American student's. Recalling her art school, she laments, "The male students were more interested in protesting and drinking than in going to class, and the female students were busy preening or being dramatically depressed." The narrative feels so familiar to Western readers that it is easy to forget the protests she refers to hold tremendous political significance, and were met with violent backlash from police.
Still, Jung's deepest struggles are not bound to time or place. Shin's skill lies in her ability to transmute the specific into the universal: loneliness, loss and the sweet anxiety of first love are experiences made broadly familiar through Jung's keen self-awareness. It is no doubt due to Shin's poignant yet accessible style that her bestselling Please Look After Mom has been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. --Annie Atherton