Author Frances Park takes you from the streets of postwar Korea to an apartment complex in Fairfax County in her sweeping historical novel, Blue Rice. The story follows a young Korean woman’s move to the U.S. after losing her entire family, working in a brothel, and marrying an American soldier. When her husband abandons her in a foreign land, resilient protagonist Honey, nee Hanhee, rebuilds her life once again.
The cinematic tale hits close to home for Springfield native Park, whose mother grew up in northern Korea and immigrated to the U.S. after the war. But Park says that while now, “my work always reflects my heritage,” it wasn’t always that way.
“I started writing when I was 10,” Park says. “With no other Koreans around, all my writing was about white people, because that’s all I knew. And it didn’t dawn on me until much later that I had a lot to draw on.”
Her works include the memoir in essays That Lonely Spell: Stories of Family, Friends & Love and several award-winning children’s books co-written with her sister Ginger, with whom she owns the artisanal chocolate shop Chocolate Chocolate in Dupont Circle.
The richly drawn character of Honey/Hanhee was inspired by the Korean mother of a boy Park tutored when she was in fifth grade. “Many years later, I would learn that she was illiterate and had worked as a prostitute after the Korean War,” Park says.
Dedicated “To all the lives lost and souls shattered by The Korean War, and to my late mother who lived and breathed it as she carried on in America, humming Korean songs,” Park says the novel had been circling in her brain for decades. She started writing it more than 20 years ago, discarding and adding sections and characters over the years. “That book never quite left my mind. And I always thought, ‘I know I can get this right.’”
Trips to Korea as a child in the 1960s left an imprint. “That picture of poverty has never left me,” Park says, emphasizing the starving children she saw all around her in the postwar environment. And details from her parents’ lives, such as a female friendship her mother made in the U.S., also made it into Blue Rice.
“You listen to your parents your whole life and then, you know, you don’t think you are recording all this stuff, but you are.” Park, who says she “straddles both worlds” as a Korean American, hopes the story of “triumph, family, and heartbreak” will resonate with readers.
Feature image courtesy Frances Park
This story originally ran in our June issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
