When Thomas Pak is hired as a clerk at a Korean grocery, he isn't prepared for the searing racial tensions that threaten to destroy the neighborhood in which he lives and works. His tenuous relationship with the store owners and their young daughter is jepordized by his own conflicting affiliations of race and class, and these turbulent forces soon converge violently around him.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Thomas Pak, a 26-year-old Korean American, straggles home broke to Kasdan, Queens, after he is laid off from his restaurant job in Boston. Although Tom is a college graduate, his prospects have sunk along with his hometown neighborhood. Once middle-class with a population of Italians, Asians and blacks, Kasdan is now crime-ridden. Tom takes a job at the Fruit 'n Food, the local market run by a hardworking Korean family, and the store becomes an embattled haven for him, a vulnerable middle-class island in a sea of racially motivated hate and despair. Tom, however, maintains that he is more American than Asian, and more tolerant than his employers, the terrified and driven Rhee family. Small conflicts like shoplifting escalate to armed robberies and to a boycott by some black customers claiming racist harassment by the owners. In the midst of the tension, the Rhees' teenaged daughter rebels against the blinding work ethic of her parents by having an affair with Tom. Tom himself comes to understand the helplessness and fear the Rhees feel only as the violence reaches its natural but horrific finale. In his first novel, Chang ably captures the dislocation rational people experience when faced with violence, but his attempts to maintain a balanced point of view intrude and read like clumsy polemics. Perhaps in his next novel, Chang will attend more to the needs of his story and less to the demands of political correctness. (Nov.) Social Fiction.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Chang is patient and precise. His knack for dismantling sentiment and rendering the real is stunning." -- Michael Martone, Safety Patrol
"The Fruit 'N Food is a book of...compressed inter-racial and inter-generational conflicts that implode with frightening truth..." -- KoreAm Journal
"The Fruit 'N Food is a thoroughly enjoyable, wonderfully written, socially relevant piece of contemporary fiction." -- The Pacific Reader
"The Fruit 'N Food is a book of...compressed inter-racial and inter-generational conflicts that implode with frightening truth..." -- KoreAm Journal
"The Fruit 'N Food is a thoroughly enjoyable, wonderfully written, socially relevant piece of contemporary fiction." -- The Pacific Reader
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chang's candid portrayal of a dark urban world,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fruit 'N Food, The (Hardcover)
Enter Thomas Pak, isolated Korean-American set apart from the world by circumstance, by generational boundaries. He is an individual that becomes inextricably tied to the Fruit N' Food, a job that offers him human connections, as well as money, for a basic need: survival & life. However, the racial rage that envelops this mileu brings to it a certain sacrifice: racism begets racism in this world, and often brings down everyone within it. With a clear, meticulous literary voice, Chang describes this setting with a stylistic candor; bringing to the fore themes of the Asian "American-dream", race, hate and class struggle. Tom Pak is rendered through a Stranger-eque portrait with sometimes graphic observation, only for us to realize his lost role in a society that bewilders him even further.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
in the heart of the heart of the tension,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fruit 'N Food, The (Hardcover)
everyone's fighting the hell out of each other trying to get at that American Dream and it's not a pretty sight...crab cage with the claws out chopping and clamping and poor old Tom Pak is getting the crap beaten out of him...this is the closest i've seen to some writer getting at the screwed-up racial mess the cities are going through and i'm glad he wrote this...
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Similarities to THE STRANGER,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fruit 'N Food, The (Hardcover)
I kept thinking of Camus when I read this novel, but I don't think the existential underpinnings were fully explored by the author. I think he subordinated the idea of the quotidian existence for the flash and excitement of racial tension (and the boycotts). He also took Sartre's idea of NAUSEA a little too literally, I thought. Nevertheless, this was much more ambitious than most first novels coming out these days...
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