Customer Reviews

The Lucky Gourd Shop: A Novel

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After reading book reviews in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor applauding Joanna Catherine Scott's book "The Lucky Gourd Shop" I had to get my own copy. For once I wasn't disappointed. Scott's literary style is brilliant, one that could only be accomplished by a gifted poet. Her words flow like verse set to music. The characters, when introduced, fly from the pages and become real people with a sometimes sad, but often enough uplifting, tale to tell. I love books that take the reader to a different place, one that would be impossible to get to. The Lucky Gourd Shop did that for me. Scott introduces the reader to a South Korea, desolated by war, overrun by poverty. Only the author's personal background in Asia and her passionate research with attention to the most minute of details could have accomplished the presentation of a place so different from the one we inhabit. At times on the journey through "The Lucky Gourd Shop" it's difficult to comprehend that this place exists in our world. Scott's characterizations are outstanding. I will always remember that grandmother, plugging away, never giving up, and trying to do the best with what she has for her family. The little boy, not really a child, watching over his sisters, grubbing for food and surviving in his meager existence is another unforgettable, real person. The wedding shop owner brings to mind the indomitable Asian women running businesses in our neighborhoods. The husband, though a drunk and a wife-beater, grabs the reader's sympathy because of the cultural burden imposed on him by the narrow society he occupies. Then there's Mi Song, who couldn't comprehend how many times she had been "found", or passed from one person to another since her early abandonment in back of the Seoul coffee shop. Throughout the book as she missed opportunities, faced choices, I wanted to shout out, "No, no, don't do that...go the other way!" But oh, how she perseveres! How proud Scott's adopted Korean children must be at the perhaps fictional but nonetheless believable presentation of this brave woman as their birth mother. They also must be proud of Joanna Catherine Scott, the mother who has cherished them since their early childhood for presenting them with this penetrating narrative reflecting their heritage. The "Lucky Gourd Shop" is a must read! I only wish there was a sixth star available for me to rate it!

The book's opening chapter starts out great: I would have loved to have heard more about the three children. But once the fictional reimagining begins, I became incredulous. Scott knows nothing about a real Korean family and makes disturbing generalizations that wouldn't bother me if it weren't for the fact that many adoptive parents will be reading, and believing, this book.

First, the notion that a young girl could be orhpaned in the back of a shop and "raise herself" through a succession of "Ama's" (Scott's mistransliteration for mother, "Omma") is preposterously unbelievable. The depiction of this Korean girl as a primitive savage who views TV as "people inside boxes" like Tarzan meeting civilization is outrageously offensive. I won't even go into the depiction of the father as a cruel Oriental patriarch. But her assertion that Korean women are passive, servile slaves to men, who don't even have a name except in relation to her role as mother is distorted and wrong. Men are often addressed as "So-and-so's father" (my own father, for e.g., Jeong-suk Appa) just as women are!; Koreans often do NOT address each other by their personal names but by their relationships: uncle, teacher, sister, etc. But Scott takes the tag of the "mother of such child" and makes it seemas if this is due to sexism in Korean culture. This only perpetuates the worst stereotypes of Korea and makes adoptive parents feel better for having "rescued" Korean babies from that terrible country. I feel sorry for adoptees who read this and will grow and up and feel self-hatred for their horrible country of origin. Does anybody want to talk about America's responsibility for the devastation that took place in Korea that necessitated international adoption? Does anyone really know that Korea is the 14th largest economy in the world? I suspect Ms. Scott has her own personal issues with Western feminism. Korea is a convenient place for her to dump her own hang-ups, at the expense of dignity and truth. Take the advice of the other reviewer: study Korean hisotry and culture on your own, not from this awful book.

Joanna Scott's richly imagined The Lucky Gourd Shop begins in America, where the adoptive mother of three Korean children tries to find out more about their pasts. But where she fails, we succeed; the rest of the novel takes us back a generation, to a South Korea ravaged by years of poverty and war. There we meet Mi Sook--orphan, independent spirit, and, as soon becomes clear, the children's birth mother. Found abandoned in an alley and raised like a stray in the back room of a coffee shop, Mi Sook grows up pretty, bubbly, and happy enough, but still "that rare creature in her society, one who did not draw her sense of self from fixed relationships with others." In South Korea, of course, to be without fixed relationships--to be without family--is to live in a dangerous limbo, and soon enough Mi Sook finds trouble.
Throughout the events that follow, Scott's powerful narrative voice never fails to convince. In her telling, this is a story without villains; even the violent husband is no monster when we learn the intense economic and cultural pressures with which he struggles. More to the point, it's also a story without victims; as in all great works of literature, Scott's characters are made of flesh and blood, capable of agency and action and especially mistakes. This novel succeeds on a number of levels, as an imaginative leap between nations and generations and as a snapshot of a culture in transition. Most of all, however, The Lucky Gourd Shop is a precise, affecting, and unsentimental portrait of Mi Sook herself, of hardships endured without knowing they're hardships and choices that are scarcely choices at all.

I have just returned from a trip to a remote part of Mexico, where perhaps incongruously I read the most wonderful book about Korea, "The Lucky Gourd Shop." Some how it didn't seem out of place. The novel is an Asian "My Antonia," reminding us that the frontier qualities of courage, independence, and determination transcend nation and culture. "The Lucky Gourd Shop" has everything you look for in a book: an engaging story, characters you care about, a glimpse at an unfamilar (to me anyway) culture, insight into human nature, and gorgeous language (Scott is also a poet). This is a book I am giving and recommending to family and friends, and I recommend it to you.

All the positive reviews are true. It's captivating and beautifully written, what there is of it. But the story of the three children's search for their birthparents is hastily glued on to the front of the book. As many reviewers mentioned, the story isn't about them at all. It's about the birthparents who they will presumably never learn about. Why do that without telling us anything about the lives those children ended up having, especially since the older ones remember their difficult beginning? The ending seemed abrupt and disappointing, as it left me with many questions about those children and how this beginning affected their lives. It seemed like half a book, and the other half promised to be even more interesting.

It is hard to imagine a more tragic figure than the strong and lovely Mi Sook, who was abandoned at birth, reared in the storage room of a Seoul coffee shop and who becomes the mistress (and later the wife) of a poor construction worker obsessed, like so many Korean men, with having "a flock of sons." Joanna Catherine Scott's incisive new novel, "The Lucky Gourd Shop," opens in America, where three adopted Korean teenagers have become curious about their birth mther. The book quickly plunges into the past and becomes the life story of that mother, Mi Sook, who as a child is passed down by each of the coffee shop's owners "like a display counter that has to be wiped from time to time or a floor that must be swept." Mi Sook vows to live an independent life but then meets Kun Soo, a sneaky, desperate man who wants a submissive wife and a houseful of sons. In Mi Sook, he chose badly. Men "feared this woman -- for her beauty, and for the way she looked into their eyes with no humility. Every one of them would have liked to have her but not one would dare." Ultimately, Kun Soo can control only his death, which leads to events that affect generations to come. Scott knows the territory explored in this novel well -- while living in the Philippines, she and her husband adopted three Korean orphans. More important, though, is th fact that Scott can really write -- her sentences are lean and move with authority. "The Lucky Gourd Shop" is a smart, sensitive book about independence, identity and survival." -- Paige Williams

The language used in this book is both rich and powerful befitting the whole story and setting which it describes. The characters portray the immense cultural and economic pressures which exist within their society. They are real people, whose life and struggles have been vivdly and powerfully explored. Joanna Scott has brilliantly portayed the Korean background - its authenticity adding to and enriching the characters within it. This book really is exceptional in its depth and sensitivity in describing cultural values and ideals in a state of change. A friend of mine who also read this book, found it impossible to stem the flow of tears. A remarkable book about a huge and emmotive subject- a book which is impossible to put down until the last word is read.

Scott has a fast-moving plot and a clear, clean style often verging on the poetic. Furthermore, the book rings true to my experience of Asia. But I think the greatest strength of The Lucky Gourd Shop is how insightfully the author shows the inner life of her characters as they flail against harsh circumstances, trying again and again to find a way to manage. They are not perfect people, they are real, they keep trying, and they finally break your heart.

I heard Joanna Scott on the radio the other day on NPR, and almost tuned it out. Then she started reading from the poetry book that is the companion book included with The Lucky Gourd Shop. I was moved to listen, then I was moved to buy the book. There was a great deal of emotion transmitted in this writing. Probably what struck me most was the unfailing similarity of children from culture to culture. The Lucky Gourd Shop demonstrates this clearly. Those darling children. That misguided, but heroic mother. If you've ever made a life decision that you were not quite sure about, read this book. You'll feel better. Bring tissue.

As a student of Korean history and culture and as the mother of a Korean adoptee I found this book to be very disturbing. From the stereotype of the father as an alcoholic, gambling, wife-beating, adulterer who had no interest in his daughters to the first wife who just submits to her fate and just lies down and dies when her husband wants to divorce her...I found the story line unreal and contrived.

Go ahead and enjoy this as fantasy but don't think you've learned anything about Korea or reasons children are relinquished for adoption.