Customer Reviews

Translations of Beauty: A Novel

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I very much enjoyed Mia Yun's first novel, House of the Winds, so when I got hold of her new novel, Translations of Beauty, I dove into it. And I am happy to report that I was not at all disappointed.

When the twin sisters, Inah and Yunah, are four years old, Inah ends up disfigured for life as a result of a harrowing accident. And it's Yunah, now twenty-eight years old, who narrates this moving story of the twins' and their family's struggle to cope with it while living as immigrants in America. It is an intimate and poignant portrait that demands us to rethink what the so-called "American dream" really is.

Although serious and dark-toned, there are quite a few moments of lightness and humor and loveliness in this beautifully written heartbreaker of a novel. The early relationship of the twins with their humane and flawed father (who later has an extra-marital affair) especially reminded me of Christina Stead's The Man Loved Children, one of my favorite novels. And of the many eccentric minor characters in the book, the outrageous Auntie Minnie is a true standout.

I think this deeply felt "literary page-turner" about sisterhood, family, identity, beauty and immigrant experience works on many levels and will touch a lot of readers. Yun is a very gifted writer. Highly recommended.

I also recommend Yun's lyrical first novel, V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, and Sandor Marai's Embers.

This is a novel of rare beauty which lingers in your mind long after you turn the last page. Whether in Korea, Italy or the immigrant mecca of Flushing, New York, Mia Yun offers the reader an impeccable and immediate sense of place. Written with subtle, comic and tragic touches, this palpably moving story of Korean-born twin sisters who immigrate to New York as small children explores many important issues such as self-identity, racial prejudice and the fleeting nature of beauty.

I enjoyed it tremendously. I am very eager to read this novel again as I feel there are more hidden treasures to discover.

I usually avoid Asian-American fiction as they are too similar in nature and too full of cliches. However, I read Mia Yun's poetically written House of the Winds and was hooked. I knew I had discovered a remarkable writer. Her new book, Translations of Beauty, explores the lives of two sisters, one horribly damaged. Once again, it is beautifully, even poetically written, always willing to take chances to arrive at painful truths and always avoiding cliches. Highly recommended!

While there are many elements of this novel that bring forth emotional value, the element that struck me the most (reading as a Korean-Canadian male) was the wit instilled by Mia Yun to twins. In reading Mia Yun's narrative, I couldn't help but think back on my own immigrant experiences that remain so vivid within my own mind. The tension between the new and old world for children of Korean immigrants is one that we all have to endure and overcome. Clearly Mia Yun has found a voice for Korean-Americans.

I had not heard of this novel or author when I saw the book on a list of "new immigrant classics" in a special New York Times feature on immigration, which is my area of study. And I must say that I agree that it shares something with the classics I love: that powerful, intangible that hits you and lingers after you finish the last word and makes you want to read it again. While ostensibly focused on the tribulations of a family of Koreans who immigrate to New York, the author has successfully transcended the genre and has provided a compelling and nuanced portrait of family relationships. Beautifully written and very highly recommended.

I picked up this book because USA Today recommended it for summer reading, and was completely surprised and taken up by this raw and emotionally-charged book-I hadn't expected that. This moving and heart-breaking story of one fragile family's hope and love and the ultimate compromises to stay together in America will move many readers. I loved it thoroughly. I really felt for the father, a former artist who gave up his art for his family: I've rarely encountered a male figure like that in a novel.

All in all, a very moving and unforgettable novel about family bonds. Writing is superb throughout!

This is a beautiful novel written in vivid prose. Mia Yun's wonderful and poetic sense of language which she amply displayed in her lovely and lyrical first novel, House of the Winds, are as apparent in this second offering. Seamlessly woven and exquisitely rendered, this is a memorable story of Korean twin sisters' and their family's struggles and disappointments in America. I think it's Yun's considerable talent as a writer that the story never ends up didactic or cliched. She simply knows how to portray time and place and people with immediacy, intimacy, vividness and all the emotional urgency. Although I don't want to give too much away, whether it is in Venice, Italy where at the book's opening, 28-year old Yunah flies to meet her twin, Inah, who was disfigured from a terrible childhood accident, or on Ash Avenue in Flushing, Queens where the twins grow up, I felt as though I was right there with them, smelling and seeing and feeling what they were smelling and seeing and feeling. I also thoroughly enjoyed the raw humor and humanity of the host of ethnically diverse and vividly-drawn characters such as Uncle Shin, Auntie Minnie, Michael and Jason, which I thought added more emotional depth to this terrific book.

In TRANSLATIONS OF BEAUTY, Mia Yun combines a tale of the Korean immigrant experience in America with a dissection of a family's unrealized expectations, marital infidelities, sibling love and rivalry, and the physical and psychological scarring from a family tragedy. Unfortunately, Ms. Yun's vehicle simply cannot carry such a heavy load and ends up as an interesting story which tells us nothing new about any of these issues.

The book intertwines two chronological story lines. One narrative thread follows twin sisters Yunah (the story's narrator) and Inah as they grow up in Flushing, Queens, the largest Korean immigrant neighborhood in New York. The family's emigration to America is precipitated by a terrible home accident in Korea when young Inah tips a pot of scalding water onto her face, scarring her for life and instantly guaranteeing her place as an outcast in her homeland. As the twins grow, they battle the difficulties of being outsiders in a foreign world, compounded by Inah's sense of rejection because of her disfigurement.

The second story line follows Yunah's trip to Italy to see her globetrotting, dropout sister and perhaps reconcile their relationship. Through their travels, Yunah's feelings of guilt and Inah's sense of isolation slowly melt away as they achieve, if not full reconciliation, at least a new level of mutual understanding.

Yunah as narrator is most effective telling an immigrant child's experiences in acculturation, but she is far less helpful exploring her mother's feelings, Inah's frustrations and alienation, and especially her father's sense of personal failure and his affair with another woman. We see the events through a child or adolescent's eyes, but those eyes lack the maturity to explore the motivations and feelings of the adult characters.

We never truly get to know these characters, lessening the author's ability to explore the issues she has raised. In particular, Inah's isolation and turmoil can only be seen through her outward actions. An obviously tortured soul who has spent her young life coping with people's automatically aversive reactions, we never come to experience what she has had to live with and the hardships she has faced being an outsider in every community she enters simply because of a childhood accident. The twins' mother becomes a Korean version of a Jewish mother, scarred by her own guilt and driving her unfortunate daughter academically in compensation. Worse, Yun emasculates their father, oddly painting him as a sensitive lover of nature and shallowly capricious in his sudden departure and return to the family.

The novel's greatest shortcoming comes in its ostensible resolution of the twin sisters' relationship - the core element of the novel. As Yunah's two-week visit with Inah in Italy comes to an end, Yun forces her narrator to begin a series of surprisingly superficial pronouncements about her family situation: that Inah's abandoning her doctoral studies at Oxford "couldn't have been a decision she had made lightly," that "the truth is we can never experience the exact same thing twice," that "what we have now has to be good enough," that "memories...have a way of haunting and taunting," that "all we can do is just to go on," and that "everything changes and heals and fades away over time." Meager rewards after 300 pages, polished pebbles from the waters of the same river we can never cross twice rather than true pearls of insight.

TRANSLATIONS OF BEAUTY manages to tell an engaging story with interesting characters. Furthermore, Ms. Yun's prose style, with its occasional machine-gun style and sudden bursts of rainbow-like colorature, is potent and evocative. In the end though, the book feels hollow, like a missed opportunity for something much more than she gives us.

If you want to read this as another Asian American lit, it would pass as mediocre, OK in its own end, somewhat low key, more realistic look at the down side of immigration that is always a set deal with so called American dream, or Etopianism, which only translates an false ad of the promised land and the westward progress. But this has already become a cliche in the immigrant literature field.

I got more drawn to another subject: what a woman's esthetic feature means to her life. Reading this sort of study done by nobody but Korean female author like Yun somehow reminded me of another Korean immigrant author Suki Kim and her novel "Interpreter". Because women are judged and treated according to their looks, and actually, that seems to be the only thing they are valued for in the culture, Korean women's obsession always appears intense. Their outrageous enthusiasm for plastic surgery is attributed to this national faith in women's looks, which only equates the unabashed objetification of women, which is only the norm of the society. But they do not seem to see it as the institutional sadism against women or deplorable commodification of humen beings. I do beieve this phenomenon can't be criticized more.

All the more, a novel like this reads as a testimony of how disasterous it is for a woman not to be equipped with the asset she is supposed to have to manuever her life. In this context, the real tragedy is that authors like these, Yun or Suki KIM's, having no criticism for the culture of ultimate objectification or commodification of women. Their writings on another tale of how important looks are for women never help Korean women get over the fallacy they should not comply any more. The film director Kim Gidok shows way keener view on Korean women's condition. When it comes to the 'face' issue, check "Time" out, which is dealing with the science of cosmetic surgery and mechanism of people's minds regarding for women's faces.

Twins Inah and Yunah were born in 1973 in South Korea to married schoolteachers. The sisters enjoyed a happy early childhood in their homeland until Inah was hideously scarred during a scalding accident that left her visage permanently marred. Knowing that Inah would forever be ostracized in Korean society, the family immigrates to the United States moving into the Korean-American community of Flushing, Queens.

Over a decade passes and Inah drops out of graduate school at Oxford to first backpack in India and then to relocate in Italy. Yunah follows her sibling to Italy, but the reception is cold and angry as Inah does not want her here. Now the once close twins argue over their future, their past, their father, and finally the disfigurement that made them no longer identical.

TRANSLATIONS OF BEAUTY is a delightful family drama that focuses on the long term impact of a trauma on twins. The story line alternates between Yunah narrating glimpses back to their childhood with her providing a present day description of the Italian encounter of trouble between them. The ill winds into this Korean house seems overextended yet provides a deep look at battling loving twins from Yunah's respective. Though more of Inah's sullen perspective even if it is just what is going on inside her head, would have provided a stronger character study, fans will appreciate this deep look at discord in a Korean family.

Harriet Klausner