SUBLIMATION, by Isabel J. Kim
“Do you think it’s emotionally equivalent to murder?”
So begins “Sublimation,” the remarkable debut novel by Isabel J. Kim. A 29-year-old woman, Soyoung, poses this loaded question to Yujin, her best friend, over coffee in a department store in Seoul.
The “it” that Soyoung is asking about is “reintegration” with one’s “instance.” In the science fictional world of “Sublimation,” people split into two “instances” of themselves when they emigrate. One instance proceeds; the other remains behind. Their lives unfold in parallel, but if instances reunite and touch, then they merge back into one.
Soyoung and Yujin have instances: Rose and YJ, who both live in New York City. Soyoung friend-zoned Yujin in high school. Rose and YJ have never met. More about this complex foursome in a moment. First, consider the deeper question within Soyoung’s words: When someone leaves their homeland forever, do they kill off the person they used to be?
The answer, of course, is yes. To a degree. It depends. Some of us strive to maintain ties to the cultures, languages and people we’ve left behind. We send our kids to Armenian school on Saturdays; we make our own kim chi; we burn paper money during the Qingming Festival, even if we can’t sweep our ancestors’ tombs in person. But some of us don’t. Some of us, like my father, never look back. Some of us have a past that we’ve attempted to bury forever.
Soyoung’s instance, Rose, is like my father. She hasn’t spoken to Soyoung since they were cleaved apart at the border at age 11. In the intervening years, Rose has let her Korean identity shrivel down to a husk. Then their grandfather dies. Soyoung invites Rose to the funeral, and Rose — perhaps sensing a Seoul-sized hole in her heart — says yes.
But Soyoung has an ulterior motive too. She’s intensely curious about Rose’s American life. She wants to reintegrate, but she fears that Rose won’t want to give up her separate existence. Hence Soyoung’s question about emotional murder: If she snatches Rose’s wrist, will she feel guilty?
In contrast to the chilly tension between Soyoung and her instance, Yujin and YJ speak every day. They can read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences. They plan to reintegrate after YJ attains dual citizenship. YJ’s relationship with his former self seems more wholesome than Rose’s, but his loyalty has a price: Yujin’s expectations weigh on him like an anchor, 7,000 miles away.
The novel pings back and forth between New York and Seoul, each chapter centering a different member of the foursome. If you enjoy a smoldering K-drama romance in the vein of #childhoodfriendstolovers, just imagine how much fun things can be if everybody has an evil American twin! Soyoung, Rose, Yujin and YJ board flights, whisper secrets and betray one another’s confidences. They snatch at one another’s wrists. To further complicate matters, they learn of a secret new technology, Mitosis, which makes it possible for reintegrated instances to un-merge, i.e., to re-cleave themselves in twain.
Does this sound convoluted? Somehow, it’s not. Kim performs this high-wire act with preternatural storytelling skill. Throughout, she pulls in historical, cultural and literary examples of “instancing,” including our present immigration debates, the “Odyssey,” and Adam and Eve — the Bible’s original refugees — recasting them all in the brilliant light of her imagination. And she never loses track of the cascading desires that sometimes draw Rose, Soyoung, Yujin and YJ toward one another, and other times tear them apart.
The lush intricacy of this imagined world is not matched by Kim’s everyman characters. All four share the same emotional vocabulary: a banal quadrangle of awkward, wistful, horny and sad. “If you were a different sort of person, you could live a different sort of life,” YJ thinks to himself. “But you’re not. You’re just you.” Right you are, my man!
Even so, “Sublimation” finds resonance in the poignant differences between its Korean and American instances. Soyoung, having never left Korea, is more vulnerable than Rose, who had to harden herself in order to assimilate. Yujin feels impotent because he has no opportunity in his homeland to get ahead; YJ feels impotent because he can get ahead only by betraying his heritage and swallowing his pride.
The contrasts reminded me of the time I had dinner with my father’s cousins in Beijing. The three cousins, who’d never met my father, looked a lot like him. They spoke like him, and they shared his sly exuberance, his dimply grin. But I also sensed great fractures beneath the surface — fault lines that surely deepened during China’s Cultural Revolution, when my father’s cousins built bricks on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau while he, an undergraduate in Texas, tutored the football team in math. Anyone who has witnessed such fateful divergences will see themselves in “Sublimation”: staring across a chasm at one’s double, uncannily alike and irreversibly transformed.
SUBLIMATION | By Isabel J. Kim | Tor | 360 pp. | $28.99
The post Her Clone Is Finally Coming Home. Should They Merge Back Into One? appeared first on New York Times.
