A family saga sweeping across seventy years through four generations of the Song family, Carol Roh Spaulding’s debut collection contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Starting with the family’s emigration to the U.S. in 1924, the collection comes full circle in 1997, when an aging Grace Song journeys with her lover and her seven-year-old grandson to the family’s homeland of Korea. 

In the opening story, “Day of the Swallows, 1924,” Grace’s mother reflects that “[b]ack home, it is the third day of the third moon, the day of the swallows’ return” and that “each year, a bird no bigger than a man’s heart knows how to return home from across the ocean.” Unlike the birds, Grace’s family can’t return home. Soon after their emigration, the Immigration Act of 1924 bars them from returning to the U.S. if they visit Korea and forbids them from bringing additional family members to join them. Mulling the swallows’ perpetual flight, Grace’s mother articulates the contradictions at the heart of this family’s diaspora: “Maybe what’s home to me is away for them. Or wherever they alight is home. Or all places are away and no place is home.” 

Most of the collection focuses on Grace Song. Even when the stories are not told from her point of view, they speak directly to her experience—sometimes metaphorically, sometimes metaphysically. Sung May, an older sister who dies before Grace’s birth, voices “A Former Citizen,” describing Grace as “a child called into the world in the name of my loss.” Her haunting sets the scene into which Grace is born, fraught with their mother’s grief and the mincing frugality of the family’s first years in America, where “Mother and Father don’t pinch pennies, they wring them.” The novella that concludes the collection, “The Inside of the World, 1997,”  features Grace, now in her 60s and divorced with grown children, living alone as a last holdout against development alongside orchards aging out of existence. Part of the novella plumbs the inner life of Daro Tagura, a side character from an earlier section, but rather than being a digression, this shift prepares us for his increasing significance to Grace, both as the developer who will ultimately buy her out and as the younger lover who will teach her about pleasure. 

Punishing immigration policies and anti-Asian racism saturate the family’s experiences. In the first story, Grace’s mother asks their missionary family sponsor to “teach me the English for ‘You look better that way,’” as a ready retort for the child at the market who repeatedly taunts her with choruses of “Chinky Chinky Chinaman.” In the concluding novella, Grace struggles to dampen her outrage when she learns that her white former son-in-law calls her grandson the “ironic” nickname of “Chink.” Other stories examine related issues of shame, suicide, friction across different Asian-American communities, and Japanese internment.

With rich, precise, and lyrical language, Spaulding evokes the fullness of the arid California landscape, as in “Made You Look, 1979”: “The cactus and juniper are twinkling, while overhead, the dark rim of the desert mountains spills its bowl of stars.” Later in the same story, her shrewdly beautiful sensibility works just as effectively to describe the pornographic photo fourteen-year-old Evelyn’s grandfather shows her, in a stomach-turning spirit of openness, “A woman with breasts splayed like what’s for breakfast lay back on a fluffy white animal skin of some kind with her arms above her head and legs spread in front for her partner.”   

The scope of these stories is as immense as their renderings are masterful. More than a mere family saga, the collection testifies to the history of anti-Asian racism and immigration policy in the U.S. and to the powers of family, place, belonging, and identity.

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Carol Roh Spaulding’s short stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Nimrod International, Mississippi Review, December magazine, and many other publications. Her forthcoming novel, Helen Button, received the 2021 Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts. She lives in Central Iowa with her family and teaches at Drake University in Des Moines. Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler lives, writes, and teaches in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her debut story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2023; other work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Millions, Atticus Review, The Westchester Review, Arts & Letters, Gargoyle, Pithead Chapel, CRAFT, The Rumpus, Charlottesville Wine & Country Life, and elsewhere. She earned her fiction MFA from Lesley University, teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA, and reads for The Los Angeles Review.