One Thousand Chestnut Trees by Mira Stout Flamingo, $135 The historical novel appears to have given way to the docudrama - a mixture of reportage, memoir and fiction. It is a literary form most commonly used for the so-called Asian-American novel: newsreel images combined with that perennial American preoccupation, the immigrant seeking roots.
Mira Stout's One Thousand Chestnut Trees weaves together the story of the American-born daughter Anna and the Korean mother Myung-ja who undergoes terrible upheaval during World War II and then again during the communist advance in the Korean War before flying to the safety of America.
The patriarchal grandfather provides a throwback to the early life of the Korean landowning class. Grandfather's jailing and torture by the Japanese while still a child sparks his political awakening and, in the shifting political sands of the early part of the century, his political involvement plunges his family into an even more precarious situation.
After hearing her mother's stories of her Korean past, Anna decides to travel to the East to see her relatives, marvel at how they survived, and, of course, search for her own identity and roots, some of it inaccessible in North Korea.
This is, of course, horribly familiar. Amy Tan and Jung Chang have done the same thing with more dexterity and literary merit. Chang considered her work biography, not fiction. And the survival of family bonds through the hardship of political upheaval and war is an even stronger theme in the Chinese works.
Covering the half-century when Korea was in upheaval, the story of Myung-ja is gripping and told with almost cinematic detail. The scenes of chaos stand out from the rest of the book with its clumsy prose. Vivid and heart-stopping images such as that of Myung-ja's family fleeing south from the communist advance make this seem much more an eyewitness account than a novel.