Minbak by Ela Lee

Minbak, Ela Lee’s second novel, starts as a dark personal story but slowly opens out to reveal a national tragedy. The story takes as its centre three generations of women who circle around an event kept secret for many years. A “minbak” is a Korean word for a family-run boarding house or guest house. The plot will oscillate between two of these in different time periods, one in Incheon and one in London, as these secrets slowly come to light.

The main plot opens in London in 2008. Hana has just lost her husband and soon finds things are much worse than that as he has died with serious debts that he accrued through the global financial crisis. In order to make ends meet Hana decides to turn her house into a minbak, she moves her mother Youngja out of care and together with teenage daughter Ada moves into a single room of the house while renting out the other rooms to Korean tourists and visitors. This way of living resonates with Hana’s young adulthood in the mid-1980s in Incheon, living and working in the minbak run by her Youngja. The narration will drop back often to this time and place and the impact of events there on Hana and Youngja. All three women have secrets and their close living arrangements and Youngja’s dementia, where she confuses her granddaughter for her daughter, start to bring the secrets from that earlier time to the surface.

Minbak is a beautifully observed novel of three generations of women, the differences between them but also some of the resonances of their past and present. Each is a slight step further from their Korean heritage – Ada was born in England to a Korean mother and English father, Hana came to England from South Korea as a young adult and her mother Youngja was brought over later in life as neither of Hana’s siblings would care for her. So their experiences and understanding are very different.

But Minbak is more than just the story of one family. At first it is unclear why Lee drops in short chapters from the point-of-view of very minor characters. But slowly a bigger story emerges. And that is the story of the large scale export of South Korean babies for adoption, particularly to the United States, a practice which peaked 1980s. This puts Hana’s story into the context of a much larger, almost industrial, process which remained hidden for many years.

Minbak works on a number of levels. It is first and foremost an emotionally resonant tale of three women coming to terms with both their past and their present. But it also exposes the South Korean adoption industry which saw hundreds of thousands of babies sent to adoptive parents overseas and evidence of their parentage either hidden or destroyed.  While the subject matter is dark and poignant, Lee is also able to celebrate her protagonists and focus on their connection to each other and their resilience.

Minbak by Ela Lee

8.5

8.5/10