Blurb:
| Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing. In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that. For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated. A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more. |
Out of all the types of trauma and injuries the human body
can suffer, eye trauma makes me the most squeamish. They’re so soft and
vulnerable; whenever I know an eye injury is about to happen in a horror movie,
I watch the scene through my fingers. The infamous eye scene in Zombi 2
still makes me squirm. So, I knew a story that centered around ripping out eyes
and consuming them would be especially horrific. Interestingly, the book isn’t
especially violent. There are only two scenes with any significant amount of
blood, though ironically the stabbing and bludgeoning is less disturbing than
the scenes of eye trauma and cannibalism (which have comparatively little
gore).
After Ji-won Lim’s Appa (Korean for dad) abandons his wife
and two daughters their Umma (the Korean word for mom) is completely
inconsolable. Despite being a faithful and devoted wife, he still leaves her
for another woman. She haunts the entrance to their apartment, hoping he will
come back and saying she wants to die without him. It’s at that moment Ji-won realizes
their roles are reversed. She has become the mother and Umma the daughter; it’s
now Ji-won’s responsibility to take care of her little family.
When Umma was little, her parents left their children to
search for work. Her other siblings decided to follow, afraid they would starve
to death before their parents returned. But Umma refused to leave their home
and instead waited for her parents to return, living off bark and snow
throughout the harsh winter. When her family finally returned the following summer,
they found her skeletal and delirious. Her older brother mistook her for a
ghost.
To Ji-won, her mother’s decision to remain behind seems
foolish and naive. She feels frustrated by what she sees as Umma’s stupidity
and thinks she’s pathetic for spending her life making herself small and
inconspicuous to men. But she also pities how every part of Umma’s life is
characterized by suffering and relates to the fact that her mother is always
alone. Ji-won is feeling abandoned, not just by her Appa but also her high
school friends who all got into Berkeley when she didn’t. Their loneliness makes both women particularly
vulnerable to predatory men. Umma begins dating George, a white man with
striking blue eyes. He says he speaks Korean, but is terrible at it and his
pronunciation is awful. He clearly fetishizes Asian women as is clear when he
leers at a Chinese waitress and later at Ji-won’s chest, makes gross sexual
comments to Ji-won and her younger, underage sister Ji-hyun, and goes on trips
to Thailand to sleep with the women there.
He also gets mad when
they have a white waitress at a Chinese restaurant because he wants to
experience “culture,” even though the restaurant is anything but authentic
(it’s called Wok and Roll for crying out loud). George has a truck with a
bumper sticker that says “I’m a Republican because we can’t all be on welfare,”
complains loudly about how kids these days are "too soft" and “easily
offended,” and reminiscences about “the good old days.” Essentially, he’s a
loud, mediocre, abrasive white man who is thoroughly convinced of his own
superiority. Understandably, the sisters can’t stand George, and they both
resent Umma for bringing him into their lives, but the conflict averse Ji-won
refuses to say anything about it.
Meanwhile, Ji-won befriends a boy in her class who seems
like George’s polar opposite. Geoffrey presents himself as an ally. He takes
women’s studies, wears “Nevertheless she Persisted” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
t-shirts, reads Ngozi Adichie’s We
Should All be Feminists, and is horrified when a group of frat bros at
their school say disgusting things about Asian women in front of Ji-won. Ji-won
immediately likes Geoffrey and really wants to be his friend. She’s impressed
by his intellect and his knowledge of the world. She believes they “get” each
other and she doesn’t need her old friends anymore because she has Geoffrey
now. But slowly red flags start to pop up. Geoffrey gets extremely jealous when
Ji-won spends any time with her new friend (and possible crush) Alexis. At
first Ji-won excuses this, thinking he’s just insecure and possessive of his
friends like she is. Even when he snatches her phone out of her pocket to get
her phone number, acts clingy, or pushes her to do things even after she’s said
no, Ji-won continues to ignore his toxic behavior. She doesn’t realize Geoffrey
is arrogant, loud, self-absorbed, and rude, just like George. His quips about
feminism are just showing off, trying to make himself seem better than other
men. He claims he’s an ally because he’s read about oppression, yet still gives
Ji-won a thoughtless, racist gift for Christmas. George and Geoffrey are merely
two sides of the same coin.
After Appa’s abandonment, the frat boys at her school saying
disgusting about Asian women, George invading their life and being horrible,
and Geoffrey’s face heel turn, Ji-won is boiling over with barely suppressed
rage. Things come to a head when George wakes her from a nightmare and she
quickly turns her anger on him and starts cussing him out. She apologizes for
Umma’s sake, but the outburst has awoken something in Ji-won. Up until this
point Ji-hyun has been begging her Unni (Korean for older sister, an honorific
used by younger women to refer to older women) to do something about
George and is frustrated by her inaction. Now Ji-hyun notices something is off about
Ji-won and starts to worry about her, despite her sister’s insistence that
she’s fine. Ji-won is a well-crafted, sympathetic anti-villain who focuses her
anger on the toxic men who have wronged her. She cares deeply for her little
sister, Ji-hyun, and her Umma, while still finding them frustrating (something
I’m sure many daughters will relate to).
She’s also incredibly manipulative, cowardly, jealous, and
unable to deal with her emotions in a healthy and mature way. Feeling betrayed
that her friends are all going to Berkley, Ji-won hides an heirloom ring then
blames one of her friends for stealing it. She continues to try and sabotage
their relationships by sending texts pretending to be her other friends or
their crushes because she’s upset that they’re “abandoning” her. When her
friends finally figure out what she’s doing and try to have a calm conversation
about how she hurt them, Ji-won shuts them down and leaves abruptly because she
feels like she can’t face what she did. She doesn’t interact with them again
for the rest of the story.
Later, Ji-won fucks with George the same way she did with her
friends. Because he’s so convinced of his own self-importance and superiority,
he’s easily manipulated by a “Oriental girl” he sees as beneath him. She starts
by stealing money from his wallet, hiding his keys, and putting his driver’s
license down the garbage disposal. Her “pranks” escalate and she destroys his
most prized possession, the expensive Rolex his father gave him, and even gets
him fired from his job, all why playing innocent. I love that she’s imperfect
and gets to do bad things. I’ve mentioned it before, but imperfect, morally
gray, sometimes villainous characters are my favorite! There’s too much of a
push for protagonists to be perfect and heroic, but too often it leads to dull
characters, in my humble opinion, at least. As horrified as I am at some of
Ji-won’s behavior, I still love her as a character, and it thrills me that she
gets to live out her (and I imagine many other Asian women’s) revenge fantasy.
I’ve touched before on how white men tend to fetishize Asian women and how harmful it is. As Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and author of "Reel Inequality” told USA Today "The idea that Asian women are desirable and exotic and passive isn't just an innocent stereotype or a desirable trait to envy. The shadowed side of that is they then become targets of hate, sexual violence and physical violence when they aren't perceived as fully human and deserving of rights to be safe." Media representation unfortunately only reenforces harmful hypersexualization of Asian women.
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One of the editors for this book, and my personal friend, Diana Pho, wrote this piece about being fetishized and harassed as a Vietnamese-American woman during an interview at New York Comic Con back in 2013. Diana was there to host a panel on representation in comics and had donned one of her Asian inspired steampunk outfits and was carrying a parasol. She was approached by a group of white men asking her to do an interview for a “TV show”. Though hesitant, Diana agreed. The interviewer (who she would later learn was Mike Babchik from the now defunct Man Banter) immediately started making sexist and racist comments (you can read a full account of the incident here).
The Eyes Are the Best Part is a slow-burn psychological horror story. I was half way through the book and wondering if perhaps I had picked up a thriller by mistake, when things started to get bloody and wild. It’s a suspenseful read, made even more tense by Ji-won’s deteriorating mental state and fraught relationships. The atmosphere is oppressive and claustrophobic, with the tiny, cramped apartment the family shares emphasizing Ji-won’s feeling of being trapped. Kim’s writing is as precise as a surgeon’s blade, gradually becoming more chaotic as Ji-won’s mind begins to unravel. There isn’t a page or paragraph wasted on filler or pointless details. Every line of the book carries meaning and weight.
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