This is by Korean-American author Steph Cha. I listened to the audio-version, and found the narration -- by Glenn Davis and Greta Jung -- absolutely top-notch.

The book was published in 2019, which is interesting because the second of its time periods (its two timelines start, respectively, in March 1991 and June 2019) moves into territory that would have been the future for Cha when she was writing the book.

In brief (and there are a couple of spoilers here, so don't read this if you want to be carried along by the tension of the novel), we are following the ripples that relentlessly spread out from a miscarriage of justice that happened in 1991. That's the year Jung-Ja Han, a Korean-American woman minding her Los Angeles grocery shop, shoots and kills Ava Matthews, a 16-year-old black girl just there to buy some milk. The shooter is convicted of manslaughter, but serves no jail time.

This key element closely mirrors a real event, the 1991 killing, in South Central Los Angeles, of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl, by Soon Ja Du, a Korean shopkeeper. The shooting happened two weeks after the vicious police beating of Rodney King, and these events, exacerbated by the surprising clemency shown to Du, and the acquittal of the four officers charged in the King case, contributed to the 1992 LA uprising, in which more than 50 people died, thousands were injured, and 1 billion US dollars' worth of property was destroyed (including more than 2,000 Korean-own businesses).

Back in the fictional story, the chickens start to come home to roost in June 2019. Someone penetrates the new life, livelihood, and locality that Jung-Ja Han (now called Yvonne Park) and her family have created around themselves. And that someone shoots her. She doesn't die instantly. But she dies.


Further north in California than LA, but both Oakland and San Francisco have their race issues

As these events unfold, we follow, through parallel but intersecting third-person narratives, two of the characters who are intimately caught up in them: Shawn Matthews, the younger brother of Ava, who knows every inch of this tragedy back to front and sideways; and Grace Park, the daughter of Yvonne, who knows nothing whatsoever about her mother's past.

Shawn, just 13 at the time of his sister's death, and already an orphan, was raised by the kind-hearted and steely-spirited Aunt Sheila, alongside Ray, her own son. Times are tough; gangs are everywhere. Ray and Shawn both end up doing prison terms. Shawn has kept his nose clean since his incarceration, but Ray, who has only just been sprung from a 10-year stint when the contemporary narrative starts, is already starting to keep bad company. And racial profiling being what it is, it's not long before Ray is arrested on suspicion of murdering Yvonne (despite his rock-solid alibi).

Grace, a leading light in her parents' pharmacy, is smart, dutiful, and hard-working, but politically naive. It's her older sister, Miriam, who knows stuff -- including their mother's history. After the attack on Yvonne, word of this history starts to spread across the internet, much to the horror of Grace, who is harried by an unscrupulous activist into making an unwise reaction, which then also goes viral.

I very much like the way this book tries to be even-handed, compassionately revealing the pain on all sides, and steadfastly refusing to lump everyone from any given community together in one sack.

The black community is united in its rejection of injustice, but the characters are highly differentiated. Aunt Sheila is tired, but heroically stands up for good. Shawn has struggled with his anger for years, and has never totally beaten it. Yet he is grateful for the modest life he has been able to plaster back together, and is desperate to hang to it. Others, meanwhile, are trapped in a cycle of deprivation and poor choices.

The Korean community is united in its desire to work hard, and keep its head down, but again the individuals are not tarred with the same brush. There's plenty of racism on display (Miriam's erstwhile black boyfriend doesn't go down very well at home, for example, and it's questionable whether Jung-Ja/Yvonne ever really faces up to what she has done). But there's also a desire to make amends, or at least show contrition, to Ava Matthews's family (both Miriam and Grace make efforts in this direction, misguided perhaps, and in Miriam's case fateful, but heart-felt and well-intentioned).

Backgrounding this multi-layered story we also have the recurring and highly unattractive presence of the white right, and the permanent furore whipped up by social media. And we have the white journalist, Jules Searcey, who has somehow embedded himself in the lives of the Matthews family. This is an interesting case. Searcey works for the victims of injustice, and is highly politically aware. But the book he wrote about Ava turns her into a saint. She wasn't a saint (as we see in the early phases of the narrative), but -- crucially -- she shouldn't HAVE to be in order to evoke our sympathy and desire for justice.

I also like the open ending. We don't know whether Ray will end up paying for a crime he didn't commit in order to shield the person who did. We don't know whether the real killer, who thoroughly regrets what happened, will be formally called to account for it. We don't know how these families, after all this trauma, will start to move forward again. There are no easy answers here.



At the end of the book, Los Angeles is again in turmoil. Black anger at injustice meets racist taunts and provocations from white trouble-makers, and first apathy then antagonism from the police; Grace and Miriam are threatened by both blacks and whites -- and protected by Shawn.

There's a very moving passage towards the close:

"Los Angeles, this was supposed to be it. The end of the frontier, land of sunshine, promised land. Last stop for the immigrant, the refugee, the fugitive, the pioneer. It was Shawn's home, where his mother and sister had lived and died. But he had left, and so had most of the people he knew. Chased out, priced out, native children living in exile. And he saw the fear and rancor here, in the ones who'd stayed. This city of good feeling, of tolerance and progress and loving thy neighbor, was also a city that shunned and starved and killed its own. No wonder, was it, that it huffed and heaved, ready to blow. Because the city was human, and humans could only take so much."

This is a novel that reinforces things you already know. Chief among these is the way the odds are perpetually stacked against the black population in the United States today. Sean Carswell, commenting on the scene at the beginning where Ray is released, and family members solemnly assemble to accompany him home, contrasts this warmth and solidarity with the challenges that face those released into nothing: "Imagine being that black man, boarding a train in clothes that most people wouldn’t wear outside of their house. All of your belongings are in a paper bag. You don’t have much cash. In a few hours, you’ll be in Los Angeles, a town with lousy public transportation, a very large homeless population, and a police department that will forever see you as a suspect and an easy arrest. On top of that, you’re starting the journey in San Luis Obispo, a city that has five hundred and thirty-two black residents, just over one hundred and fifty black students enrolled in the state university in town (a full 0.7 percent of the overall student body), and about twelve hundred black people living in the prison that’s next door to the university... I see scenes like this play out often. Every time I do, I wonder if there are real ways to have a conversation about the racism inherent in a state, and nation, that disproportionately incarcerates black men. But also, more generally, I wonder how we might talk about race in a meaningful way."



It's also, however, a novel that taught me a lot. While alive to the way white racism affects both African Americans and Asian Americans, I had been largely unaware of the state of tension that often subsists between those two latter groups. Jervey Tervalon explains: "Your House Will Pay describes the intense hostility that was present between Black and Korean communities in the ’90s -- though African Americans and Asians and Asian Americans had previously gotten along well enough in the Crenshaw and Jefferson Park neighborhoods where I was raised... When the South Korean shop owners appeared, they seemed more confrontational in a community where perceived slights could quickly escalate. I heard explanations for this: that this wave of Korean immigrants had come up from the working class and didn’t have the wherewithal to buy a shop in a solidly middle-class area. They showed their disdain at being forced to buy in undesirable areas. They were stuck with us, and we were stuck with them -- a situation that was a time bomb waiting to go off, as it did. Soon Ja Du killed Latasha Harlins not because she feared for her life, but in retaliation for being punched."

The two communities are also unequally burdened, in terms of stereotypes. As Cha explains in an interview, "Asians get hit with this image of quietness and meekness and politeness, whereas black people get hit with 'you're angry,' 'you're violent'... One set [of stereotypes] is much more damaging than the other, and results in different outcomes in the criminal justice system, also in education. You know, in all these different arenas, Asian Americans are able to code white, and black Americans just are not. And Asian Americans have this in-between status where sometimes we code as people of color. It kind of depends on who's telling the story and what the story is."

But Korean-Americans aren't immune from white "othering" either. As Carswell points out, when Grace becomes the object of internet hatred, she "is confronted with the fact that she’s still not a part of the dominant race in a racist society. She’s still other. She’s disobeyed the culture’s demands of her otherness, and now she’s being punished."

Korean racism then compounds this already murky situation, often creating inter-generational tension into the bargain. Cha again: "I just thought about the people I know who have Korean parents, like my own Korean parents, and older Korean people I know, and how these people can actually be really nasty racists but people let that slide in ways I totally understand because they’re good parents or the racism is so deeply ignorant. It’s a common immigrant-kid second-generation problem; your parents came here probably for your benefit and then you get educated as an American -- and this is one of the broader themes of the novel -- because of their sacrifice, you get this American heritage that you’re then able to wield against them. I think we as the children have the right to do just that, but there’s something sad about it. I don’t hold my parents’ generation to the same standards that I do our generation. I think among progressive second-generation kids, it’s a complicated negotiation navigating that gap between your parents’ politics and your politics, which are probably much more sophisticated because they brought you here." We clearly see this dynamic playing out in Miriam's reactions to her parents.



I had two ethical questions about this novel. The first wonders how it feels to be part of a real victim's family, and read a fictionalized account of your loss. I have not found any material to answer that question.

The other interrogates Cha's exceptionally bold move, as a Korean-American woman, in writing half her story through the eyes of a black man. She admits it was a challenge: "Honestly, it was very difficult and starting the novel, I knew I was going to have to do it. I knew I couldn’t just have the point of view of this Korean family. I felt like that would be limited. I felt like without inhabiting the black family, I would end up writing something that either erased them to an extent or reduced them to something simple."

I'm always dubious about this co-opting of radically different viewpoints. And Tervalon admits to the same concern: "The fear I had about reading Your House Will Pay is that Cha, even with the best of intentions, would walk into a minefield of cultural appropriation." But he is pleasantly surprised: "As I read, the interactions of Black folk contrasted so well with the more dour depiction of Korean-American family life, which seemed driven by the older generation’s idea of progress: self-sacrifice and the acceptance of a gloomy Christianity... Shawn is my favorite character, but there are many complex and well-rendered African Americans in the novel... That Cha is drawn to contend with voices that don’t strictly represent her cultural heritage, while taking head-on one of the most devastating events in Los Angeles history, is admirable as well as ambitious." Melissa Chadburn also gives it a big tick: "I’m so grateful to Cha for capturing our city’s complicated history, in such an empathic novel."

Here, Cha explains how she pulled this off: "I did a lot of background research on black vernacular and where my characters lived, what their story might have been, and then getting specific on what that might have looked like. I also read papers on black vernacular. I took a studied approach. I wanted to respect the rules of that dialect, but I didn’t play with phonetics. I also have Koreans in my book, and some of them speak in accents. I wanted to be authentic, and nothing like a caricature... With Shawn’s family, I wanted to get this right. I wanted to make them real... I had that fear the whole time I was writing Your House Will Pay. The fear that I would get it wrong, the fear that I’d be afraid to share this book with black readers. I think that fear of messing up is very valuable for writers, and we all have fears about other things."

(And, a propos of this question of who has the right to tell a story, and how we approach writing the "other", Alexander Chee suggests we start by asking three questions: 1. Why do you want to write from this character's point of view? 2. Do you read writers from this community currently? 3. Why do you want to tell this story? Then we should follow up with three more inter-related questions: 4. Does this story contain a damaging stereotype of a marginalized group? Does the story need this stereotype to exist? If so, does the story need to exist? Wise...)

Commenting on the passage quoted above, where LA is described as always "ready to blow", Cha rather disconcertingly says: "I feel that way about the entire country -- let's get that straight... I think LA is ... kind of a microcosm for the rest of the country." I guess we're not surprised, but it's still shocking to hear it put as candidly as this.



But Cha also makes clear that good people can make a difference. Shawn and Aunt Sheila; Grace and Miriam -- none of these trying-to-do-the-right-thing people is perfect or infallible, but they're doing the work.

Carswell again: "When Grace goes viral [with her ill-advised comments], everyone in the novel is quick to judge her, to call her a racist, to attack her. In doing so, no one has to look inside himself or evaluate his culture very deeply. Instead, they can scapegoat Grace. This is something we do in real life all the time... Vengeance often creates an endless loop. But instead..., Grace seeks to redeem herself. She begins the process of understanding what beliefs she still holds that she needs to release. She allows herself to be imperfect. She starts down a path of action that allows her to be an imperfect person working for positive change."

Shawn, similarly, calls out those who bully others, or act out on the internet, because they want to create a sideshow, "a way for you to feel good, while you keep on doing nothing." At the end, having dispersed the "posse" that has been threatening Grace and Miriam, he stands silhouetted against the fires that have erupted in the city, like a prophet of old.

As Cha puts it, "The personal is political and the political is personal. To pretend otherwise is a choice and a choice that isn’t available to everyone. At its core, my book is about two people who try very hard -- one from ignorance and laziness, the other from exhaustion -- to stay in their own worlds and mind their own business, but are forced into the political fray by events outside of their control."

No happy endings, then. Just a tiny grain of hope that people can learn to think differently.