A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

their lives and reminiscing on hers, Soong decides, “I’ll wait for my grandson to find his
mate, then die.” 316 For a while it seems that working together as a family in the son’s
Kailua take-out restaurant saves them from drifting apart, but Won Ju, the older daughter,
has premonitions when she compares the place to a fish tank: “All of these different fish
forced together behind a wall of glass” (121-2).
Then the temporary harmony gives way to chaos, leaving the couples separated,
and the stripper Crystal pregnant from a one-night stand with the young computer nerd.
Soong is looking for clues in the past, needing to account for her children’s messed-up
lives. Having started out as an orphan straying through war-torn Korea, she had married a
producer and become famous, hardly sparing time for her small children. After her first
husband had died, influential suitors, true love, ruined reputations, economic failure,
another dead husband, abandoned children, and finally, a rape and a murder occur in her
account: While she was away in Korea, her shy nineteen-year old was raped by a co-
worker out on her very first date in Las Vegas. Soong killed the rapist with a silver knife
she had so far viewed as a talisman (“It is a gift that symbolizes the fact that you are no
longer the helpless girl I found in the streets. I have armed you,” 41).
Her family’s tragic story culminates in the suicide of Brandon, who had cherished
computer games in which he could be “a kick-ass druid in Everquest, not a flashing red
digital single-digit number that flashes so fast on the display that no one even really sees
it” (130). Out on the Pali Lookout on a stormy day, he climbs the railing, announcing
“I’m tired. Flying or sinking” (265). For a moment he does fly, levitated by the wind,
“right before he crashed toward the canopy like an ill-constructed paper airplane. God
inhaled, but Kaipo would never forget that victorious, angel-for-a-second smile that
outshone the sun” (266). Shortly afterwards, Soong is on a plane back to Korea, brooding:
The legacy of her family that started with an orphan girl named Kwang Ja, the
matriarch, was ending. […] What was hers belonged to a museum. She did not
understand this world, and her artifacts proved useless. She would die in Korea.
The plane began taxiing down the runway. Soong thought about reincarnation and
wished it were so. She wanted another chance. She still wasn’t quite sure what
she’d done wrong, but she hoped with no delusion that she could have another
opportunity (267-8).
316 Chris McKinney, The Queen of Tears, Honolulu 2001: 65.
109