Hurt You (eBook)

Marie Myung-Ok Lee (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
Blackstone Publishing (Verlag)
979-8-200-75811-1 (ISBN)

Infos

With echoes of Marieke Nijkamp and Jason Reynolds, acclaimed author Marie Myung-Ok Lee's stunning YA homage to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men tells the tragic story of a Korean American teen who fights to protect herself and her neurodivergent older brother from a hostile community.

Moving beyond the quasi-fraternal bond of the unforgettable George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men, Hurt You explores the actual sibling bond of Georgia and Leonardo da Vinci Daewoo Kim, who has an unnamed neurological disability that resembles autism. The themes of race, disability, and class spin themselves out in a suburban high school where the Kim family has moved in order to access better services for Leonardo.

Suddenly unmoored from the familiar, including the support of her Aunt Clara, Georgia struggles to find her place in an Asian-majority school where whites still dominate culturally, and she finds herself feeling not Korean 'enough.' Her one pole star is her commitment to her brother, a loyalty that finds itself at odds with her immigrant parents' dreams for her, and an ableist, racist society that may bring violence to Leonardo despite her efforts to keep him safe.

Hurt You is a deep exploration of family, society, and the bond between siblings and reflects the reality that people with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, not the perpetrator.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of The Evening Hero, Somebody's Daughter, the YA novel Finding My Voice (heralded as the first Korean American own voices novel for teens), and middle-grade novels If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun and Night of the Chupacabras. Her books have won awards such as Friends of American Writers, New York Public Library's Best Books for the Teen Age, and NCTE's Children's Choice. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards, a Fulbright Fellow, and one of the few Korean American journalists allowed into North Korea. She currently teaches creative writing as a writer-in-residence at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race. She has an adult son on the autistic spectrum who helped to inspire her latest novel.

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With echoes of Marieke Nijkamp and Jason Reynolds, acclaimed author Marie Myung-Ok Lee's stunning YA homage to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men tells the tragic story of a Korean American teen who fights to protect herself and her neurodivergent older brother from a hostile community.Moving beyond the quasi-fraternal bond of the unforgettable George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men, Hurt You explores the actual sibling bond of Georgia and Leonardo da Vinci Daewoo Kim, who has an unnamed neurological disability that resembles autism. The themes of race, disability, and class spin themselves out in a suburban high school where the Kim family has moved in order to access better services for Leonardo.Suddenly unmoored from the familiar, including the support of her Aunt Clara, Georgia struggles to find her place in an Asian-majority school where whites still dominate culturally, and she finds herself feeling not Korean "e;enough."e; Her one pole star is her commitment to her brother, a loyalty that finds itself at odds with her immigrant parents' dreams for her, and an ableist, racist society that may bring violence to Leonardo despite her efforts to keep him safe.Hurt You is a deep exploration of family, society, and the bond between siblings and reflects the reality that people with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, not the perpetrator.

Textauszug

One

Georgia Kim

Secret Diary
(if you are reading this—STOP!!!
This is an invasion of privacy!)

August 12

Umma and Appa, fighting. Again.

I used to be relieved once they had their daily fight. It was like some kind of pressure valve was released, and we were set for the rest of the day. There. It’s done. But now, steam just keeps leaking, dripping sometimes, hissing, occasionally exploding when we least expect it. I have to get real: it’s chronic, like those underground fires that are burning in Alaska because of climate change. I give Leo a look when I think a storm is brewing. He never looks back, because that’s part of his disorder, the eye contact thing, but I wonder if he feels it, the bad air approaching. The daily bad air.

Obviously, I didn’t know my parents before they were married, but I know from my aunt Clara that theirs was a whirlwind romance, one with some Romeo and Juliet–type troubles (like Dad’s family in Korea didn’t want him marrying a Korean American who could barely speak Korean) to overcome, two extremely good-looking young people. I want a time machine so I can see this. Or, act as lawyer, judge, spy, family FBI investigator and demand they produce evidence for their union. Photos, videos, courtroom sketches—I don’t care. Not just for me, I want to see them take in their first dates. Their first, fluttery kiss. The love-blind light in their eyes. I want to see how each thought the other could make them into a better person. I want to see them with so much hope for their pairing that they stride hand in hand into their future together, smiling. Wedding pictures don’t count. Anyone can fake their way through those.

I’ve never had a boyfriend, so I’m hardly the expert on why people come together, no less decide to spend their lives together forever. But I have zero doubt that they were once deliriously in love. And likely still are (however, produce the evidence, please!). And of course, they produced Leo and me.

• I want to know them when they were happy together.
• I also want to know that it wasn’t Leo who changed everything.

I shut the book. A sparkly horse cover. I’ve been “off” horses since sixth grade, but my parents seem to think I just stay the same and don’t get older. I can’t help wondering if it’s because Leo has never mentally gotten older since he was maybe three. I don’t know. But I’m still thinking of my own line—“produced Leo and me”—and cringing. I don’t even know how to talk about sex without blushing and metaphorically ducking my head into the sand, giggling like some middle schooler and not a rising junior. But I know that for most kids, picturing their parents having sex is the number one thing they do not want to think about. But I do. I want to know that they “made love” (also cringe, but a little better phrasing) and that Leo and I came out of that. Instead of Leo being the biggest barrier to our family happiness, the biggest obstacle to my success. When it’s the opposite. Truly. Why can’t they see that?

Oops, losing the thread here. I want to be a writer, maybe, but the diary is no longer a compendium of funny and interesting vignettes I could use in a novel someday. But to keep the pen moving (as one of my writing teachers recommended we do to keep the creative juices flowing), my diary ends up repeating words over and over in the pauses, kind of like Leo. Why why why why why why? did we have to move?

I know why we moved. Between my parents, their own refrain (with different tones): “Because of Leo.”

That’s a lot to put on Leo, who has never ever asked for any of these things. He hasn’t asked for anything, because he can’t really talk.

But I know he’s sad. I’m not sure he knows exactly what’s going on, but it’s been a year since Aunt Clara’s accident. Aunt Clara, the one other person who takes time to try to understand him. To let Leo be Leo even when it means he squawks like a bird when he’s excited. Or when he calls me Nuna, older sister, and repeats “Nuna keep me safe, Nuna keep me safe”—Clara and I knew he wasn’t being imperative but instead signaling that he felt safe and secure, at least in that moment. But Appa would sigh harassedly about Leo’s “vocal stims” and how his behavior plan means we are absolutely not supposed to answer him. But I often do. I can tell he feels comforted when I say, “Yes, Leo, you are safe. Nuna won’t let anything happen to you.” Whether he understands the reassurance or it’s just the reply he expects to hear, closing a kind of circle. See, the fact he can speak words makes Appa think, well, he should be able to talk and understand. But that’s just not how it works in Leo world.

See, despite their good intentions, Umma is always too busy rushing to keep all the family stuff together—Leo’s schooling, his therapies, his new clothes and shoes now that he’s growing like the Hulk—to spend much time seeing him. She’s the one everyone calls—the day program, the school—when there’s a problem. Everyone waits for her to fix it. I get that she’s doing the best she can on the special needs treadmill. I try to lie low and never add to her burden.

Appa also loves Leo (I know it!) but has turned most of his attention to me as if he’s a car with its high beams on all the time—stuck on me as “college candidate.” He’s gone full tiger dad, applying himself as if his job is getting me into Harvard. Where I won’t go unless, like, Leo moved to Cambridge with me. They don’t think I’m serious. Who could say no to Harvard? Well, me. I’m as serious as hell.

Within this disconnect between all of us, every encounter of the mater and pater has the potential for fireworks and sparks (not the good kind, but the kind that leaves Umma quietly weeping in the thin-walled bathroom of the apartment, Appa walking around, his face a hardened cast). Don’t they think about how this affects us?

My guess is that this move to Sunnyvale is a last-ditch attempt to reboot the family, our little self-contained operating system, glitches grown too frequent to ignore—the flickerings of if something isn’t done, the whole thing’s going to implode, that our motherboard is failing.

But I feel the need to point out that despite living in an “urban” area that was cramped—often smelly in the alley, yes there was crime—our whole apartment building was a family. Umma and Appa pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, maybe were a bit on the maniacal side of privacy, but there were a couple of times when, like, if they forgot something for Leo while waiting for the bus, if Mr. Goh the super was out watering the one gangly tree, they’d let him watch Leo for a second while they dashed back upstairs. Not everyone loved Leo, but everyone knew him. When he was in his phase of slipping out of the apartment, there would always be people retrieving him.

But living like sardines also means having some idea of what’s going on with your neighbors, no matter how much you want to hide. There was always “I cooked too much!” food circulating between floors, especially when someone was sick or in need. And, like a family, there were fights over whether we could leave bikes and strollers in the hall (fire hazard) or if dogs needed to take the service elevator (“so insulting”—dog owners; but also, Leo is deathly afraid of dogs).

Like I said, we were a family. Now we’re in a house and it’s like we’re living in outer space—soundless, airless.

I’m most surprised about Appa, an only child. He used to talk about how lonely he was growing up, especially as his mother died when he was five and his father had to travel for work and he was shuffled around relatives all over Korea—with varying degrees of welcome, including his uncle’s wife muttering under her breath about the expense, his cousins cold-shouldering him entirely. It was lucky he had his friend Byun in middle school. Byun’s family had an astonishing five siblings, which was good because that meant more hands on deck at the family’s fried chicken place, King’s, and showed Appa what a happy family could look like. With him in it.

“You and Leo are lucky—that is double what I had,” he would chuckle. Sometimes, like waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’ll wonder if he actually meant to have five kids like Byun’s family. Byun married an Italian woman he met during a study abroad and moved to Italy. Their Christmas cards are wild—in the pictures, it seems like no family gathering has fewer than a hundred people in it, including all the nonnas and grandpas and zillions of kids and babies and pregnant ladies. I have heard Appa sometimes talk about Byun as “crazy” to Umma, how his family was so disappointed by what he did, especially as “first son,” which I guess comes with all sorts of expectations in Korea. But Byun seems bursting with happiness in all the pictures. And it seems like his family, at least some of them, has come around. Is Appa maybe even a little jealous that his friend went and did something no one told him he could do? That people generally don’t do? Like reaching for an unlikely happiness and just making it work.

I guess you could say the gift my brother gave me was learning early on that adults don’t know much more than kids. They’ve been around longer and have the benefit of experience, but that’s about it. So much depends on what you do with the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.5.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch
• ISBN-13: 979-8-200-75811-1 / 9798200758111