Sorry To Disrupt the Peace Blog Post
Helen, the narrator and protagonist of this novel, is sorry-not-sorry to interrupt everyone's day. She smokes pot with the children she is responsible for and gives them candy, and she is not sorry about that. She was not able to help her brother when he came to New York to visit her, and she is too busy being angry with her parents to be sorry about that. She consistently refers to her parents as "adopted parents" i.e. not real parents, but does not wish to be closer to either her parents or to her biological mother in Korea. She is sorry-not-sorry about everything she does, too busy being angry to recognize how she is hurting those around her.
The LA Times book review of this novel (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-waterfall-coping-strategy-patty-yumi-cottrells-sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace/#!) emphasizes that hurt. The review suggests Helen ought to be more aware of her negative impact, that she ought to be, indeed, sorry to disrupt the peace those around her are presumably feeling, or could experience if she let them. In fact, I think this novel stands as a defense of Helen's choice not to do that.
Yumi begins the novel with a Helen who is impossible to love, difficult even to relate to. Helen loves her job, but makes jokes about her "favorite troubled kids" who desperately need her and with whom she can relate, but it's clear she identifies with them so much this gets in the way of helping them. Her brother is dead, and she appears to be making his suicide about herself by turning it into a mystery story. In the course of her investigation, she asks all kinds of troubling questions about time, place, and manner of her brother's death, bringing up details no one in her family wants to talk about.
Yet here lies the brilliance of this work. Yumi is speaking to a Western audience, many of whom are white, and I realized in the course of reading this novel, to my horror, that I am predisposed to hate Helen. Anything less than a perfectly well-adjusted product of a very happy childhood was not something I was prepared to accept in her. I was jealous of her for stealing the love and affection [and, yes, wealth] of white parents, all things I believed she somehow stole. I was convinced on some unconscious level that Helen's life in the U.S. must be a thousand times better than the one she would have lived in Korea, and how dare she be miserable?
I think this is a widespread phenomena, depicting the adoption of children from developing countries by women from developed nations as somehow heroic. The propaganda around this phenomena suggests that the U.S. is a place of gender equality (so Chinese girls will be happier here), one of democracy rather than totalitarianism (so Korean children will grow up freer here), etc. Yet the adoption of Children of Color by white women has its roots in a racist, ethnocentric ideology and has much more to do with the ego of the adopter than the best interests of the adoptee. Helen therefore is not heroic, not a particularly brave or compassionate character, but she is a relatable one--she is easy to empathize with. It is that engendered sympathy which compels the audience to truly question our own ideas regarding the adoption process which so altered Helen's life, possibly for the worse.
Maybe it's self-centered, but I read this novel as a slow, steady indictment of these beliefs. Helen is not the happy-go-lucky Lily from Modern Family, given endless clothes and toys and whatever else she might want or need. Helen grew up in a dark, dank house with only her brother for company. Her parents do not seem to have made any effort to help her adjust to a culture she was dragged into, and her only company was her depressed and equally lonely brother. Helen internalized the values of the culture without gaining access to its benefits, and ultimately for lack of an alternative became what she believed to be a "good" girl within this culture--self-sacrificing, lives in New York, kind, helpful, giving. Being these things did not make her happy, but she does not know what would. Worse, she seems cut off from that knowledge, confused about how even to find out.
Eventually, we start to understand Helen's anger, to accept it as rational and reasonable and even to empathize. Helen is too angry to enjoy sex, but we are also told that she once had to physically bite off a man's tongue to interrupt his sexual assault [an event which she relates as matter-of-factly as she does everything else]. She is too angry to have been there for her brother when he needed her, but what evidence was she given that he was in jeopardy? She wanted to help others at her job, but given how badly her parents needed her behavior to fit a very small confines for them to be able to cope, Helen likely was given tragically flawed role models to teach her how to be a role model.
The fact that Helen is not an adult is understandable. No one else in her life is, either.
The novel presents no easy answers. Helen does not go to Korea and find the mother her brother came so close to meeting. She does not directly confront her parents and achieve some catharsis. She never comes to accept what reality is, or which reality she wants to embrace; rather, she stands like her brother standing in Korea afraid embracing the fact of his mother would destroy the fact of his life in America. One life cancels the other out, that's the anxiety.
Helen's search leads her only to her brother's rationale for dying. He has no self-esteem left; he wants to give away his organs and when various hospitals reject him as a living donor, he buys a gun and drives to a hospital's entrance hoping to become a dead one. He wants only to give something, to produce something of value. We never truly learn as readers why he felt he could not do this as an adult. We can only speculate that perhaps he felt his true self of little value due to his parents' invalidation, the subtle horror of his life with them, his spiral of shame and self-doubt and his self-condemnation because he could not feel about them and his life with them the way he believed he should feel.
This is the cost of our ridiculous beliefs about adopted children, implies the book. Too much pressure. Too many expectations. Children cannot be reasonably expected to fill in their parents' gaps, to help their parents pretend at a perfection the U.S. cannot offer [but pretends to] any more than Korea. This is the cost of trying to "help" people you don't understand and don't listen to.
I found this book very difficult to read, but I'm glad I did. I think anyone who ever intends to be a parent should.
-Ariadne Wolf
The LA Times book review of this novel (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-waterfall-coping-strategy-patty-yumi-cottrells-sorry-to-disrupt-the-peace/#!) emphasizes that hurt. The review suggests Helen ought to be more aware of her negative impact, that she ought to be, indeed, sorry to disrupt the peace those around her are presumably feeling, or could experience if she let them. In fact, I think this novel stands as a defense of Helen's choice not to do that.
Yumi begins the novel with a Helen who is impossible to love, difficult even to relate to. Helen loves her job, but makes jokes about her "favorite troubled kids" who desperately need her and with whom she can relate, but it's clear she identifies with them so much this gets in the way of helping them. Her brother is dead, and she appears to be making his suicide about herself by turning it into a mystery story. In the course of her investigation, she asks all kinds of troubling questions about time, place, and manner of her brother's death, bringing up details no one in her family wants to talk about.
Yet here lies the brilliance of this work. Yumi is speaking to a Western audience, many of whom are white, and I realized in the course of reading this novel, to my horror, that I am predisposed to hate Helen. Anything less than a perfectly well-adjusted product of a very happy childhood was not something I was prepared to accept in her. I was jealous of her for stealing the love and affection [and, yes, wealth] of white parents, all things I believed she somehow stole. I was convinced on some unconscious level that Helen's life in the U.S. must be a thousand times better than the one she would have lived in Korea, and how dare she be miserable?
I think this is a widespread phenomena, depicting the adoption of children from developing countries by women from developed nations as somehow heroic. The propaganda around this phenomena suggests that the U.S. is a place of gender equality (so Chinese girls will be happier here), one of democracy rather than totalitarianism (so Korean children will grow up freer here), etc. Yet the adoption of Children of Color by white women has its roots in a racist, ethnocentric ideology and has much more to do with the ego of the adopter than the best interests of the adoptee. Helen therefore is not heroic, not a particularly brave or compassionate character, but she is a relatable one--she is easy to empathize with. It is that engendered sympathy which compels the audience to truly question our own ideas regarding the adoption process which so altered Helen's life, possibly for the worse.
Maybe it's self-centered, but I read this novel as a slow, steady indictment of these beliefs. Helen is not the happy-go-lucky Lily from Modern Family, given endless clothes and toys and whatever else she might want or need. Helen grew up in a dark, dank house with only her brother for company. Her parents do not seem to have made any effort to help her adjust to a culture she was dragged into, and her only company was her depressed and equally lonely brother. Helen internalized the values of the culture without gaining access to its benefits, and ultimately for lack of an alternative became what she believed to be a "good" girl within this culture--self-sacrificing, lives in New York, kind, helpful, giving. Being these things did not make her happy, but she does not know what would. Worse, she seems cut off from that knowledge, confused about how even to find out.
Eventually, we start to understand Helen's anger, to accept it as rational and reasonable and even to empathize. Helen is too angry to enjoy sex, but we are also told that she once had to physically bite off a man's tongue to interrupt his sexual assault [an event which she relates as matter-of-factly as she does everything else]. She is too angry to have been there for her brother when he needed her, but what evidence was she given that he was in jeopardy? She wanted to help others at her job, but given how badly her parents needed her behavior to fit a very small confines for them to be able to cope, Helen likely was given tragically flawed role models to teach her how to be a role model.
The fact that Helen is not an adult is understandable. No one else in her life is, either.
The novel presents no easy answers. Helen does not go to Korea and find the mother her brother came so close to meeting. She does not directly confront her parents and achieve some catharsis. She never comes to accept what reality is, or which reality she wants to embrace; rather, she stands like her brother standing in Korea afraid embracing the fact of his mother would destroy the fact of his life in America. One life cancels the other out, that's the anxiety.
Helen's search leads her only to her brother's rationale for dying. He has no self-esteem left; he wants to give away his organs and when various hospitals reject him as a living donor, he buys a gun and drives to a hospital's entrance hoping to become a dead one. He wants only to give something, to produce something of value. We never truly learn as readers why he felt he could not do this as an adult. We can only speculate that perhaps he felt his true self of little value due to his parents' invalidation, the subtle horror of his life with them, his spiral of shame and self-doubt and his self-condemnation because he could not feel about them and his life with them the way he believed he should feel.
This is the cost of our ridiculous beliefs about adopted children, implies the book. Too much pressure. Too many expectations. Children cannot be reasonably expected to fill in their parents' gaps, to help their parents pretend at a perfection the U.S. cannot offer [but pretends to] any more than Korea. This is the cost of trying to "help" people you don't understand and don't listen to.
I found this book very difficult to read, but I'm glad I did. I think anyone who ever intends to be a parent should.
-Ariadne Wolf
Ari,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your discussion of Helen's adopted history and the way our culture addresses adoption. There is so much pressure on adopted kids to behave, look, and act a certain way, and I think I forgot that while reading this book. It is obvious that the parents were insufficient in raising Helen and her brother, but I'm wondering exactly what they did wrong? Helen often avoids discussing the specific failings of her parents, other than of their house and being cheap, but that doesn't seem like a fatal flaw in their persons as far as raising children. Helen seems to be avoiding the really hard question of what her parents could have done to help her brother or to help her, to change the pressures they felt, to help them adjust to their lives here. I'm not sure I have the answer to it, because I get the impression Helen is scared of disturbing the peace too much by acknowledging that, like confronting the answer is an experience she doesn't want to live with.
Thanks, I think your post was really insightful.
Anna Erice
Gratefully literature complicates the ideas we already have--especially the romanticizing of the good-meaning behaviors. We can talk the craft that leads to this transformation.
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