The Evening Hero

Prologue Prologue
His name was Yungman.

The components of his name were, as custom dictated, selected by his paternal grandfather, just as his father's had been selected by his grandfather, and so forth back to the origin of the clan. The grounding character "Yung"-"Hero"-cemented him to all his cousins (Yung-jo, Yung-ho, Yung-chun, Yungbok) in this twelfth generation of Kwaks, whether he knew them or not; "Man" meant "Evening." "Evening Hero" would thus be carved into all the family trees on male Kwak headstones henceforth, chipped into his jade name-stick-his legal signature. Yungman's place as first son was evident by contrast to his younger brother Yung-sik, "Vegetable Hero."

To his patients, he was no Evening Hero but Dr. Kwak. A little Asian man (certainly short of stature, at 5'4"), the hospital's obstetrician. He was distinctive to the white townspeople not just by being Asian but by being the first doctor from somewhere, anywhere, else. First North Korea, then South Korea. In America, a year first in Birmingham, Alabama, repeating his internship, as all foreign-trained physicians had to do.

And though he was a graduate of the "Harvard of Korea," no hospital even bothered to reply to the American job search of this man from Asia, a region of the world America had decided it didn't want and made laws to ban and expel. Yungman would end up so desperate for employment that he would drive straight north with his wife and infant child to this Arctic Circle of the US-the Iron Range of Minnesota-where winters were almost lightless, where schools closed for blizzards only when temperatures fell below minus fifty degrees.

Horse's Breath, so named because the only way the early settlers (49ers who got lost on the way to California) could discern whether their horses were still alive that first winter was by checking for their breath, or alternatively, the name was a white man's mangling of the Anishinaabe word ozhaawashkwaabika: the purplish

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the young adult novel Finding my Voice, thought to be one of the first contemporary-set Asian American YA novels. She is one of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family.

"This precise, watchful novel reveals the loneliness of the immigrant experience, even when cloaked in outward success... a novel about healers and healing, about unflashy, quiet heroism...[with] lyrical, lush, deeply felt prose... a soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel."-THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person's lifetime-their body, mind, and memories-no matter how far in the past it may seem. This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance." -KIRKUS REVIEWS

"An ambitious story charting the travails of an elderly immigrant doctor...Lee offers touching details...fans of immigrant stories will appreciate Lee's labor of love."-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY