[BOOKS OF THE DEAD] The Eyes Are the Best Part - Monika Kim
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The Eyes Are the Best Part - Books of the Dead Review
Welcome to Books of the Dead. A monthly series by published author and founder of The Readers in the Rue Morgue Book Club Victoria Brown where she deep dives into some her favourite (and not so favourite) authors and books.
Author: Monika Kim
Publication Date: 11/07/2024
Synopsis: Ji-won's life is in disarray. Her father's affair has ripped the family to shreds, leaving her to piece their crappy lives back together. Then her mother's new white boyfriend enters the scene, bragging about his knowledge of Korean culture. As he swaggers around their claustrophobic apartment ogling her teenage sister, Ji-won's grip on reality begins to slip. She finds herself growing obsessed with his brilliant blue eyeballs, resolving to do the one thing that will save her family - and curb her cravings...
Thoughts:
This book was a wild ride. Told through the perspective of college student Ji-won, this contemporary horror novel explores her experience dealing with racial and sexual aggressions, both micro and macro, as a young Korean American woman in the USA through the lens of cannibalism. Absolutely fascinating! The book’s origins are equally fascinating, and their influence is clear throughout the narrative.
Firstly, we have the opening. The story opens with Ji-won and her sister eating fish with their mother who, to their horror, pops the fish’s eyeball straight into her mouth and chews it. This short but impactful scene was inspired by a similar experience during Monika Kim’s childhood and it evidently stuck with her to make it an integral part of her novel. The motif of eyes, as you will have guessed from the title of the story, is crucial throughout the book, both in how Western eyes consume Asian-American women, with real life consequences, and how our Asian-American protagonist in turn consumes them literally and symbolically.
Secondly, the events of the novel are rooted in Monika Kim’s anger, grief, and frustration at the 2021 mass shooting in Atlanta, where a 21-year-old white man shot and killed, among others, six Asian women, citing that it was a response to his sex addiction. Despite an overwhelming majority of his victims being of Asian descent, he vehemently denied that race played at part. Among many of the themes Kim explores in her novel, the stereotype of Asian-Americans as ‘model immigrants’ plays a huge role. In an interview with University of Colorado, journalist and associate professor of journalism in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information Angie Chaung notes that ‘the model minority stereotype has contributed to a long history of Asian-American invisibility. The stereotype creates a perception that Asian-Americans are good citizens, financially better off and don't make a lot of trouble. As a result, Asian-Americans are often not the focus of many stories, including those about ICE raids.’
While the 2021 Atlanta shootings made headline news, many, many hate crimes against Asian-Americans go unreported. And direct criminality is not the only issues facing Asian-Americans; it is the consistent labelling and micro-aggressions too, all of which Kim explores in 'The Eyes Are the Best Part'.
While cannibalism of specifically blue eyes is a large part of this story – it is no accident that the eyes Ji-won is drawn to are blue and that her addiction to them comes from her inner rage and sense of injustice – it is the characters who stick with you the most.
Ji-won’s mother is heartbroken at her husband abandoning them, and the way she falls for the misogynistic, racist, and wildly republican suitor (who, of course, hides most of these characters flaws insidiously) is hard to read but also understandable, for she is in the throes of grief, not only of her marriage but of her identity and the story she has created for herself.
Ji-won is relatable and understandable too, even if you disagree with how she handles certain aspects of her life or how she presents her version of events to you (if you like unreliable narrators, this book is for you). Ji-won also does not fit the typical ‘good immigrant’ stereotype; she struggles in school and is anything but submissive, a trait often given to Asian-American women by American men who like them to be sexually controllable, childlike, and naïve. Watching her struggle with constant stereotypes, including being gifted chopsticks by her ‘white knight’, poser feminist wanna be-boyfriend Geoffrey (he will make you want to throw the book at the nearest wall) and being subjected to hearing two male baristas make disgusting assumptions about the sexual activities of all Asian-American women, is difficult to read but that is by design. Asian-American readers will perhaps understand and emphasise with Ji-won more than white readers, but it is important for white readers, like myself, to be exposed to the experiences of these women and to acknowledge how drastically they differ from ours. One of the best ways to be a true ally is to put yourself into someone else’s shoes, and Kim gives readers the framework to do so.
In addition to the cannibalism horror – there is one particular passage where Kim describes the feeling of the optic nerves sliding down Ji-won’s throat and it almost made me gag – we also see the real horror of intergenerational trauma and how that impacts family dynamics, which is made all the more challenging when your family is pressured to be ‘good immigrants’, living between two worlds, in a country that seems to actively root against you, despite its founding being based upon the idea that all people can achieve their dreams.
I had expected a run-of-the-mill cannibalism story and, while the novel does deliver on that part, what readers really get is a multi-layered exploration of the horrors that racial violence does to Asian American women. I feel like a better reader having read it, and hopefully a better ally. This is an incredible piece of literature.
Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
-Victoria Brown, Author of The Death Ship: Recovering The Bodies of Titanic's Dead