Free Food For Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

 

FFFM tells the story of Casey Han, a recent Princeton graduate who immigrated to the United States with her family as a young child. As the story opens, she’s at a family dinner with her parents at the beginning of her first summer as a college graduate. She’s moved in with them, but hasn’t told them that she’s deferred admission to Columbia Law School and has no plans for her post-college life. She also hasn’t told them that she’s been dating a white American, which would be an even more egregious offense to her traditional Korean parents. Casey is clearly of a different generation and a different world than her parents. As a result she felt 

If her rotten choices hurt her, well then, she’d be willing to take that wager, but it was hard to think of letting her parents down again and again. But her choices were always hurting her parents, or so they said. Yet Casey was an American, too -- she had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones (123).

This tension between the Korean values and wishes of her family and her American values and wishes runs through the book. We also see themes of religion, class, and race.

As this first night (predictably) ends explosively, Casey’s life is irrevocably changed and the rest of the book tells the story of her attempting to (re)gain a sense of self and purpose in a world that isn’t governed wholly by her parents’ traditions or her white American peers’ privilege. The things Casey knows best are shopping and hats, although she has an ivy-league education, and she has to reinvent her life a lot more quickly and urgently than she had planned.

This book was immersive in a way that, even though I really feel that I didn’t relate to Casey, I felt so invested in the characters that I couldn’t wait to keep reading. The characters were so real that at times they felt predictable, simply because they seemed like real people and they acted like real people would. Their flaws were real flaws, and their successes, therefore, were real successes.

I felt that there were some loose ends that could have been tied up more cleanly, or alternatively omitted altogether, but the book was panoramic in scope even despite these loose ends and gave us a comprehensive look at the immigrant experience for this family and their new community in New York.

Questions for Discussion: 

Is Casey’s spending (and possibly Unu’s gambling?) a unique result of the immigrant experience? 

What can we learn about the experiences of this family by comparing and contrasting Casey to Tina, and is this actually a valuable exercise? Or is Tina’s story so different that comparing to Casey cheapens them both? I felt as though Tina was almost entirely in the story as a foil to Casey and really wanted to know more of her story. 

What role did hats and millinery play in the story?

The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell

The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell

The Wolf Wilder has the feel of a Russian fairytale. It tells of turn-of-the-century Russia, a country just beginning to discover Lenin’s message, and a young girl named Feo who lives with her mother and teaches the pampered wolf pets of the Russian nobility how to be wild again when they outlive their appeal at court.

In this volatile political climate, Feo and her mother, Marina, have a run in with Rakov, a commander in the Russian army who commands them to stop wilding the wolves, and when they don’t, develops a personal vendetta against Feo and imprisons Marina with plans to execute her in one week’s time.

Feo embarks on a journey to free Marina from prison, with the help of some special friends.
Despite the fact that this book has the classic fairy tale trope of “get rid of the parent so the child can have an adventure,” I loved the way this book dealt with that tropey situation. Rather than adventuring in spite of her mother’s wishes and upbringing, it’s clear throughout the book that Feo is out adventuring because of her mother- not just to liberate her from prison, but because of the valuable lessons she was taught at her mother’s side. Despite her feral appearance, Feo shows her deep humanity and capacity for caring because of, not despite, the attentions of her mother.

I also enjoyed the degree to which natural elements, such as the wolves themselves, and the cold Russian winter, played key roles in the story. They were never anthropomorphized, but their influence was well felt and appropriately realistic (for a fairy tale in which riding on a wolf’s back is feasible).

Questions for further discussion:
How much did the political climate really matter to the story? Would this story have worked at another time or place in history?
What was the role of the ballet school in the story?
What do you think happened to the children after the events of the story? Does it matter?