Ginger Lee, the plucky Korean-American heroine of Hwang's debut novel, didn't realize that her life was broken until her mother showed up at the door of her New York City studio vowing to "fix" it. Mom arrives with a long list of family friends who have eligible Korean-American sons and insists on staying until the 27-year-old Ginger is safely married ("your bloom is almost over"). Ginger, a Ph.D. dropout who's now the oldest—and least ambitious—fashion assistant at À la Mode
magazine, goes into a tailspin. She's never managed to tell her mother that she doesn't want to marry anyone, let alone an upstanding Korean-American professional, and she goes to extreme measures (such as throwing herself into her ersatz career) to keep her mother at bay—to no avail. Along with the 20-something angst typical of this genre—Ginger frets about her nonexistent romantic life and vapid colleagues—Hwang addresses more serious subjects like Ginger's encounters with subtle forms of racism and the psychic toll of her mother's expectations. She tosses off well-turned—if predictable—observations about the Old World Mrs. Lee (on her fashion sense: "as long as little Korean women populate the earth, the eighties would never die"). Hwang runs out of steam by the end of the story with an anticlimactic resolution, but the novel has plenty of engaging moments and arch humor. With a little polishing, Hwang could become a crowd-pleasing storyteller. (Mar.)
Forecast:This novel could be a successful handsell with women in their
20s.
