The Eyes Are the Best Part

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, rape, mental illness, graphic violence, death, and emotional abuse.

“Before Umma started doing this, I never felt bad about eating fish. Whenever we had it for dinner, I ate voraciously, sucking every remaining morsel of flesh off the bones. Now, I can’t even look at a fish without feeling cruel. It was once a living, breathing creature. It could see and feel and think. It probably had a family, maybe even friends.”

Early in the narrative, Ji-won exhibits empathy for the fish she’s about to eat, demonstrating her capacity for compassion. This trait diminishes as the novel continues, and Ji-won shifts from feeling bad for fish to feeling nothing when she kills human beings. It is notable, however, that she associates her compassion for the fish with Umma’s consumption of the eyes, as it implies her empathy is rooted partly in disgust (for the practice, for her mother’s passive behavior, etc.). This tension carries over into her ambivalence toward eyes themselves.

“There are some things that you can never truly escape. Not really. Maybe that’s why, even now, she’s stuck in the past, long after everyone else has moved on.”

This passage draws a parallel between physical and psychological imprisonment to contextualize Umma’s behavior—e.g., her passivity in the face of men’s abandonment. The voice shifts from universal to personal, suggesting how Ji-won’s worldviews are rooted in this inherited trauma.

“Appa is a man with big dreams, the type of person who is smart and works hard but is held back only by the hand that fortune has dealt him. In Korean, the word for ‘fortune’ is palja. It comes from the term saju palja, which means ‘the four pillars of destiny.’ These four pillars are based on the year, month, day, and hour of a person’s birth. And, according to my father, these seemingly meaningless components determine whether your brief existence will be good or bad before you even have the opportunity to live.”

This quote introduces the Korean concept of palja through exposition while establishing notions of predetermined fate versus free will; such cultural details contextualize Ji-won’s experiences as a second-generation immigrant, laying the groundwork for the exploration of The False Promise of Assimilation. The quote also foreshadows Ji-won’s future actions and, in particular, the questions the novel raises about her responsibility for the murders she commits.