Island Books
Engaging 'Queen of Tears' frayed by dueling themes

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser book editor

"The Queen of Tears" by Chris McKinney. Mutual Publishing, paperback $10.95, hardback $15.95

McKinney's second novel, "The Queen of Tears," released earlier this month, is a subtler experience, more like the look your mother shoots you when she's getting ready to slap your head. It's puzzling — "Wot, Ma? Wot I did?" It stirs up your emotions. It puts you on the defensive and convicts you of your sins. It makes you sad.

The central character, Park Soong Nan, in her youth a movie star known in her native Korea as "The Queen of Tears," is the matriarch of a clan within which all the problems of contemporary Hawai'i seem to be concentrated.

Soong is a mother who questions whether she should ever have had children, who admits that she's no good at seeing, only doing. Orphaned, bastard daughter of a comfort woman, she walked 100 miles from North to South Korea to find a better life. Even having it found it, she cannot stop and pushes her family to do as she does.

Widowed and living in New York, Soong returns to her former home in Hawai'i for the wedding of her feckless son, Donny, who is always wheedling money out of her. His bride, Crystal, is a stripper who considers him "the perfect husband" because he's shorter, uglier and more irresponsible than she is — not to mention impotent.

Her eldest daughter, quiet, responsible Won Ju Akana, is married to a haolefied hapa-Hawaiian named Kenny, who "looked good on paper," but now Won Ju is seeing how thin the paper was.

Darien, Soong's part-Caucasian "American daughter," is a spoiled English major who stuns the family by hooking up with Crystal's brother, Kaipo, a Wai'anae ex-con, seemingly in an attempt to experience something real for the first time in her life.

Soong hopes are focused on her only grandchild, 15-year-old Brandon. But even she admits that she doesn't know him at all. No one knows Brandon, or listens to him, and no one but Kaipo comes close to seeing what's going on inside the boy — even Crystal, whose affair with Brandon puts the match to the family powder keg.

McKinney, arguably the most important young writer in Hawai'i today, employs several metaphors as he juggles the plot back and forth in time and fleshes out these disparate characters.

Among the recurring images is the fish tank — an unkempt aquarium in the Akana's condo, the gigantic Oceanarium at the Pacific Beach Hotel — in which different breeds of sea life are caged, forced to live together and adopt to the lack of space, powerless and dependent. The tanks represent not only the Park family but Hawai'i and its racial, social and economic complexities.

"Queen of Tears," like "Tattoo," explores racial tension: Soong's contemptuous judgment that Hawaiians could lift themselves out of poverty and above race-imposed barriers, if only they had her will. Kaipo's dismissal of Kenny as a "coconut" — brown on the outside, white on the inside. Darian's stereotypical assessments of Wai'anae and its people.

The Parks debate, and live, the issues faced by immigrant families and their second-generation offspring: the self-loathing that causes them to tone down their tell-tale accents and Westernize their bodies; the way that speaking another language allows them to talk in front of others as if the English-speakers weren't there; Darian's feeling that in studying the literature of first-generation Asian Americans she is only exposing what a fraud she is, never having experienced any hardships herself.

And these are only the main themes. Money. Development. Suicide. Misogyny. Sex. Rape. All these come into the plot. The issues raised slosh up against each other like clothes in a washing machine, touching, tangling, leaching color onto each other.

McKinney's characters live, breathe and engage you — three-quarters of the battle in writing a novel — but there's an awful lot going on here. Perhaps too much. Like those clothes in the washing machine, sometimes the plot seems to get a bit soggy.

Furthermore, it's time for McKinney to graduate to a national publisher and to partner with a skilled editor who can help to polish his prose and grow him as a writer. (And also so that he can more readily find the national audience that he deserves.) This book, like his last, hits the occasional false note (primarily in word selection) and lacks the smoothness and economy of phrasing a good editor can bring.

As its title might indicate, "Queen of Tears" won't leave you laughing. Thinking. Questioning. Fuming. Arguing. But not laughing. Like a slap on the head.