South Korea

South Korea is the Bae family’s country of origin and a continuing point of reference in the novel’s treatment of migration, inherited identity, and work. The narrative gives little description of the family’s particular life there; instead, South Korea appears through the decision to leave, the naming customs Min Soo Bae carries with her, and the historical forces that help explain the business the family establishes in New York City. Its significance lies in how a distant homeland remains active in the family’s American life, even as that life is shaped by adaptation and opportunity.

Origin and Migration

Min Soo Bae and Dae Hyun Bae’s departure begins with both affection and economic hope. Min Soo falls in love with Dae Hyun without expecting that their relationship will take them from South Korea to the United States. Dae Hyun, who has been poor throughout his life, has a cousin in New York City who is doing well and promises to help. The move is thus neither a simple pursuit of romance nor a purely individual venture: it is a family decision made possible by an existing transnational connection and the prospect of work.

The account frames migration as an act of faith. Stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity may draw people toward a new country, but leaving also means separating from one’s language, community, country, and history, without knowing whether the promised future will be available or whether newcomers will be welcomed. For Min Soo and Dae Hyun, the outcome is mixed rather than effortless. They adapt as far as they can, avoid people and places that do not want them, and receive practical help from Dae Hyun’s cousin. They eventually prosper, so some of the hopes that brought them across the ocean are realized, but the need to adapt and find places of acceptance remains part of the migration story.

The novel does not supply a specific South Korean hometown or linger over a detailed portrait of the country. South Korea is instead established as the point of departure and as a cultural history the family carries forward. That emphasis makes the act of leaving more than a change of address: the move places the family in a new society while leaving their origins present in their choices and in the way they understand family.

Names and Inherited Identity

The connection to South Korea becomes especially concrete when Min Soo learns that she is pregnant and considers what to name her child. She understands names in Korea as a record of ancestry: the family name comes first and locates a person within family history. By contrast, the American convention calls the family name the last name. Dae Hyun interprets that ordering as an indication that Americans place greater emphasis on the individual than on the family. The contrast gives the naming decision a cultural and familial weight beyond the practical question of what teachers and classmates will find easy to pronounce.

Min Soo considers whether to choose an American personal name or to follow Korean tradition with a two-syllable name formed from two Chinese characters. She ultimately combines the alternatives rather than treating them as mutually exclusive. Her sons receive an American name, a Korean personal name, and the family name: Charles Jae Won Bae and Daniel Jae Ho Bae. The order makes room for life in the United States while preserving Korean names and the Bae family identity. The narration presents names as markers that locate people in time and geography, but also as a kind of compass. In that sense, the boys’ names carry South Korea forward without requiring them to live there; they are meant to know where they come from while growing up in America.

A Historical Link to Work in New York

South Korea’s connection to the Bae family’s livelihood is both personal and historical. When Dae Hyun and Min Soo settle in New York City, a community of South Korean immigrants is already there to offer support. Dae Hyun’s cousin provides a loan and advises them to open a Black hair-care store, following a business model used by the cousin and other members of the community. The family’s entry into the trade therefore grows from kinship, immigrant networks, and the practical transfer of advice and capital.

The novel sets that family decision within a broader account of South Korean prominence in the Black hair-care industry. During the 1960s, wigs made with South Korean hair became popular in the African American community. The South Korean government then prohibited the export of raw hair, ensuring that wigs using South Korean hair could be made only in South Korea. At the same time, the United States prohibited imports of wigs containing hair from China. Together, the policies consolidated South Korea’s position in the wig market, and the wig business later expanded into the more general Black hair-care trade.

The account estimates that South Korean businesses control between sixty and eighty percent of the market, across distribution, retail, and increasingly manufacturing. It also describes how South Korean distributors primarily supply South Korean retailers, making it difficult for other groups to gain a foothold. These details complicate a straightforward story of individual enterprise: the Bae family’s store is part of a community network, while that network operates within a market shaped by government policy and unequal access to distribution. Dae Hyun, however, does not know this history. What he understands is that the United States offers opportunity and that his children may have more than he had.

Significance as a Remembered Homeland

South Korea is important to the novel not because the narrative maps its landscapes or recounts an extended period of the Baes’ lives there, but because it remains legible in the family’s life after migration. Its presence survives in the structure of the sons’ names, in Min Soo’s concern that they should know their origins, and in the immigrant community that helps the family build a livelihood. The family’s American future is not depicted as a clean break from its past: adaptation and aspiration coexist with customs and connections carried across borders.

The novel also distinguishes between the private meaning of South Korea to the Baes and its larger historical role in the market where they work. To Min Soo, it is bound to ancestry and the question of what her children should inherit. To Dae Hyun, its significance is filtered through the difficult movement from poverty toward opportunity and the practical support of relatives and fellow immigrants. In the industry’s history, South Korea is a national center whose policies help shape a transnational trade. These perspectives converge in the family store, linking intimate decisions about belonging to economic structures that reach well beyond the family.

The account’s restraint about South Korea itself matters: it remains an origin recalled through migration, naming, and work rather than a setting exhaustively described. That limited depiction keeps attention on what crosses the distance. The Bae family’s move changes where they live and how they make a living, but the family name and Korean personal names preserve a connection to the country they left. South Korea thus operates as both a point of departure and an ongoing coordinate in the family’s American identity.