The father-son relationship between Daniel Bae and Dae Hyun Bae

The father-son relationship between Daniel Bae and Dae Hyun Bae turns on a painful mismatch: Dae Hyun treats security as the clearest expression of love, while Daniel needs to be heard as a person with wants of his own. Their strained silences and abrupt conversations are not simply signs of indifference. They grow from Dae Hyun’s fear of poverty, his decision to shield his sons from the past, and Daniel’s sense that this protection has also left them unable to understand one another.

A Household Built Around Provision

Dae Hyun is a reserved father who speaks readily to customers but rarely to his sons except to berate them. Daniel suggests that this pattern has been especially pronounced with Charlie Bae, whom their father has criticized repeatedly. Daniel knows his father as a skilled reader of people in the store, able to judge who might shoplift or who can be trusted to pay later, but that perceptiveness does not translate into easy intimacy at home. To Daniel, the relationship can feel like looking at his father through soundproof glass: they see one another, but cannot hear one another.

The store is both the setting for their encounters and a material expression of Dae Hyun’s idea of a good life. When he and Min Soo Bae arrived in New York City, Dae Hyun’s cousin helped them with a loan and advised them to open a Black hair-care store, as other members of the South Korean immigrant community had done. The business offered a route to stability, but it also tied the family to an industry shaped by racial and economic divisions. South Korean businesses came to control an estimated sixty to eighty percent of the Black hair-care market, after the popularity of South Korean wigs and government restrictions helped consolidate the trade. Dae Hyun does not know this history; what he knows is that America offers opportunity and that his children should have more than he had.

That conviction comes from a past he has largely kept to himself. At thirteen, while still living in South Korea, Dae Hyun was being prepared to take over his family’s barely profitable crab-fishing business. As the eldest of three sons, he understood succession as his place in the family, and each fishing season meant another struggle to survive. The book presents poverty not as an abstract hardship but as a force that can cut into a person’s body and mind. Dae Hyun fears that knowledge as something transmissible: he withholds his history because he believes that if his sons learn what poverty can do, they might inherit its damage. In his mind, silence protects them; to Daniel, it leaves an essential part of his father unknowable.

The Store Encounter

Daniel’s decision to bring Natasha Kingsley to the family store in Harlem makes the distance between father and son visible in a small, uncomfortable scene. He arrives with a pouch and deposit slips for his father, while also bringing someone he has not prepared his family to meet. Before they enter, Daniel worries that Dae Hyun will notice the significance of Natasha and that his father’s manner will frighten her away. He is nervous not only about introducing her but about what the store represents: the family business, its racial politics, and the possibility that Natasha will judge him through it.

Inside, Dae Hyun asks Daniel a question in Korean, and Daniel sidesteps its meaning by handing over the pouch and answering in English so Natasha will not think they are discussing her. Charlie offers to translate, emphasizing Natasha’s status as Daniel’s friend. Dae Hyun challenges Charlie’s claim that he does not understand Korean; when Charlie says he can get by, Dae Hyun brings up Charlie’s failure at Harvard in Korean, intending not to air the family’s private conflict in front of an American. Charlie translates the insult anyway. With his words exposed and his customary sense of propriety under pressure, Dae Hyun retreats into his deferential store-owner manner and offers Natasha a product.

The product he chooses is a tub of hair relaxer. Looking at Natasha’s large Afro, he says it will make her hair less big. Natasha replies that she likes it big, while Daniel tries to manage the encounter and Charlie turns it into a crude joke about Daniel. The exchange leaves Daniel humiliated and eager to get Natasha out of the store, but it also reveals how little he can control the meeting between his family’s assumptions and the person he has brought into their world. Natasha’s Afro is her own choice, not a declaration made to provoke Dae Hyun. The book places that choice against a history in which African hair carried cultural and spiritual meaning, was forcibly shaved under slavery, and was later judged against European beauty standards. Dae Hyun’s casual offer of relaxer therefore lands within a much larger history, even though he does not appear to recognize its weight.

Daniel is ashamed of the encounter and fears that he may be a product of his father’s history. He tries to separate himself from Dae Hyun, while also recognizing that he understands why it is difficult to come from someone one is not proud of. The embarrassment does not make Daniel stop caring about his father, nor does the store scene resolve their conflict. Instead, it turns their unspoken differences into something Daniel can no longer ignore: his father’s habits, business, and expectations shape the life from which Daniel is trying to distinguish himself.

Care, Ambition, and the Unfinished Conversation

Daniel wants to understand what his father believes and why. After noticing that Dae Hyun bought oil paints for Min Soo, he wonders whether his mother might have had a better life if she had continued painting, and whether his father is sad that she gave it up. That question belongs to a wider wish: Daniel wants to ask why his parents want particular things for their children, and why those things matter so much to his father. His curiosity marks a change from simply experiencing the distance between them to seeking the history behind it.

At the store, Dae Hyun summons Daniel and explains his understanding of the future. What Daniel wants now, he argues, matters less than what will be good for him: he should go to school, become a doctor, succeed, and avoid having to work in a store. Money and respect, in this account, will eventually provide the things Daniel desires, along with a wife, children, and the American Dream. Dae Hyun presents this not as anger but as a basic lesson, as though he is explaining something self-evident. It is the most he has said to Daniel at once, and for a moment Daniel feels they may finally be approaching an understanding.

That opening narrows almost as soon as it appears. Dae Hyun raises a hand to stop Daniel from speaking and says that perhaps he has made things too easy for his sons by keeping them from learning about their history and what poverty can do. Daniel is close to telling him that he does not want the future his father has planned and believes he will be all right without it. But Dae Hyun silences him again, apparently knowing what he is about to say and refusing to hear it. The interruption captures their central pattern: the father begins to reveal the fear beneath his expectations, yet still cannot make room for his son’s answer. He then lays down the consequence plainly: if Daniel does not go to Yale and become a doctor, he must find work and pay for college himself.

Daniel’s later conversation with Jeremy Fitzgerald makes clear that this threat is not merely rhetorical. Daniel says that refusing his father’s plan could mean being cut off, with no college funds. He does not describe Dae Hyun as evil or reduce him to a stereotype; rather, he understands that his father cannot see past his own history enough to let his sons have histories of their own. The future Dae Hyun imagines for Daniel is thus both a gift and a demand: education and money are meant to spare Daniel the deprivation his father knew, but support remains conditional on accepting the path Dae Hyun believes will keep him safe.

A Bond Neither Fully Broken nor Repaired

The book gives the relationship real tenderness without making it an easy reconciliation. Daniel knows that Dae Hyun loves his sons fiercely and understands his secrecy as an attempt at protection, even as he resents being shut out. Dae Hyun’s care appears in the concrete work of providing for the family and in his insistence that his children should have money, respect, and choices he did not have. Daniel, in turn, does not dismiss the past that shaped his father; he wants to know it, and he wants his father to recognize that love cannot be measured only by the security of a prescribed future.

Their tension also reaches beyond the store. Daniel wonders whether their difficulties come from ordinary father-son conflict, cultural difference, or both, and admits that he cannot separate those causes cleanly. His relationship with Natasha gives that question another pressure point: Daniel is willing to disregard the opinions of either family about their relationship, placing his attachment to her ahead of parental approval. This does not establish that Dae Hyun accepts Daniel’s choices, or that father and son settle their disagreement. The decisive movement is instead Daniel’s clearer understanding of the cost and source of his father’s demands. Dae Hyun’s fear of poverty explains his vision of success; it does not make that vision Daniel’s own. Their bond remains caught between provision and autonomy, inherited hardship and the chance to choose differently.