The Devoted
Author: Catherine Cho
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-876328-2
Publisher: 4th Estate
Guideline Price: £16.99
Catherine Cho’s ravishing novel, The Devoted, opens with its narrator, Eunhua, killing her husband. She muses, “I wonder whether he will know that it was me.”
Eunhua is the Hong Kong-born Korean daughter of a Triad gangster, and her life has not been easy. Her son has been kidnapped, her marriage to a wealthy Shanghai man is loveless, and her mother went insane before she died. It’s a tale of glittering surfaces and sleaze, its social codes embedded in material specifics.
Tai-tais, the married ladies-who-lunch, “can smell the desperation of the wives ... whose designer handbags and shoes were too new”, while in smoky bars, gangsters and businessmen consort with hostesses over whiskey.
What distinguishes The Devoted is that its Triads are not Chinese. “We were Koreans in a foreign land,” Eunhua explains. “Hong Kong was not our home.”
Cho, a Korean-American who has lived in Hong Kong, cleverly uses objects to evoke hierarchies and relationships. A funeral is catered “in the Korean style: spicy soup with shredded beef, platters of boiled pork slices and rice cakes shaped like moons”; the widow wears “a rhinestone pressed on each nail”.
Like in The Godfather, its characters are bound not just by crime and family, but because they are immigrants. As outsiders, they are the only ones they have.
Although blood is spilled, it’s a noir novel that sighs rather than crackles. Cho writes with a cinematic burnish, bathing violent trauma with an old-fashioned glow. The chief sorrows are of the heart – of forbidden love and lost childhood and, ultimately, Eunha’s sadness cannot take away from how luxuriantly enjoyable her story is.
It’s despair dressed in silk, raw hurt refined into melodrama of the ripest and best kind, an ode to Wong Kar-Wai, K-drama and silver-screen classics such as Mildred Pierce. You can almost hear the soundtrack swell: “I wondered what he saw: the lines on my forehead, my face no longer young,” Eunhua says. “I could see who he was too – the way his eyes seemed to turn darker in the light, the freckles along his nose from the summers on the sea.”
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There’s a type of tearjerking that Asians do well, of yearning unfulfilled, the tremor of not-touching. Eunhua observes: “I wondered if he meant for his shoulder to rest against mine ... I could feel tears on my face. Why couldn’t we stay?”
I found The Devotion pure pleasure, a book that tapped into cravings buried in my Asian soul. I read it in one fell swoon, and in the end, was reluctant to let its world go.
Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin
