Title: Unnie
Author: Yun-Yun
Publisher: Libre Books
Paperback ISBN: 9791198565105 Buy paperback here.
Hardback ISBN: 9791198565112
Note: the selling price of both paperback and hardcover end in 4.16--deliberately evoking the date of the tragedy of the Sewol ferry sinking in South Korea on April 16, 2014.
When a novel is based upon real tragedy, there’s usually an added depth to the painful experience in the author’s telling because of the way news media and survivors recount events. This is the case with Unnie, the story of a family’s grief as they traverse the horrors of the sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, when 304 died, including 250 Danwon High School students and 11 teachers who were headed for a field trip. Author Yun-Yun handles the details of fear, anticipation, realization, and grief adeptly.
This novel tells the story of the fictitious Parks family, whose daughter was a teacher, through the experiences of the youngest sister Yun-young. At first the family waits at the high school, anticipating the joy of greeting survivors, especially their oldest daughter, Unnie. Unnie is a Korean term meaning big sister.
But time passes and Yun-Young and her family are tormented by the thoughts of their daughter and sister sinking to the bottom of the cold dark ocean. Yun-Young’s grief is all engulfing as “Her footsteps echo in the empty street, covered in early morning dew. In a world where everything has been shaken off, she feels like groping along blindly.” Over time, deceased students and teachers are retrieved. Unnie remains in the depths of the sea. Only after 1,091 days do families of unrecovered victims hold funerals.
Throughout the unfolding of this tragedy, the South Korean government attempts to mislead the media and families into believing that they’ve done all things possible to find survivors and then to retrieve the dead. But the families know better. Also through this novelized version of the story, we learn the truth that this tragedy became so much worse because students were ordered to stay in place when they may have survived if they’d left the ferry’s interior and gone atop and into the water.
With depth and incredible insight, this novel explores the nature of grief as Yun-Young, her brother Ji-ho, and her parents walk through weeks of unknowing. They are filled, at first, with hope that Unnie will return unharmed. When time passes and they realize that Unnie’s body is lost either within the sunken ferry or lost at the bottom of the sea, they plead for her return even as they recognize the illogic of this possibility. Yun-Young sees her deceased sister in the faces of others. The family visits her school where people have set up shrines for the lost. They, along with other families, rent boats and travel to the site where the ferry sank and leave flowers, gifts, even a birthday cake for Unnie on her thirtieth birthday. Slowly, Yun-Young realizes she must let go of her sister, long held in the depths. She writes the lyrics of “The Never-ending Story” in a journal she’s been keeping over almost three years and sets the journal on fire, setting her sister free but knowing the song “claims if one yearns for a loved one so deeply, they will miraculously meet in the end.”
This novel handles grief with extraordinary sensitivity even as it wraps the plot around the very real history of this tragedy that has become so unspeakable that some have forgotten it happened.
Reviewer: Ann Angel
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