Marie Myung-Ok Lee's sweeping novel, The Evening Hero, opens with a depiction of an eventful day for Dr.

Brutalized by cultural genocide, first by the Japanese empire and then by American napalm, Yungman comes from a small village that finds itself on the northern side of an American-drawn line.In the Air Force base where he becomes a “houseboy,” he is given the nickname Hong Kil-dong, the Korean Robin Hood, a curiously rakish nickname for someone so quiet, precise, observant.He only later realizes it is merely a place-holder, the equivalent of John Doe, for all men on official Korean documents.Lee, a fiction professor and founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, has written a novel about the quiet humanity of sacrifice.Yungman owes his life in America to many: his communist-leaning mother, who damns herself to save her two sons his gangster brother, who pays Yungman’s way through medical school his wife, Young-ae, who was cleverer than he was in medical school but hasn’t practiced since her unplanned pregnancy.From the outside, Yungman and Young-ae - parents to a 'Korean-ish' adult son, Einstein - seem to be 'so intensely connected that their communication had taken on a form beyond spoken language'.This is a novel about healers and healing, about unflashy, quiet heroism, all wrapped in Yungman’s mordant humor.Lee summons well-worn Korean syllogisms - 'the flower that blooms in the morning is dead by noon' - as well as 'the lament of the Korean people, shot through with years of sadness over its history, pessimism for its future,' into lyrical, lush, deeply felt prose.'Diffuse pain was the hardest to pinpoint for a cause,' Yungman says of one of his patients.The same is true of himself and his people.

The Evening Hero by Marie Myung-Ok Lee