“Do you think more people are alike than not?” An uncanny question when posed by a sister. If siblings are inscrutable to each other, is it possible to understand anyone? Then again, to be like one’s family is to be evil in an all-too-familiar way. The more accurate question may be: “Would you rather live in a hall of mirrors or alone in a crowd?” This is the central problem of The Sisters K, Maureen Sun’s debut novel about three Korean American sisters growing up with an abusive father in 1990s Los Angeles and reunited in adulthood by his terminal illness. In 1879, Fyodor Dostoevsky began publishing The Brothers Karamazov, a similar novel about three brothers who receive a cruel inheritance, from which The Sisters K takes inspiration. While these two novels take place over a century apart, they pose the same question: How do we escape that affliction we call family?
As Sun answers this question, she claims an inheritance of her own. Readers may wonder, as I did: What’s the family resemblance between Sun’s novel and Dostoevsky’s? Maybe the reader of an adaptation—not the writer herself—most acutely experiences the anxiety of influence, the comparative urge. But, in the case of Russian literature, adaptation is especially loaded. “Power sticks to tradition and builds up like a residue,” remarks Sun’s character of the Christian church, but she may as well have said it about the Russian literary canon.
Since the nineteenth century, Russian literature has been imagined as an expression of universal humanity. Dostoevsky himself was an architect of this myth. He believed that the Russian soul, as embodied in the Orthodox Christian peasantry, would save the world from Western modernity. And though it derived from the peasantry, the Russian soul was, in Dostoevsky’s imperialist vision, just the universal, human soul dressed in national garb. Adaptations of the Russian classics are thought to particularize what has already been rendered universal, transplanting “the soul” into a historically specific “body.” But Sun rejects this gambit: she isn’t trying to prove that these Korean American sisters are just as representative as the Russian brothers. By recasting this Slavophile opus as a critique of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, with a grand sense of philosophical rigor, Sun models anti-imperial engagement with the Russian canon.
The Sisters K opens like a fairy tale: “The sisters Minah, Sarah, and Esther shared the same father but were not full-blooded siblings. And though they each considered the same woman their mother, they were not raised by the same women.”The first passages are taut, as Sun breathlessly introduces the entire family at once. The sisters witness their father’s violence, while their mother, Jeonghee, lies in bed. The family’s neighbor, Anna, is a woman from Russia who cannily spies Eugene’s abuse and Jeonghee’s fragility and shepherds the Kim girls into her lovingly decorated home. “Anna, like the room, had layers—unknown depths of wisdom and will, of power—that she could not measure,” recalls Sarah, the middle sister. How fitting that this Russian woman betrays a mystical aptitude for observation, a sense of humanity that transcends borders. This is what the Russian classics have been credited with since their Anglophone discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. Anna is something like Dostoevsky’s Grigory, the kind peasant formerly enserfed by Fyodor Karamazov, who takes the Karamazov boys into his hut and raises them for a time. She is the good-hearted, if opaque, Russian peasant of Dostoevsky’s nationalist dreams. But Sun moves beyond caricature, endowing Anna with real personality. At the piano, writes Sun, Anna’s face would “alternately grow more severe or soften as she played, sometimes humming under her breath.” All the characters in Sun’s novel are thoughtfully drawn, embodied individuals, an impressive feat for a novel as feverishly plotty as The Sisters K.
When the Kim sisters are reunited for the first time as adults, they are “like veterans of enemy armies long dissolved. At last indifferent to the original cause of conflict, they were forever bound by the experience of war, which they alone knew, as they navigated the strangely diminished dimensions of civilian life.” In this story, neither witness nor victim is a moral champion. Sitting in a New York café after their father’s illness has brought them back together, Minah tells Sarah: “You must have met people in your life who could never imagine what we’ve grown up with. They tell you, ‘You must be exaggerating, your father only did what he thought was best for you.’ I want my children to be like those people.” Minah, who fled to Korea as a young adult, is now a polished Manhattan lawyer searching doggedly for a husband in order to start a family of her own and rewrite her childhood. Minah speaks of these prospective children, of beloved people as a category: “Their happiness is the most beautiful in the world. It’s beautiful and ridiculous and priceless, like a Fabergé egg. You might find them absurd, but you could never bring yourself to damage one because it is priceless. . . . You will never convince me that what we suffered has given us greater wisdom or humanity. None of it was worth it.” Departing from this language of equivalence—what is suffering worth?—Minah explains that her future children’s happiness will require a great deal of money. Now that Eugene is dying, this eldest sister is more than prepared to fund her remedy from the pockets of her abuser.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky skirts the question of gendered violence. Fyodor Karamazov raped his children’s mothers and left the young Dmitry to watch his provincial orgies, but his three boys are mostly raised beyond his walls, away from his physical reach. Karamazov’s crime is neglect, but Eugene Kim’s lies in his proximity. What did Eugene do to his daughters? This question hangs over the sisters, and the novel. In refusing to answer it, Sun maintains a brilliant opacity. Her reader, like the sisters, cannot count on their own perceptions to apprehend the extent of Eugene’s violence. By introducing Edwin, Eugene’s son with another woman, Sun undertakes something of a control experiment. Neglected by his father, the adult Edwin claims commensurable suffering with the Kim sisters. To the reader who has so carefully witnessed the sisters’ childhoods and the questions and confusion that follow them into adulthood, Edwin’s claim is outrageous. Sun’s characters, too, resist the idea that everyone deserves empathy, especially when some violations are so thoroughly gendered. “It felt violent to be asked to recognize anything but the demands and the suffering of the sufferer—the suffering of the three sisters,” thinks Sarah. “To do so was both heartless and lucid, righteous and obscene.”
Sun queries the supposedly lucid, righteous path of empathizing with the villain. This is Sun’s key challenge to Dostoevsky, who has been celebrated as a “dialogic” novelist. A dialogic novel, in the terms of the twentieth-century critic Mikhail Bakhtin, features many voices in a single text, without any indication of the author’s preference for one perspective over another. Dialogism, like many Russian theories of literature, has been developed through comparisons of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The “monologic” author of War and Peace treats his characters like a chiding father—even when he allows a character to express views contrary to his own, Tolstoy practically shakes his head at the reader, reminding us not to take this perspective seriously. Dostoevsky, by contrast, is a dialogic novelist, a chill older brother who lets his characters climb onto the roof or start a fire. The U.S. scholars who translated Bakhtin in the late Cold War saw great political virtue in dialogism and its theorist. Here was a Russian thinker, living under an authoritarian regime, who celebrated a democracy of novelistic voices. Today, the political meanings of dialogism—in the U.S., at least—are different. At best, a dialogic novel may be in the spirit of liberal multiculturalism and inclusion. At worst, and not unrelatedly, dialogism suggests a commensurability between all perspectives. Read within this critical history, Sun’s insistence on the particularity of certain kinds of violence, and certain perspectives, is a welcome challenge to Dostoevsky and his readers.
The Sisters K is dialogic in one important way its predecessor is not. Dostoevsky’s novel is entirely in Russian with the occasional quotation from French or German, while The Sisters K consistently thematizes two languages, with major plot events launching from the pivot between English and Korean. The weakness of Eugene’s English makes it a crude instrument–a club as opposed to the knife of his Korean, whose smooth cuts are initially unfelt by his second-generation daughters. In one scene, Eugene and Esther rehash an old problem: he gave her tuition money, which she didn’t return after dropping out of college. Eugene accuses his daughter, once again, of being a sex worker. Esther fails to explain the circumstance in a way that convinces her father, concluding, “If I was a prostitute, you might understand why.” Sun narrates Eugene’s reaction:
His expression remained hard, but she saw a shadow flitting across his eyes. She knew he didn’t understand this conditional; her face to him was like a window darkened to outsiders in daylight. Though he hadn’t understood the sense of what she said, it suggested to him something devious and offensive. He was a volatile man of unhampered drives who considered the implicit request to wrestle with complexity a suspicious aberration of life and, most insidiously, a threat to his vigor.
Linguistic complexity, like a conditional construction in a foreign language, is a metaphor for the complexity of the individual. Refusing to entertain even a small instance of intricacy, Eugene reveals his disregard for everything beyond himself. Sarah’s greatest wish is to meet someone with whom “the language in her head would evolve and emerge to become a brilliant common tongue.” It’s an understandable desire from a daughter of Eugene: Sarah wants a shared language, a metaphorical kind of monolingualism, rather than the literal kind that appealed to the nationalist Dostoevsky. Yet, if goodness requires patience with complexity, it is also true that fluency doesn’t guarantee goodness. Of the sisters, only Minah is perfectly bilingual—a privilege that makes her both a resource and a threat in this scramble for inheritance. Minah’s Korean makes Eugene more legible to her and renders her less legible to her sisters. And it’s this misunderstanding that leads the sisters to the novel’s surprising finale.
“Thoughts were not always personal, psychological,” writes Sun. They were “more like charged particles hanging in the air.” To read The Sisters K is to enter the orbit of various thoughts, many of which long predate this novel, that find elegant expression in the hands of this debut novelist. I like to imagine these two novels not as father and child but as siblings themselves, recipients of a much more mysterious inheritance that they put to different ends. You might say of this adaptation, as Sarah says of Esther:“Her sister was a part of her and yet remained a stranger.”
