Chicago author Samuel Park’s first novel inspired by mom’s stories

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Samuel Park, Chicago author and Columbia College Chicago teacher at S. Wabash Ave ad Harrison Street. Friday, August 12 , 2011. | John H. White~Sun-Times.

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Samuel Park will read from and sign copies of This Burns My Heart, 7 p.m. Sept. 23 at Mighty Twig Library, 900 Chicago Ave., Evanston.

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Updated: October 19, 2011 3:22AM

Samuel Park has his mother to thank for sparking the idea that got him started on his debut novel, This Burns My Heart.

A “great storyteller,” his mother would often entertain her three children with tales about her life in South Korea. One such story stuck with Park as he began thinking about how to structure a novel.

“The day before my mother was to be married, another man, a doctor, asked her out on a date,” Park said. “She was intrigued but of course didn’t take him up on the offer. Later, as her marriage faced difficulties, she often wondered what would have happened had she run off with the doctor.”

This idea of unrequited love is the through-line of Park’s work of historical fiction set in postwar South Korea. It follows a young woman, Soo-Ja, trapped in a loveless marriage, who experiences the same proposal on the eve of her wedding and dreams the same dream as Park’s mother.

But Park says that’s as far as the similarities go.

“My mother’s story was the real-life inspiration that guided the book,” Park said. “And Soo-Ja is very similar to her in personality but the story is primarily fiction.”

This Burns My Heart begins with Soo-Ja dreaming of going to diplomat school. When her father refuses to let her go, she plots to marry Min, a young man who has been courting her, with hopes that they will move to Seoul. But Min has no intention of leaving his family home, where Soo-Ja, as was the custom, serves at the beck and call of her in-laws. As Soo-Ja becomes a mother and transforms from a powerless wife to a driven businesswoman, her thoughts often travel to Yul, a young doctor, who also wanted to marry her.

Park melds a captivating love story with a detailed portrait of a nation rising out of the ruins of war. But for the author, setting the novel in South Korea wasn’t as easy as one might expect. His parents immigrated to Brazil, where he was born; when he was 14, the family relocated to Los Angeles.

As a youngster, Park spent a few summer vacations in Korea with relatives and thought he had “a feel for the country.” And the Korean customs simply moved with the family to Brazil. But he knew very little about the look and feel of postwar Korea. Park consulted his parents, read a lot of books, perused the Korea Annual (a yearly almanac popular in the ’60s), and turned to movies of the era for information.

“Korea was pretty decimated after the war and so was the film industry,” said Park, 35. “Soundstages and the like were destroyed. So filmmakers had to shoot on the street guerrilla-style. In these movies, you get to see real buildings, streets, people. They almost look like documentaries.”

Through his research, Park came to see the role of women in Korean society as “strange and paradoxical. On one hand, they are worshipped as mothers but at the same time, especially in these years, they were maids to their in-laws.”

Park says he couldn’t fathom his mother, who is “independent, willful and ambitious” in this type of situation. But he says she did experience it, and it became an important dramatic element of his novel.

“I wondered what it would be like to put her in a position where she had to be obedient,” Park recalled. “It felt very dramatic to me. Her personality would be so at odds with this social role you’re assigned to play.”

Park says he “became a writer when he became a reader.” Now an assistant professor of English at Columbia College Chicago, he was 8 years old when he wrote his first “novel” — a story about a flower with magical powers. He also recalls watching movies such as “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao,” and creating little book versions of the ones he liked. He doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t serious about writing.

“I was kind of a loner and didn’t have a lot of friends so I read a lot,” Park said. “And I think reading makes you want to write.”

One author he didn’t read until college — Jane Austen — was “an exciting discovery.”

“I read everything and really loved the way she wrote about the relationships between parents and children, men and woman,” Park said. “It validated for me the sense that writing about the interactions between a small group of people was worthwhile and fascinating and important.”

And what does his mother think of This Burns My Heart?

“She has a good sense of humor about it,” Park said. “I think she finds it amusing and a little fun that I turned her into the heroine of a book.”