"Your House Will Pay" by Steph Cha (2019)

 **A powerful and important story about race relations in the United States**

Ok.  To start with, you need to know the story of Latasha Harlins, a story that is known by far too few people:

In March of 1991, just 13 days after footage of Rodney King's beating was released, a Korean corner store owner thought that 15-year-old Harlins was shoplifting a bottle of orange juice.  There was a scuffle, in which Harlins struck the shopkeeper.  As Harlins was walking away (the orange juice left behind), the shopkeeper fired one shot, perhaps on accident (in the trial, it was revealed that the handgun had been illegally modified to have a lighter trigger), hitting Harlins in the back of the head and killing her instantly.  When the cops arrived, they found $2, the money to pay for the orange juice, in her hand

The store owner was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years, but the sentence was suspended.  In the end, she was placed on probation for 5 years, given 400 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $500 plus the Harlins family's funeral costs

A state appeals court unanimously upheld this decision on April 21, 1992.  Eight days later, on April 29th, three of the four officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King were acquitted of all charges, an event sparking the LA Riots

This event holds an awful but important place in Black American culture, immortalized by songs by the likes of Tupac and Ice Cube.  But I'm writing about it today, as part of AAPI Heritage month, because it also holds and awful but important place in the painful and turbulent history of relations between the Black American and Asian-American, particularly Korean-American, communities

During the riots, stores and other businesses owned by Korean- and other ethnic Asian-Americans were targeted, with Koreatown taking much of the damage (it's estimated that more than half of the $850m in damages occurred in Koreatown)

This was in part due to the tensions between these communities--tensioned not wholly caused, but certainly symbolized, by the killing of Latasha Harlins

It was also in part due to the fact that police set up barricades to protect Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and other primarily white and upper-middle-class areas.  No such barriers were placed to protect Koreatown.  Rather, they chose to barricade the roads between Koreatown and those wealthy white neighborhoods

And it is this final point, I believe, that inspired Steph Cha to write this novel.  

Set 30 years after the death of Latasha Harlins, it's a fictionalized account of these two families:  The family of Harlins, and the family of the store owner who killed her.  One of the main characters is Grace, the daughter of the shopkeeper; the other is Shawn, the brother of Latasha.  Grace finds out what her mother did, a secret that's been kept from her for decades, and she needs to decide what to do with that knowledge

It's a novel about what happens when these two people meet, and it's a story about how this terrible event has affected all of their paths over those 30 years

“You want me to forgive you, don’t you? That’s why you came.”

“I wanted to help,” she said, her words so weak he doubted she even convinced herself. 

[ . . . ] “I’ve got no fight with you. You did me no wrong, and I have no reason to forgive you.” 

He watched her go over his words to find if she’d gotten what she wanted. She hesitated, then spoke again, evidently dissatisfied. “I just wanted to say I was sorry. That’s all. This is all so new to me.”

“It’s not new to me. I’ve been living without your apology for twenty-eight years, and I’ve managed.”

It's a book about how tragedy lingers and ripples out across decades--both for the people directly involved, and for an entire community or an entire country

I loved this book, although it was at times hard to read, because of how directly it presents very realistic versions of the modern Black American and Korean-American experience.  And because of what it has to say about how need to treat each other.

Both of these characters are steeped in their communities, in poignant and powerful ways.  Grace has grown up with her mother's love, tiger mom and all of it:

But the miyeok-guk was the real clincher, the seaweed soup Yvonne made on every family birthday but her own. She’d told Grace once that it was the soup eaten by a new mother right after a birth, the nutrients targeted for postnatal recovery; that when she had Miriam and Grace, her own mother had brought it to the hospital by the bucket. It was like a traditional Korean culinary umbilical cord, eaten every year to celebrate the connection with mother and birth and body.

Shawn, of course, didn't get to grow up with his big sister to look out for his.  But he is just as surrounded by the love of his community, as well

And how do these two communities reconcile?  And if there is any fault, where does it lay?

Because also, yes, this is a story about how the system is quite happy to pit two minority communities against each other.  Grace's father has something to say about that, too:

“When our store burned down, they did nothing. And it wasn’t just our store—they let all of our neighbors down. So many Koreans lost everything. Some of them, I know they blamed us. But it was the police who made us the villains, and then they abandoned us. They let us take the fall. All the rioting in South Central and Koreatown, and they were nowhere.” 

This is a powerful, incredible, *important* book.  I cannot recommend it highly enough

I loved this book

“[The police] are supposed to protect people, right? How can they be so bad at their jobs?” 

“They protect people from other people. Question is who are ‘people’ and who are ‘other people’?”