Lee, Chang-rae

Henry Park is a Korean American private investigator who, in the course of spying on a New York City politician, comes to terms with his own sense of identity, family, and culture.

June Han, who survived her childhood in war-torn Korea thanks to American soldier Hector Brennan and the loving care of missionary wife Sylvie Tanner, reunites with Brennan in her later years to search for Tanner.

In a future where America has been in a long-decline, self-contained labor settlements replace abandoned urban neighborhoods, containing contented workers who devote their lives to the cultivation of pristine produce and seafood for the wealthy residents of distant elite walled villages. Fan, a Chinese descendant, fish-tank diver, and resident of the B-Mor labor settlement, shocks her community by leaving the safety of the walls to search for the man she loves after he disappears.

Thirty years after vying for the attentions of a beautiful but damaged missionary wife at an orphanage, Korean orphan June Han and former GI Hector Brennan are reunited by a plot that forces them to come to terms with mysterious secrets from their past.

"From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind"--.

Hardworking Franklin Hata is careful to never overstep his bounds and to always make his neighbors and customers feel comfortable, but when they learn of his forbidden affair with a Korean comfort woman, his carefully crafted reputation is destroyed.