Wait for Me (review)

Instead of attending Harvard and dating the Korean-American boyfriend her mother has chosen for her, high-school-senior Mina Kang wants to plan her own future. To this end, she's been stealing cash from her parents' dry-cleaning store, and she rebels further by sneaking off to the beach with her sister and the desirable Ysrael, a young man her parents have hired to work in their store. When Ysrael is fired for the theft that is actually Mina's, he asks Mina to leave L.A. with him. Suna, Mina's younger sister, has been a willing co-conspirator to Mina's romance, but for fear of losing her beloved sister, she reveals Mina's plans, setting the stage for a confrontation involving mother and daughter and for a near-fatal accident. This is a well-crafted tale, sensitively told: Na fashions the story and fleshes out her characters by juxtaposing Korean and American cultural traditions, parental dreams, and young adult desires, even birth-order differences between siblings. This opposition is emphasized by the format: alternating chapters in which Mina speaks for herself while Suna's story is told in a third-person, present-tense narrative capturing her feelings of being once removed from the world and her mother's love. There are some familiar cultural patterns here, but the mother-daughter conflict will resonate with teens of any culture who have wrestled parents for the right to choose their own paths. At times the ending seems inevitable, but Na doesn't settle for easy resolution, and the conclusion respects her characters and their growth.