Hurt You by Marie Myung-Ok Lee (review)

See this month’s Big Picture, p. 317, for review.

Published in 1937, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men has become a classroom staple, and many middle and high schoolers will be familiar with the heartbreaking story of George Milton and Lennie Small. Famous for the senseless tragedy of its ending, the book exposed profound fissures in American society: its dangerous exploitation of the working class, its callous disregard for those with disabilities, and its shameful abetment of mob justice. Hurt You is both an homage to and a modernization of this American classic, as author Marie Myung-Ok Lee lends further nuance and pathos to Steinbeck’s themes of class dynamics, power, and loyalty. Set in a Korean American community in suburban California, this fitting successor finds modern-day thematic parallels in the profiteering off of immigrant labor and the “Stand Your Ground” gun laws that allow civilians to take justice into their own hands, often with tragic consequences.

Georgia Kim’s life is fraught with tension. She feels it mounting in the room as her brother Leo works himself into another tantrum, and between her parents as they clash over how to raise a son who, like Steinbeck’s character Lennie, has an intellectual disability. She feels tension brewing within herself, as well, in her competing desires to claim agency in her future and to protect her gentle brother from the cruelty and ignorance that surrounds him. Georgia cannot imagine a life without Leo by her side, but her parents are eager for her to move away and attend an elite college where she can start her life sans Leo. Their ambitions precipitate a move to the pristine planned community of Sunnyvale, where Georgia and Leo encounter familiar bigotry in the form of the gun-toting bigshot Curley and his fawning girlfriend. Yet, they also find unprecedented support and kindness in their new school’s Korean American community. With the help of their new friends, Georgia begins to make plans to secure her and Leo’s future, but, like “the best laid plans o’ mice an’ men,” they go awry.

As the story begins at its tragic conclusion, readers know that there will be no future for Leo, that Georgia’s cherished hopes for their life together will come to nothing, that society will not be kind. Yet as the story unfolds, full of love and tenderness, one cannot help but cling to hope that these incredible characters can alter its course. This is a testament to Lee’s masterful storytelling; her visceral prose and deft use of figurative language compound to create an immersive world in which even minor characters are fleshy and flawed. The novel even uses Leo’s tendency to echo speech to call back to Steinbeck’s text, as Leo’s repeated affirmations that “Nuna [older sister] keeps me safe” haunt the novel.

The result is a searing critique of the inaccessible, hostile world people with mental disabilities are forced to navigate, and the gun lobbyist rhetoric that makes marginalized communities especially vulnerable to violence. Indeed, the most disconcerting conceit here is how little our ableist society has changed in the years between the two books. Hurt You is devastating and urgent, and it has the makings of a modern classic.