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Description
With lyric grace and the luminosity that is a distinct signature of her poetry, Cathy Song has created a rich tapestry of powerful stories and vividly drawn characters that can be read both sequentially as a novel and as a short story collection that takes a searching look at the cycle of human existence. Individually the pieces offer a satisfying narrative arc that yields beautifully crafted portraits of real people, the turning points of their lives, their stories of travel, love, aging, and death played out against the changing social and historical backdrop of Hawaiʻi. Collectively the stories affirm the power of memory to redeem, to bridge lives and bind three generations in a timeless tale of love and its endurance. It is a collection to cherish, as much for its compelling images and characters as for its profound wisdom and insights into what it means to be human, to love, to grow old and lose what you love.
—Boey Kim Cheng, author of the travel memoir BETWEEN STATIONS and five collections of poetry
Details
| Author | |
|---|---|
| ISBN-13 | 978-1943756032 |
| Year Published | |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Weight | 14.4 oz |
| Dimensions | 9 × 6 × 0.56 in |
About the Author
Cathy Song is the author of five books of poetry, including PICTURE BRIDE, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, she spends her time between Honolulu and Volcano on Hawai‘i Island.
Excerpts
Grandfather Park left the mountains of central Korea for the sugarcane fields of Oʻahu to work as a common laborer, sailing for two weeks across the Pacific Ocean on the America Maru. After his contract year was over, having proven to be a hard worker and a natural leader, probably due to his height and large frame, he stayed on at the plantation, leading crews to repair the water systems in the vast fields of the ‘Ewa plains. After learning to drive a truck, he drove crews to the various work sites in progress around the plantation. Reliable, he was promoted to better paying jobs, first at the plantation warehouse where he was in charge of delivering and returning equipment to and from the fields, and later, transferring provisions to the company stores in ‘Ewa and Waipahu from the piers in Honolulu. By the time he married, he had been a bachelor for eighteen years, working like a miner, spending most of his time underground, directing crews in excavating the deeper layers of rock beneath the softer volcanic surfaces which had to be broken into manageable sizes and then carted away before the land could be used. There was always the threat of collapse as the men worked in the tunnels they had dug long after the sun went down, working to exhaustion by the light of kerosene lamps.
Moving out of the shadows of thankless anonymity, he felt he had attained a level of respectability when he secured one of the concession rights to run a tailor shop and a laundry service at Schofield Barracks for the 13th Field Artillery Division. He never saw the job as menial. In fact, he felt as if he himself had joined the military, and having done so, attained a kind of promotion. To provide the soldiers of his adopted country with clean, neatly pressed uniforms was a thoroughly respectable business. Even at the beginning when he and his young wife were just starting out, he felt a deep sense of honor in the early mornings, scrubbing the clothes with a tub and washboard on the stream banks near the barracks. They wrung the clothes by hand. The starch his wife had concocted was applied over the clothes, which were then wrung once more and spread on the surrounding bushes to dry. After lunch, whether or not the clothes were dry, they were taken to the shop to be pressed with coal-heated irons. Soon he was able to buy his wife a sewing machine, and with that she was able to increase their profits by sewing caps and ties for the soldiers and offering alteration services not only for the soldiers but for their wives as well. Grandfather Park’s reputation grew for swift delivery of the impeccable creases and the brightest whites. At great cost to his wife’s health, Grandfather Park was one of the first practitioners of 24-hour service.
Moving out of the shadows of thankless anonymity, he felt he had attained a level of respectability when he secured one of the concession rights to run a tailor shop and a laundry service at Schofield Barracks for the 13th Field Artillery Division. He never saw the job as menial. In fact, he felt as if he himself had joined the military, and having done so, attained a kind of promotion. To provide the soldiers of his adopted country with clean, neatly pressed uniforms was a thoroughly respectable business. Even at the beginning when he and his young wife were just starting out, he felt a deep sense of honor in the early mornings, scrubbing the clothes with a tub and washboard on the stream banks near the barracks. They wrung the clothes by hand. The starch his wife had concocted was applied over the clothes, which were then wrung once more and spread on the surrounding bushes to dry. After lunch, whether or not the clothes were dry, they were taken to the shop to be pressed with coal-heated irons. Soon he was able to buy his wife a sewing machine, and with that she was able to increase their profits by sewing caps and ties for the soldiers and offering alteration services not only for the soldiers but for their wives as well. Grandfather Park’s reputation grew for swift delivery of the impeccable creases and the brightest whites. At great cost to his wife’s health, Grandfather Park was one of the first practitioners of 24-hour service.
Blurbs and Reviews
The best book of short stories I ever read.
Feeling absorbed instantly into deep cultural resonance,
fascinating places, mixtures and connections, unexpected difficulties,
but most especially, greatest tenderness for a precious, particular
father and family, was a journey of a reader’s lifetime as well as a writer’s.
This exquisitely written and remembered book is a treasure of love and care.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation
This powerful and beautiful novel in stories recounts the interconnectedness of the immigrant experience on a global scale. The epic scope of the collection ranges from Hawaiʻi to Oklahoma to California to New York to New Zealand to India, to name just a few of the stops along the ride. And what a ride it is! Beginning with the first generation of the Park family, immigrants to Hawaiʻi during the Korean diaspora, All the Love in the World does not merely retrace the painful and familiar struggle by immigrants everywhere to preserve the connection to their cultural inheritance; the book goes deeper in parsing what is left to us when those bonds are broken or erased by the overwhelming pressures to acculturate by a dominant culture. Who do we become? What is to be done? Cathy Song’s contemplation of these questions is, in the end, filled with light, untinged by easy despair.
—Sylvia Watanabe, author of TALKING TO THE DEAD
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation
This powerful and beautiful novel in stories recounts the interconnectedness of the immigrant experience on a global scale. The epic scope of the collection ranges from Hawaiʻi to Oklahoma to California to New York to New Zealand to India, to name just a few of the stops along the ride. And what a ride it is! Beginning with the first generation of the Park family, immigrants to Hawaiʻi during the Korean diaspora, All the Love in the World does not merely retrace the painful and familiar struggle by immigrants everywhere to preserve the connection to their cultural inheritance; the book goes deeper in parsing what is left to us when those bonds are broken or erased by the overwhelming pressures to acculturate by a dominant culture. Who do we become? What is to be done? Cathy Song’s contemplation of these questions is, in the end, filled with light, untinged by easy despair.
—Sylvia Watanabe, author of TALKING TO THE DEAD
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