Brutalized by cultural genocide, first by the Japanese empire and then by American napalm, Yungman comes from a small village that finds itself on the northern side of an American-drawn line...In the Air Force base where he becomes a “houseboy,” he is given the nickname Hong Kil-dong, the Korean Robin Hood, a curiously rakish nickname for someone so quiet, precise, observant...He only later realizes it is merely a place-holder, the equivalent of John Doe, for all men on official Korean documents...Lee, a fiction professor and founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, has written a novel about the quiet humanity of sacrifice...Yungman owes his life in America to many: his communist-leaning mother, who damns herself to save her two sons; his gangster brother, who pays Yungman’s way through medical school; his wife, Young-ae, who was cleverer than he was in medical school but hasn’t practiced since her unplanned pregnancy...From the outside, Yungman and Young-ae — parents to a 'Korean-ish' adult son, Einstein — seem to be 'so intensely connected that their communication had taken on a form beyond spoken language'...This is a novel about healers and healing, about unflashy, quiet heroism, all wrapped in Yungman’s mordant humor...Lee summons well-worn Korean syllogisms — 'the flower that blooms in the morning is dead by noon' — as well as 'the lament of the Korean people, shot through with years of sadness over its history, pessimism for its future,' into lyrical, lush, deeply felt prose...'Diffuse pain was the hardest to pinpoint for a cause,' Yungman says of one of his patients...The same is true of himself and his people.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee's sweeping novel, The Evening Hero, opens with a depiction of an eventful day for Dr. Yungman Kwak, who for decades has delivered the babies or Horse's Breath, a small town on the Iron Range of Minnesota populated by the descendants of Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish immigrants...Yungman is a good man, but perhaps has never lived up to his bold Korean name —'Evening Hero'...With comic flair, Lee follows her endearing, 5-foot-4 protagonist—who economizes by purchasing decommissioned police cars at the sheriff's auction and who is so empathetic 'he often became crampy himself when it was time to push'—as he embarks on a late-in-life awakening about his purpose and the secrets he carries from the Korean War...Lee illustrates how the turmoil of war occasions desperate choices as each person struggles to stay alive, and how those who survive forever endure guilt about their decisions...The Evening Hero is a book about one man's steadfast devotion to his job, family and community, even when his dedication is unrequited...With heart, humor and authentic detail, Lee shows how the most outwardly unassuming people can harbor epic histories.

Toggling between the past and present, Korea and America, The Evening Hero is a sweeping, moving, darkly comic novel about a man looking back at his life and asking big questions about what is lost and what is gained when immigrants leave home for new shores.

Yungman Kwak, who came to the U.S. after the Korean War, has been the only practicing obstetrician in Horse’s Breath, Minnesota, for decades...When the holding corporation that runs the hospital where he works closes its doors, he’s lucky to escape with his pension...A good portion of the book is a biting critique of a predatory American health care system and the economy at large...As a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, Lee has long been a leading voice in the literary world. She organizes this saga into five sections, each more gripping than the last, as the story travels through time and across continents to describe the many obstacles Yungman faces on his journey from a boy forced to flee his village to a medical student in Seoul competing to woo a charismatic classmate to a man who leaves his home country for greater opportunity elsewhere...The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person’s lifetime—their body, mind, and memories—no matter how far in the past it may seem...This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance.

Lee returns with an ambitious story charting the travails of an elderly immigrant doctor in Minnesota after the hospital he works at closes down...Thirsty for a new purpose to life, Yungman Kwak takes a job with his son’s employer, SANUS, a healthcare company with several retail outlets in the Mall of America...Yungman isn’t much of a match for SANUS’s startup jargon...Eventually, Yungman enlists in Doctors Without Borders, an endeavor that brings him back to what is now North Korea, where he was born in 1940...Peppered throughout are stories from Yungman’s early life there: his experiences of poverty, war, striving for education, and courtship of his wife, who was raised in an elite circle within his village...Sometimes the prose is a bit awkward, and the minutia of Yungman’s work routines can drag a bit, but Lee offers touching details of Yungman’s nostalgia for the Korea of his youth, where 'small dandelions... carpeted the grass like stars'...It’s a little bumpy, but fans of immigrant stories will appreciate Lee’s labor of love.