“I drop the eye in the cupholder. It falls with a soft plink among the coins and bobby pins. The pain in my head grows until I can no longer feel anything else…I do my best to clean it with my shirt before cramming the entire thing in my mouth…It crackles and pops and reminds me of the crispy fish skin crunching loudly between my mother’s teeth.” — The Eyes Are the Best Part
Such cringeworthy and visceral descriptions are not for the faint of heart in Monika Kim’s first book, The Eyes Are the Best Part. It has the subtlety of a Jordan Peele movie that gradually escalates into something intangibly horrific that eventually unearths itself and rears its ugly head. In Kim’s book, this horror unveils itself as the protagonist, Ji-won, unleashes her unfettered rage against white men.
Ji-won is a college freshman, and though she keeps it together on the outside, her personal life is in disarray. Her father recently abandoned the family to be with a younger woman, leaving her and her younger sister Ji-hyun to pick up the pieces of their mother’s shattered emotional state. To make matters worse, their mother, now convinced that white men are better than Korean men, starts dating a random white man with blue eyes named George who happened to visit the Korean grocery market she works at.
It is clear to Ji-won from their first family outing that George fetishizes Asian women (including both her and her sister) and feels like he is an expert on Asian culture just because he served in Korea through the U.S. military. He prides himself on being able to detect authentic East Asian food from Westernized Asian food even though he cannot discern between the two. He hefts his masculinity around with his money, which he flaunts through his so-called generosity. Despite barely being able to communicate with each other, her mother laps up the attention and remains blind to the oddities of George’s behavior.
Ji-won has a hard time making connections with her peers at school but befriends two classmates, Geoffrey and Alexis. While she finds herself undeniably attracted to Alexis, Geoffrey seems to be a white ally, but his friendship becomes awkward and desperate as he sees her attention drawn to Alexis. She gradually comes to realize his kindness is just pretentious, affected, and superficial behavior covering up the way he truly views her — as a female Asian stereotype.
Grappling with her own insecurities and unhappiness, Ji-won takes it upon herself to be her family’s caretaker. Suspecting her mother was becoming unhinged when she starts eating fried fish eyes for the first time in her presence, Ji-won eventually tries eating them to humor her mother. To her surprise, she enjoys the experience but is plagued with nightmares about eyeballs, particularly blue ones, resulting in a relentless obsession that pursues her to do the unthinkable.
“Almost every Asian woman I know has had to deal with some aspect of our hypersexualization and fetishization in popular culture,” said Kim in an interview with Library Journal, a trade publication for librarians. “Much of this, I think, comes from stereotypes of us as submissive, as weak and unable to defend ourselves, and worst of all, as willing to put up with anything a man does to hurt or degrade us. [I wanted] to tell a story that challenges these insidious stereotypes and (literally) attacks the white male gaze, empowering women to be whatever we want to be—intelligent, funny, strong, outrageous, ridiculous, or all of the above.”
The Eyes Are the Best Part covers everything from misogyny and racism to intergenerational trauma. I, for one, found it to be a cathartic experience to the very end, tapping into similar feelings I have harbored for a lifetime. Though Ji-won is an unreliable narrator whose sister and childhood friends have accused her of being deceitful, it is thrilling to see how she masterfully flicks on this switch to weave a path of destruction in her wake to protect her loved ones.
There is explicit violence in the book that might not appeal to some readers (as the jarring cover art promises), but the violence might start to feel like a horror comedy as Ji-won exacts her revenge. As Alexis puts it when asked if she would still like Ji-won if she did something wrong: “If you killed someone, then…it depends on whether or not they deserved it.” Perhaps readers might not find themselves rooting for Ji-won, but the curiosity of how things unravel may keep them glued until the very end.
