The Lucky Gourd Shop

By Joanna Catherine Scott

Book Overview

When an American mother's three adopted children reach their teens, they grow curious about their Korean heritage. A much-anticipated letter from Korea fails to satisfy them but sparks memories in the eldest. So begins the heartbreaking and inspiring tale of their birth mother's life as their adoptive mother imagines it.
Abandoned as a baby and then again and again, Mi Sook is raised in a Korean coffee shop by its string of owner-mothers. She grows to adulthood fiercely independent and eventually comes to manage the shop. But her marriage to Kun Soo, with whom she has three children, begins a series of events that ultimately wrench her babies from her arms. Deceived by Kun Soo and his well-intentioned mother, and unsupported by a rigidly Confucian culture, Mi Sook emerges as a tragic and heroic figure who embodies the rich complexities of a nation -- and of the heart.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743437357
• ISBN13: 9780743437356
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An extraordinarily well-written piece

Adoption is a two-headed coin -- tremendous joy but at someone else's sorrow.Ms. Scott has taken the memories of her children, combined them with extensive research into the culture and socio-economics of Korea and written not simply a story but a complex profile of what I think is a not-so-untypical family.It is a portrait of poverty, yes, but painted lovingly and yet without sentimentality. It is, I fear, a much truer face than we would like to see.The first few pages moved me to tears - and I had to close the book. A few hours later, I picked it up again and read it straight through. I have not been able to stop talking about it ever since.Mi Sook is a memorable character, and the grandmother's devotion and torment over deciding the fate of her grandchildren will haunt you. Even knowing the eventual outcome did not quell my thirst for more.It was a wonderful read and I know it is a story that has touched my heart.

Never Fails to Convince -- by Chloe Byrne

Joanna Scott's richly imagined The Lucky Gourd Shop begins in America, where the adoptive mother of three Korean children tries to find out more about their pasts. But where she fails, we succeed; the rest of the novel takes us back a generation, to a South Korea ravaged by years of poverty and war. There we meet Mi Sook--orphan, independent spirit, and, as soon becomes clear, the children's birth mother. Found abandoned in an alley and raised like a stray in the back room of a coffee shop, Mi Sook grows up pretty, bubbly, and happy enough, but still "that rare creature in her society, one who did not draw her sense of self from fixed relationships with others." In South Korea, of course, to be without fixed relationships--to be without family--is to live in a dangerous limbo, and soon enough Mi Sook finds trouble.Throughout the events that follow, Scott's powerful narrative voice never fails to convince. In her telling, this is a story without villains; even the violent husband is no monster when we learn the intense economic and cultural pressures with which he struggles. More to the point, it's also a story without victims; as in all great works of literature, Scott's characters are made of flesh and blood, capable of agency and action and especially mistakes. This novel succeeds on a number of levels, as an imaginative leap between nations and generations and as a snapshot of a culture in transition. Most of all, however, The Lucky Gourd Shop is a precise, affecting, and unsentimental portrait of Mi Sook herself, of hardships endured without knowing they're hardships and choices that are scarcely choices at all.

Highly Recommended

I have just returned from a trip to a remote part of Mexico, where perhaps incongruously I read the most wonderful book about Korea, "The Lucky Gourd Shop." Some how it didn't seem out of place. The novel is an Asian "My Antonia," reminding us that the frontier qualities of courage, independence, and determination transcend nation and culture. "The Lucky Gourd Shop" has everything you look for in a book: an engaging story, characters you care about, a glimpse at an unfamilar (to me anyway) culture, insight into human nature, and gorgeous language (Scott is also a poet). This is a book I am giving and recommending to family and friends, and I recommend it to you.

Like Verse set to Music

After reading book reviews in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor applauding Joanna Catherine Scott's book "The Lucky Gourd Shop" I had to get my own copy. For once I wasn't disappointed. Scott's literary style is brilliant, one that could only be accomplished by a gifted poet. Her words flow like verse set to music. The characters, when introduced, fly from the pages and become real people with a sometimes sad, but often enough uplifting, tale to tell. I love books that take the reader to a different place, one that would be impossible to get to. The Lucky Gourd Shop did that for me. Scott introduces the reader to a South Korea, desolated by war, overrun by poverty. Only the author's personal background in Asia and her passionate research with attention to the most minute of details could have accomplished the presentation of a place so different from the one we inhabit. At times on the journey through "The Lucky Gourd Shop" it's difficult to comprehend that this place exists in our world. Scott's characterizations are outstanding. I will always remember that grandmother, plugging away, never giving up, and trying to do the best with what she has for her family. The little boy, not really a child, watching over his sisters, grubbing for food and surviving in his meager existence is another unforgettable, real person. The wedding shop owner brings to mind the indomitable Asian women running businesses in our neighborhoods. The husband, though a drunk and a wife-beater, grabs the reader's sympathy because of the cultural burden imposed on him by the narrow society he occupies. Then there's Mi Song, who couldn't comprehend how many times she had been "found", or passed from one person to another since her early abandonment in back of the Seoul coffee shop. Throughout the book as she missed opportunities, faced choices, I wanted to shout out, "No, no, don't do that...go the other way!" But oh, how she perseveres! How proud Scott's adopted Korean children must be at the perhaps fictional but nonetheless believable presentation of this brave woman as their birth mother. They also must be proud of Joanna Catherine Scott, the mother who has cherished them since their early childhood for presenting them with this penetrating narrative reflecting their heritage. The "Lucky Gourd Shop" is a must read! I only wish there was a sixth star available for me to rate it!

couldn't stop reading this book

Being a lifelong, voracious reader, I'm always looking for new books and authors. Joanna Catherine Scott's latest work, "The Lucky Gourd Shop," came as a very pleasant surprise and easily was the best book I read last year. It is the kind of work you pick up not knowing what to expect and then find to your immense delight that you have discovered a master craftsman. Or in her case, a master craftswoman. A better word is real artist or perhaps a virtuoso of the art of the storyteller. From her writing about the imagined life of the biological mother of her three adopted Korean children, Mi Sook, the author reveals herself to be a poet working in the novel form, just as James Dickey did in his book "Deliverance." Although they likely have nothing else in common, both care passionately about language and about storytelling. Once you fall into their invisible web, you're stuck and can't get out and don't want to. The author consumes you. And when Ms. Scott's novel ends, you feel that rare combination of emotions, joy at having had such a moving experience and a serious ache of regret that the tale is now told. Each of the characters rings true, from the major ones like Mi Sook and her abusive husband to those who show up only briefly. Among these are several of the lovely young woman's admirers, including a lonely, gentle American G.I. who fell in love with a dirt-poor shop girl and might have made a perfect husband for her. Other strengths abound. From personal experience, Ms. Scott writes convincingly about Korea and the daily struggles of its humblest people. And she knows more about foreign orphans and what happens to them than almost anyone else in this country. In a sense, she is a spokesperson for the human heart. Or at least the hearts and hopes of most women whether they live in Korea or Kokomo, Ind. I've been lending this book to friends, and all of them have enjoyed it as much as I did. My prediction is that within a few years, Joanna Catherine Scott will be recognized broadly as one of America's finest writers. Though I had not heard of her before reading Gourd Shop, I know she already must have a growing army of fans.