Word: hectored
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...missionaries, Sylvie has devoted her life to altruism. Yet for her beneficiaries, Sylvie’s presence teeters precipitously between providing mercy and causing pain. Her relentless need to numb herself to the vibrancy of life—to escape into the dulling throes of opium—destroys Hector, June, and her husband, who find it impossible to sever their connection to this fading woman and her elusive love...
...backwards from Korea to China to 1980s New York, where June, who has now become a profitable antiques dealer, has stomach cancer—an irony that does not escape the woman who once starved for weeks as a child. Realizing that death draws near, she seeks out Hector to help her track down her estranged son, Nicholas. The difficult journey brings them to Italy, where in a final moment of redemption, Hector and June arrive together at a hallowed church that recalls the ghostly memory of Sylvie’s betrayal...
Lee’s mastery of storytelling lies in portraying the self-destructive natures of these characters without dramatizing their failures. Hector is a self-loathing, libidinous man graced with good looks and good luck; June, a disimpassioned, selfish woman whose adolescent urge to cause trouble transforms into a flinty resolve. They self-medicate with alcohol and analgesics, their compulsion not dissimilar to the reason for Sylvie’s own addiction. Like the ill-fated Erysicthon, they devour themselves, and yet for all their indulgence in masochistic punishment, they cannot wrench free from the consequences of their war-torn...
...occur—abruptly, though not necessarily unpredictably—they serve to emphasize the remote helplessness of the victim. In Manchuria, the Japanese cut off the eyelids of one of Sylvie’s companions in order to force him watch her be raped. Years later, in Korea, Hector is commanded to kill a tortured prisoner of war, but cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. The young bugler, legs broken beneath him, grabs a grenade from Hector’s belt, but allows Hector to flee the area before removing the pin. Lee plays on the dichotomy between...
...Surrendered” is, finally, a romance obscured in sorrow—a ballad of Hector and June’s love affairs with life. Both are prone to fighting—Hector with his fists and June with her cold contempt—but they fight hard because of the imminent isolation threatening to consume them whole. They recognize that war has rendered them forever incomplete, lacking any conviction in human solidarity. Hector, musing about the war, sees a couple embracing: “They were both slight of frame and not tall, and if he hadn?...