Years ago, an American song came out with lyrics that seemed so trite, people assumed that they had to be ironic. In “I Will Buy You a New Life,” Art Alexakis, the lead singer for the band Everclear, sang about wanting to buy his girlfriend a new car and a big house. He was subsequently forced to explain in numerous interviews that he had not intended the song to be a satire of consumerist culture, but instead the expression of an earnest wish and a straightforward message: money can help.

        That song is stylistically miles away from Chung Han-ah’s nuanced, tough-minded novella, Last Night, in My Dream, but both pieces seem to raise the same questions. Can money help us make amends, heal the past? Is life—are we—that simple?

        The story, which Chung has described as being about disease, money, and grace, begins with the last item in vanishingly short supply. We meet three generations of women—a grandmother, mother, and granddaughter, who’s also the story’s narrator—each unwilling to give any of the others a single inch. For example, after the narrator’s mother leaves her abusive husband, her grandmother lobs some shockingly cruel words, and the narrator vows to “never forgive Grandma”—and also, to never forgive her mother if she forgives. Years later, she ruefully acknowledges that she need not have worried: the women spend decades locked in a grudge-match over the “infernal past.”

        That past truly is infernal. It begins with the grandmother’s diagnosis of Hansen’s disease, which prompts her husband to try and murder her, forcing her to abandon her young daughter. When the grandmother later gives birth to another daughter—the narrator’s mother—she places the child in an orphanage. The narrator’s mother is a neglectful parent, only taking an interest in her daughter when trying to break up her adult relationship. For these women, abandonment and pain are what they know best; they not only endure such pain but also inflict it, often in “venomous words.”

        And yet, near the story’s conclusion, we see all three together, celebrating a new addition to the family. “We clapped our hands and laughed out loud.” What helps the brittle nesting dolls we first met enter into this state of grace?

        Money. After a lengthy legal battle with a man who defrauded a Hansen’s disease community, the grandmother wins quite a sizable sum. She gives it to the mother, who awkwardly (but insistently) passes it on to her own daughter, the narrator. Both mother and daughter seem at a loss for words; only the daughter’s partner, Incheol, can speak to the magnitude of this gift: “I’m thinking about what dream I must have had last night to deserve such a fortune.”

        The money buys the struggling couple better food, a larger apartment, and more time for both art and love. When the daughter accepts Incheol’s second marriage proposal (the first having been made when they were still poor), she sheepishly admits to herself that her heart must have changed “because of that money.”

        More surprising, however, is the money’s deeper impact. With each monthly payment, so clearly tied to “an old woman who paid the price,” the narrator is compelled to understand more viscerally her grandmother’s painful, stigmatized life, which she had previously dismissed as something like “a story you might come across in an American TV show with an eerie vibe.” (The grandmother’s story also powerfully impacts the playwright Incheol, who incorporates it into a play dismissed as “trite” by one competition judge, but staged in Seoul’s largest theater by another.)

        And yet, money alone cannot bring about these changes, as we witness in the descriptions of the mother’s teenage years—reunited with her family and amply provided for, but feeling little warmth. Nor can it be found in the uncle’s joyless, relentless accumulation and disposal of things.

        What is needed, it seems, is grace. Where do the women find it? First, in the money itself. As critic Kim Bokyung points out in the Afterword, each of the women attributes a meaning to money that enables reconciliation. Passed from hand to hand, the money embodies whatever they need: an apology for abandonment and neglect, a blessing on a romantic relationship. The decision to see the money in this soft light is a kind of grace, allowing forgiveness to grow.

        “Inscrutable grace,” as the narrator calls the monthly sum, also describes the poignant moments that begin to accrue between the three: the mother’s soft insistence—“Take it, still”—after the narrator tries to refuse the first offer out of pride; the narrator naming her own daughter after the grandmother’s lost child; the women’s interlude of quiet happiness on Jeju Island.

There are no flights of lyrical fancy in those moments; Chung Han-ah’s vision is determinedly earthbound, the translation by Stella Kim is plainspoken, and the grace the women show each other is distinctly ungraceful , at least in manner. After passing along the money, the narrator’s mother beats a hasty retreat, saying, “Since I gave you what I came to give you, I’m going to go now.” The grandmother responds to her great-granddaughter’s naming with “her typical aloof look.”

        There are few words of tenderness spoken, perhaps because language has too often before been wielded as an instrument of harm. But there is the narrator’s private wish for her mother’s boyfriend to be “a good man,” and her lingering glance in the story’s penultimate scene:

Mom sat by the window and waved at me. With the scarf around her neck, she looked so much like Grandma that it took my breath away for a second.

The understated, deep emotion echoes like the faint piano the narrator hears being played by an “untrained musician” in the story’s final paragraph. Before the music lapses into silence, there is time to be grateful that it has come into the world at all.

Nadia Kalman

Author, The Cosmopolitans
(Livingston Press, 2010)