Simple Heart
In Cho Haejin’s intricate, touching novel Simple Heart, a transnational adoptee returns to Korea.
Nana, an actor and playwright, grew up in South Korea. Abandoned by her mother at a train station, she lived with the conductor and at an orphanage before being adopted by a French couple. Now pregnant and facing single parenthood, Nana wonders about her birth mother’s identity.
The day she confirms her pregnancy, Nana also opens an email from Seoyeong, a filmmaker who wants to feature her in a documentary about international adoption. Together, they revisit key sites from Nana’s early years. Nana also forms a bond with the former midwife who runs the restaurant below Seoyeong’s apartment.
The text is preoccupied with naming and the etymology of names. Most characters are known by two or three names across its pages—a complication that reflects different stages of life. Nana was “Jung Munju” when living with the train conductor and “Esther Pak” at the orphanage. The Bokhee’s Kitchen owner goes by “Bokhee” though her name is Chu Yeonhee; the original Bokhee is her foster daughter, an orphan sent to Belgium for adoption. Nana calls her child “Wooju” or “universe.”
The narrative’s obsession with doubling offers opportunities for new acquaintances to take on vacant roles. Nana’s adoptive father was a filmmaker who died of cancer; Seoyong takes his place. While Nana never finds her birth mother, Yeonhee and her surrogate daughter, as well as the train conductor’s daughter, fill in as relatives for Nana as she starts her own family. The tone is lyrical and at times mystical, imagining the fetus’s “evolutionary process of coming into this world” while the dead undergo the reverse.
The poignant novel Simple Heart explores questions of abandonment and belonging through stories of motherhood—including by adoption.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
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