Stone Angels

by Helena Rho

Genres: Asian American; Cultural Heritage; Family Life; World War II; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

In this "riveting [and] unforgettable" novel, a forty-year-old woman journeys to her cultural homeland—and uncovers a harrowing secret that makes her rethink everything she thought she knew about her mother (Jimin Han, author of The Apology). 

Angelina Lee feels like she doesn’t belong. Newly divorced, and completely unmoored by the sudden and tragic death of her mother, she hopes studying Korean will reconnect her to her roots, but nothing about Seoul feels familiar. Further complicating matters is the resurgence of an alluring man from Angelina’s past, and fellow classmate Keisuke Ono, an irritatingly good looking Japanese American journalist who refuses to leave her alone. What she’ll barely admit, however, is the true reason behind her trip. She’s convinced the key to understanding her mother’s suicide lies in Korea.

A shocking conversation with an estranged relative proves her right. Her mother had an older sister, Sunyuh, who disappeared under the Japanese occupation of Korea during WWII—a secret the family buried for over sixty years. Horrified, Angelina can’t fathom why her mother never mentioned her, but knows, deep down, her mother’s fateful decision must be linked to Sunyuh. To find answers, Angelina embarks on a journey that takes her across oceans and continents, and challenges everything she believed about her heritage and herself.

Told through the bold, determined voices of three women, this poignant family drama explores love and loss, grief and healing, and the sometimes-difficult love that exists between mothers and daughters. It’s about the questions we wish we had asked lost relatives, the lives we could have lived had we made different choices, and, above all, second chances—to reinvent ourselves, to confront the sins of the past, and to find lasting love.

Release date: March 4, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

SEOUL, KOREA

JUNE 3, 2006

Angelina should have known this journey was inevitable. She should have known she was going to be in this seat, on this bus, from Incheon Airport to Seoul city center, wilted against a glass pane, tired beyond reason. But how else would she get the answers she needed unless she returned to the country of her birth? Korea, the land where her mother’s madness began, the home Angelina left when she was six years old. Korea, the country in which Angelina was now a stranger, an outsider from America searching for family, looking for redemption.

What am I doing here? The words rang out in her head like echoes in an empty sea cave.

She looked out into the darkness of Seoul, illuminated by neon signs and glowing office towers. Everything blurred into unrecognizable shapes behind her slowly blinking eyelids. She could barely make out the words fluorescently lit in a mixture of English and Korean. FACESHOP read one sign—a shop for the face? It made no sense.

Just like this trip, she reminded herself. Angelina’s life made no sense anymore. All she’d believed about herself and others had vanished in the past two years, seemingly never having existed in the first place. No evidence that once upon a time, she’d led a perfectly normal life with a mother in her right mind, a loving husband, and two happy children. Now, she felt like a woman at the bottom of a swimming pool, arms and legs leaden from a force she couldn’t name.

Is insanity hereditary?

Angelina looked down at her wristwatch, an antique. Tracing the smooth gold around the rectangular face with her forefinger, a habit she’d formed the day she received the family heirloom, she wondered if she was also doomed to cut her wrists and bleed out in a bathtub. Suddenly, her mother’s voice echoed like a bell. Angel-ah, play Mozart for me. A Little Night Music always lifts my spirits.

The jolting of the airport bus only deepened the ache in Angelina’s body. The blinding headlights bounced off frighteningly close brick walls as the bus lumbered in and out of neighborhoods with tiny alleyways. It stopped at irregular intervals, offloading men and women with rolling bags into the warm summer night before it arrived at Konkuk University in Gwangjin-gu, north of the Han River.

One of the young Korean university students who had picked her up at the airport turned around in his seat to face her. “We are getting off here. Please get your luggage ready.”

Both of Angelina’s temples throbbed, and static was building in her ears. The aura of an impending migraine, always triggered by stress—they were now occurring with alarming frequency. Pushing past the pain, she rose to her feet and grabbed the handle of her red suitcase. She couldn’t afford to be ill, not until she reached a bed and had covers to pull over her head. As the bus lurched to a stop, she teetered down the narrow aisle. The same Korean student took her bag and carefully lifted it off the bus.

“Thank you,” she said, feeling as though her words were swimming lazily from her brain to her mouth.

The lanky young man bowed, his thick black hair falling forward. “I am sorry, but we must walk about two kilometers to the International Guest House. I know you must be tired.”

I feel catatonic with exhaustion, actually.

“How long in duration was your flight from Pittsburgh?” the young man asked.

When she responded that her journey had taken over eighteen hours, what she didn’t say was that she’d had to change planes in San Francisco from Pittsburgh before landing in Incheon. That she’d lost an entire day crossing the International Date Line. But she’d finally completed the loop that began decades ago at Gimpo International Airport when she was six years old. In 1971, her family had traveled west from Seoul to Hong Kong, then London, where they’d lived for eleven months before settling in New York, and now, over thirty years later, she was back in Seoul. Back in the country where she’d been born, but where she knew no one and barely spoke the language. Her mother was dead. Her father had remarried and taken flight. And Angelina had lost contact with everyone in her extended family.

What am I doing here? she thought again.

“I am sorry,” the young man repeated. “Please allow me to take this for you.”

He wheeled her suitcase away from her, his long, thin back disappearing into the dark. She followed. The other two exchange students from the University of Pittsburgh were walking ahead, laughing with the other host students from Konkuk, their boyish faces tinted sepia by the yellow lamplight. Edward and Mike were both nineteen years old, just finished with their freshman year of college. Angelina, forty, was in graduate school. The three of them had been chosen by their professor to study Korean at Konkuk University for the summer.

“What is Pittsburgh like?” the young man asked, his face a study in quiet attention as he carefully rolled Angelina’s suitcase behind him.

Even though Pittsburgh was in Pennsylvania, Angelina thought of it as a Midwestern city. Small, friendly, provincial. She remembered her first day in Pittsburgh, three years ago, yet another disorienting time. She and her children had arrived at around midnight from New York. In their new house, hours before the movers were due to arrive, they had slept on newly refinished wood floors, wrapped in blankets. In the morning, after a night of sporadic sleep, Angelina had ventured out looking for coffee and breakfast, passing large, single-family homes—Victorians, Dutch Colonials, Queen Annes—with well-manicured front lawns. Suddenly, she found herself on a wide, traffic-laden street. She’d thought it odd that her car was the only one in the lane until a woman coming from the opposite direction stuck her head out her car window and yelled, “Hey, bitch, you ain’t in China no more!” Angelina saw the sign for the bus lane almost at the same time. She’d pulled over onto a side street, put her head on the steering wheel, and cried.

“It used to be an industrial powerhouse, now faded in glory,” she said finally. “Did you know the mills of US Steel were so large you could see them from space? Now these enormous smokestacks stand in the middle of a mall they built out in Homewood.”

Angelina couldn’t stop her disjointed thoughts from pouring forth, as if the sharp pulsing at her temples was forcing out absolute nonsense she had no control over. She wondered if this was what going mad meant.

“There aren’t many Koreans. But there is a Korean church in Shadyside, and they have Korean classes for kids on Saturdays. Both my son and daughter go there. We’re not Presbyterian, but everyone is so very nice to us.” Her words sounded falsely bright, even to her own ears. Had she accidentally revealed how much she’d hated moving to Pittsburgh because of Thom’s job?

A row of hydrangea bushes lined the sidewalk to Angelina’s left, and a familiar sweet scent drifted into her nostrils. The fragrant blue blossoms reminded her of her small garden in Pittsburgh. Out of the dark, an image of her two children flashed in front of her, a picture she loved and had framed on her desk at home. A photograph snapped that first Halloween. Alex, at age eight, and Emma, eleven, crouched next to a neon orange jack-o-lantern in the blue slate entryway of their Victorian, their noses red from cold, arms entwined. She could almost hear the clear peals of their laughter, almost smell the cool autumn air. That was nearly three years ago. Before the divorce. Before their father moved out. Before the ugliness.

The warm night air grazed Angelina’s cheeks, comforting her in a strange way. Staring at a green blur in the dark, she watched it unfurl into a large willow tree. Remembering her mother’s love of weeping willows, she fought the urge to cry. Angelina had always imagined Korea as a land blanketed by weeping willows because of a song her mother used to sing: I long for my beloved lost home in the tallest of mountains, amongst the most beautiful of flowers… when a south wind blows, willows dance on the riverbanks…

Now, at the edge of a loosely oval-shaped body of water, Angelina watched as the willow’s draping leaves fluttered like the fingers of a dancer.

Jerking her head side to side, as if that motion could erase the feeling she was about to cry, she squinted up at the young student. “Did you say something?”

His quietly composed face smiled. “Thank you for answering my question about Pittsburgh. I will be an exchange student there in the autumn semester.”

The way he said “autumn” was so precise and delicate she could feel herself tearing up again.

“I hope you have a great time. I’m Angelina. What’s your name?” She knew she should’ve asked earlier. As the younger person in Confucian Korean culture, he couldn’t solicit her name first. It would have been considered incredibly impudent.

“Keung-nae is my Korean name, but you may call me Kevin, if you wish.”

“My Korean is pretty bad, but it isn’t so bad that I can’t say your name.”

“Americans find it easier to use our English names.” He shrugged his shoulders in an almost imperceptible way.

“But I’m not American. I’m Korean.”

“I apologize. You speak English perfectly, without an accent, and you use your American name.”

It was true. She preferred to use her English name. It was so no one could butcher the pronunciation of her Korean one. She remembered the times she’d corrected people when she was younger, to no avail. Eventually, she’d simply given up. She would just smile when they inevitably said her name wrong. Even her sisters called her Angelina—only her mother had used her Korean name. But Sunyuh and Angelina were different people, even if the meaning of both names remained the same: angel.

She’d just turned five when her family converted to Catholicism, and a priest gave them all saints’ names. Her mother, Gongju, became Columba. Her father, Minsu, became Paul. Her sisters were renamed Lucia, Catherine, and Lydia—Dia for short. Her mother said when it was Angelina’s turn, the priest had looked at her and, knowing what her name meant in Korean, said she looked as beautiful as an angel. Angelina remembered the priest in his long black robes, stooping down, tilting her chin, the scent of tobacco lingering on his long warm fingers.

Her older sisters’ names in Korean were Jewel and Pearl, so Angelina’s should have been Ruby or Sapphire or something, but instead, her younger sister was Ruby. Her mother had a dream while pregnant with Angelina, involving marble angels on top of Seoraksan, a mountain range near the East Sea, and it had moved her so deeply she named her third daughter Angel. She used to say that the stone angels against the blue sky were so beautiful she had no choice but to take one. The image of her tiny, barely four-foot-nine mother lugging a statue down a mountain always made Angelina suppress a smile.

“Would you like me to call you by your Korean name?” the Korean boy asked, deference inherent in his question.

“Angelina is easier.”

The complicated permutations that Korean demanded of its speakers were beyond her capabilities tonight. As the hubae, or junior person, in this dynamic, the Korean boy had to speak to Angelina in an elevated form of speech because of the immutable hierarchy of age—she was twenty years his senior, a sunbae. To address her otherwise would be inconceivable in Korean culture. Besides, could she really ask him to speak to her in Korean? She could barely string a sentence together in her mother tongue. And the boy would be disturbed to hear her speak to him in honorifics, no matter how much she’d insist she only knew the polite form of speech. He would insist she speak in banmal, the half talk Koreans use when speaking with children or friends or younger colleagues, which she, of course, didn’t know.

She was Angelina Lee, not Yi Sunyuh.

Skirting the man-made lake, they arrived at the tallest building on Konkuk’s campus, a glass-enshrouded structure ablaze in light, more modern than the 1970s-era campus buildings surrounding it. Kevin pushed open a large glass door and they entered the building’s cavernous lobby. Angelina shivered against the sudden chill of air-conditioning. Another young man sat at a circular laminated wood reception desk. Kevin approached him, and they spoke rapidly in Korean. Angelina understood only room and woman from what she overheard of their conversation.

“Welcome to the International Guest House,” Kevin said, bowing. “This is where our international faculty and students receive accommodations.”

“Thank you.” Angelina bowed in return. She wouldn’t be told until days later that she shouldn’t have bowed to a younger person like that, but thankfully, the boy was kind enough to ignore her mistake.

Kevin bowed again. “Your room is on the fifth floor.” He pointed to the bank of elevators and handed her a set of keys. “Is there anything else you require before I leave?”

“Thanks again for meeting me at the airport. It would have been a disaster without you,” she said, feeling lost and unmoored.

Did I tell this Korean boy I’m looking for my family?

She didn’t want him to leave. She wanted to grab his arm and beg him to help her. What would he say if she told him she hadn’t seen her grandmother in over thirty years? All she had to go on were faded blue envelopes with black Korean letters, postmarked decades ago, that she’d found mostly unopened and stashed away in the back of a closet when her mother died. Angelina had sent a simple letter to the return address on those envelopes that she was going to be at Konkuk University studying Korean in the summer, and asked her grandmother to please contact her. She hadn’t received a reply.

As if he could sense her longing, he said gently, “I will see you again tomorrow for your orientation.”

Her upper lip beaded with sweat, but she felt cold. She suppressed the urge to press her palms into her face. Angelina didn’t know why she wanted to tell this Korean boy all her secrets—the sudden violence of her mother’s suicide, the inexplicable estrangement from her mother’s family.

I must be crazy.

With a deep inhale, she walked away, rolling her suitcase to the row of elevators. Edward and Mike were engrossed with the other host students. Alone, she stepped into the first open door, pushed the button for the fifth floor. She noticed an F instead of the number 4 in the column of numbers—she would learn later that the number 4 was considered unlucky and sounded similar to the word for death, so many elevators and buildings in Korea skipped it; other times it was labeled with an F for the word four because Koreans were so enamored of English.

Angelina walked down the fifth-floor hallway, her footfalls echoing in the pristine white corridor. She stopped at a large plate glass window and stared out at the man-made lake, at the ring of tall, black, old-fashioned lamps that surrounded it. Lights twinkled as the willows swayed in the breeze. When she crossed the threshold to her room, the door closed behind her with a soft hiss. The compact space was carpeted in gray; the light-colored wood veneer desk, wardrobe, and matching single bed all efficiently arranged. There was no décor—no paintings or prints, no flowers in vases. She was back in a dormitory, feeling like a college student.

Pretending to be young again.

She turns the glass doorknob, cut like a diamond. The white wood door swings open and she sees a woman’s arm hanging adrift in a white clawfoot bathtub. She looks down at her bare feet and watches with horror as blood floods the black and white tiles and rises to her ankles. The next instant, she is standing in front of the bathroom of her mother’s old house, a forgotten paean to tasteless 1980s modernist imitations—Formica countertops, naked light bulbs over huge swaths of mirror, fake crystal cold- and hot-water tap handles. She hears shouting and looks up to see her friend Liz frantically blocking the doorway. Angelina can’t breathe. In the gaudy mirror, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s face in repose, as if she is sleeping, her head tilted down, the curve of her neck delicate and—

Angelina woke up weeping. She coughed as mucus slid down her throat and coated her vocal cords. She clutched her arms in front of her belly, slamming her head against her bent knees. The dream had been so real. She could still feel the cool glass doorknob against the palm of her hand.

“It’s not true. It’s not true.”

Her own words startled her. The vehemence, the insistence, the guttural tone sounded like someone else. But it was true—her mother was dead. Her body found by her downstairs neighbor of only four months, whose bathroom ceiling had rained pink, diluted blood. The young woman, still in shock days later, had pointed to the exact spot on the pristine white plaster when Angelina had visited the building to remove her mother’s belongings.

The luminescent dial of the bedside clock blinked 4:58 a.m. It was her third day in Seoul. She groped for the box of tissues on the bed stand and hugged it tightly, as though that would ward off her pain. Moonlight filtered in through the slats of the blinds, but shadows were everywhere. The tall, narrow wardrobe loomed large; the black desk chair seemed to have grown wider. The mini fridge wheezed, emitting an occasional gurgle.

She swung her feet off the platform bed onto gray carpet, swiping up used tissues as she walked the few steps to the tiny bathroom. When she pressed the light switch, the square mirror above the porcelain sink reflected her ashen face. In the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs, the purple shadows under her eyes looked elongated. The wrinkles between her brows furrowed deeper. She pushed away her long hair, only to have it fall back as she slumped forward.

Angelina didn’t recognize her reflection. Her facial features were the same, her eyes and nose and mouth all in the same place. But she felt like a stranger to herself, fractured somehow, rearranged in a different order. During the past two years of her divorce, she’d realized that her family—a loving husband and two happy children—was a lie. But she’d fought to keep the illusion of her life as normal, ordinary. Then her mother killed herself. And Angelina could no longer pretend she wasn’t submerged in sorrow. Blow after blow of brutal truths she couldn’t face. And she was afraid the upheaval she felt inside would look like wildness, unhingedness, and would be reflected in her eyes for all the world to see. She avoided her own gaze.

God, I look old. When did this happen?

The last time she’d looked into the mirror of an unfamiliar dorm room, disoriented, she’d been twenty years old, in London, studying Shakespeare for the summer. The time when she should have stood up for herself against her parents and changed her major from pharmacy to English literature. Instead, she was doing it now, as a forty-year-old, getting a PhD. Back then, she’d been surrounded by peeling floral wallpaper in a decrepit Georgian mansion, which University College London had designated as a dormitory.

During those months in London, she’d started speaking with a British accent, like when she’d lived there as a seven-year-old. She wasn’t consciously trying to mimic it, but a return to the place where she’d first learned the language had unlocked a primal part of her brain that she couldn’t shut off. Her American classmates used to tease that she was faking it. She didn’t tell them she still confused lift for elevator, and that lorry always sounded better than truck.

She went searching for her old neighborhood of New Malden after class one day, around the old Korean embassy, where white working-class Brits had once stared and pointed at Angelina, her darker skin and almond-shaped eyes a misfit amongst pale freckled faces. The town had seemed completely new, yet exactly the same. The fish and chip shop was still a hole-in-the-wall, its red and white tiles perpetually coated in grease, its air fragrant with burnt oil. The beauty salon next door still had the same neon pink sign overhead. But there’d been a freshness to the paint on the storefronts, a sharpness to the windows. All signs of gentrification and the old world disappearing.

Angelina turned the lights off in her dorm bathroom and sagged against the doorway, wondering when the jet lag would wear off, when the nightmares would end. She knew she couldn’t go back to sleep, couldn’t bear staring at the ceiling. In front of the only window in the room, she pulled up the blinds. Her friend Liz had been her usual goofy self when Angelina talked to her a few days ago, and their email exchange last night had glimmered with Liz’s peculiar brand of humor: “Are you getting laid soon?” Angelina had laughed before logging off.

Why was Liz in my mother’s bathroom in my dream?

She could still feel the texture of the warm night air blowing in through the screen door as she’d held the phone to her ear in August, almost a year ago now. Dia’s frantic words echoing, Mom killed herself. Angelina had abruptly slid to the floor of her kitchen. The wood had felt cold, the overhead lights too bright, a migraine exploding. She couldn’t breathe then, either. She’d called Liz, someone more family than friend since their college days twenty years ago. Her voice must have sounded stilted, because instead of a greeting, Liz had immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”

Angelina had felt like the slightest graze against her forearms would shatter her. And it was so trite, but she kept repeating again and again, “Why? Why would she do that? I don’t understand.” She’d blurted out random things about her mother—the sapphire ring she always wore on her right index finger; the large yellow roses she cultivated in every garden of every house they ever lived in; the celebratory dinner of bulgogi and japchae she cooked when Angelina became valedictorian in high school. But there was one incident Angelina never told Liz about, a day that still lingered, pricking at her years later.

When she’d been in high school, their next-door neighbor had called the police once because they’d heard glass shattering in the house. Her mother had been hospitalized—her father said she’d suffered a mini stroke. He’d driven Angelina to the hospital after school one day, his manner patently jovial, and Angelina hadn’t wanted to incur his displeasure by being melancholic. She’d opened the door to her mother’s hospital room with a smile painted on her face.

“Mom, I’m here.”

Her mother turned her face toward Angelina, eyes blank.

Angelina forced herself to keep smiling. “Did you have a good day?”

Her mother looked away, not moving in her hospital bed.

“Did you hear me, Mom?”

She kept her face turned away.

“Umma, Sunyuh-yah,” Angelina said in Korean, hoping that hearing her mother’s native language would help her.

Swiveling her head, she squinted at Angelina, her eyebrows furrowing. Then her face cleared, a smile beaming. “Sunyuh-unni? Where were you?”

“Unni?” Angelina said, confused.

Instead of answering, her mother flung out her arms, squeezing Angelina into an embrace. Stunned and stiff, Angelina looked down at the top of her mother’s scalp, gray roots defying a forest of brown. The touch of her mother’s fingers felt shocking. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been held by her mother, who deliberately avoided physical contact with her husband, with her children. She once told Angelina that people touching her felt suffocating, that their arms and hands felt heavy with need.

Angelina tried to push out of her hold, but her fingers clung tightly. Her mother’s face, open and vulnerable, smiled up at her.

“It’s okay, Mom.” Angelina tried to smile back. Her mother was ill, but her behavior was beyond bizarre. Her mother rarely smiled, but now, she was practically laughing.

“Unni!” she continued in Korean.

“Mom, you don’t have a sister. Your two older brothers are in Korea,” Angelina said in English, increasingly uncomfortable, increasingly alarmed.

“I was afraid. Scared for you. Where did you go?” Her voice rose an octave, childish in tone.

“I’m right here.” Angelina tried to say this patiently, pushing down panic. A tremor took hold of her hands.

Her mother smiled. “I’m so happy you’re back. I’ve missed you.” Then she frowned, her lower lip pushed out at a petulant angle, her head shaking like she was a little girl. “But I waited in the plum orchard. For hours. When you left that night, I thought you would be back by morning. You should have returned sooner.”

Angelina stared at her mother, speechless.

She stared back at Angelina, tossing her head, crossing her arms. “I hope you are sorry for keeping me waiting. It was not nice. And you are usually so nice to me, not like our mother.” Suddenly dropping her posturing, she grinned. “That is why I love you so much.”

“Umma, what are you saying?” Angelina said, her voice high and frantic. Her mother was delusional, spinning stories. “Mom, it’s me, Sunyuh.”

She looked at Angelina, narrowing and then widening her eyes. “Sunyuh?” Closing her eyes, she collapsed onto the hospital bed. Her keening reverberated in that blank white space. Angelina touched h. . .