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Book 2, Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pachinko, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival and Family
Imperialism, Resistance, and Compromise
Identity, Blood, and Contamination
Love, Motherhood, and Women’s Choices
Summary
Analysis
One day in 1959, while Kyunghee is at church, Kim Changho is helping Yoseb do his therapy stretches. Yoseb tells Changho that he can marry Kyunghee after Yoseb dies, but he asks him not to take Kyunghee back to North Korea, because he doesn’t trust the Communists. Changho finds Kyunghee as she’s walking home from church and tells her what Yoseb has said. Kyunghee is stunned and turns him down, asking his forgiveness.
By this time, Changho has pined for Kyunghee for years. Yoseb, with characteristic clear-sightedness, has observed this and gives Changho permission to marry her, hoping he’ll take care of her after Yoseb is dead. But the prospect of accepting another man’s proposal while her husband is alive is too much for the faithful Kyunghee.
Themes
The next morning Kyunghee finds that Changho has left for Korea already. Sunja comforts her as she cries. Kyunghee explains that she couldn’t have given Changho children, and that she doesn’t feel it was right to have had two men care for her at once. Sunja wonders why “men get to leave when they didn’t get what they wanted.”
Kyunghee apparently did have feelings for Changho, but finds herself in an impossible situation; she can’t love two men at once. In a certain way, this is similar to what Sunja went through, except that she chose to love one man in order to try to forget the other. Sunja observes that men tend to have more options in scenarios like this than women do.
Themes
