Oxford Soju Club, Jinwoo Park‘s debut novel, tells the story of three characters: a North Korean, a South Korean and a Korean American whose lives intersect in intricate and heartbreaking fated ways.
Yohan Kim— “the Northerner,” and Yunah Choi, “the American,” are spies. Jihoon Lim, “the Southerner,” is a young man from Seoul running the “Soju Club,” the Korean restaurant he has opened to keep a connection to his memories and his past. Due to their work and their circumstances, the characters in the book have complex, fluid identities that continuously shift as they try to find their true selves.
The book offers a deep exploration of the immigrant experience and asks profound questions about how our personal histories can be suffocatingly tied to our country of origin and our culture. It is also a spy novel filled with intrigue and devastating plot twists.
The book is written from the perspectives of each of the three characters; the indication that the perspective has shifted is marked by the title of each chapter: “The Northerner,” “The Southerner,” or “The American.” The device is useful to guide you through the plot; the book demands your attention as you try to keep track of each of the narrative lines.
Park builds the world of the novel elegantly and with great care, and as you move through the book and the different strands of the story start to be pulled together, you understand the depth and sophistication of the story and marvel at its construction.
What moved me the most about Oxford Soju Club was the evident love and compassion that Park had for these characters and their stories. The novel asks questions such as, “What do we owe to our countries?” “What do we owe to our ancestors?” but also, “What do we owe to ourselves?”
As an immigrant from Venezuela in Canada, I felt in my bones the quiet, dull longing of the constant search for identity that Park evokes in the novel.
In a way, to leave your country means to carry it with you forever, wherever you go, not only internally, but in the way you are perceived by others—your nationality becomes the entry point to their assessment and understanding of who you are, regardless of your own complicated feelings about the place you come from.
Park underscores this feeling by the large, nondescript labels he gives each of the characters—The Northerner, the Southerner, and the American. He then subverts it by showing us their rich inner lives and stories.
Though the book resonated with me as an immigrant, Oxford Soju Club is also a book about what it means to be Korean, and the specificities of Korean culture and history that contextualize the story provide a wonderful window through which we, non-Koreans, can peek in.
The contradictory nature of being an immigrant often means constantly rejecting and embracing different parts of our heritage so we can situate ourselves in our new country as individuals first and foremost, and as representatives of our culture second, or not at all. We are not always willing representatives of it. Still, as the story advances, Yohan, Yunah, and Jihoon seem to be pulled into each other as if guided by an invisible, shared ancestral memory.
Oxford Soju Club is a fun book, with twists and turns that make your head spin, and your breath stop. However, it’s the humanity of each of these characters that holds the story together. While reading, I cried at various parts, not only for Yohan, Yunah, and Jihoon’s stories, but for mine as well.
Oxford Soju Club, by Jinwoo Park, will be published on September 2, 2025. Visit Jinwoo Park’s website.
Read my interview with Jinwoo Park.
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