Task A

Sum up the information about the narrator’s parents.

(Comprehension) (12 Punkte)

Analyze how the role the “Gathering” plays for the parents is portrayed. Consider narrative techniques and use of language.

(Analysis) (16 Punkte)

Choose one of the following tasks:

3.1

“The poor customers give Mom-n-Dad food stamps, which become money, which becomes college tuition for me. It’s the latest version of the American Dream.” (ll. 12 – 14)
Discuss whether the narrator’s statement adequately reflects the current social realities in the US.

(Evaluation: comment) (14 Punkte)

3.2

You have a British friend who works as a student assistant at university and has been asked to design the cover of a brochure for a field trip to the US entitled “Exploring US identity.” Your friend has put together a collage and has asked you for your opinion, knowing that you have just talked about the US in class. Write an email to your friend, assessing to what extent this collage conveys an adequate idea of what constitutes US identity.

(Evaluation: re-creation of text) (14 Punkte)

David Yoon

Frankly in Love

The novel is set in California and tells the story of the protagonist Frank Li and his family.

Mom-n-Dad work at The Store every day, from morning to evening, on weekends, holidays,

New Year’s Day, 365 days out of every year without a single vacation for as long as me

and Hanna have been alive.

Mom-n-Dad inherited The Store from an older Korean couple of that first wave who came

over in the sixties. No written contracts or anything. Just an introduction from a good friend,

then tea, then dinners, and finally many deep bows, culminating in warm, two-handed

handshakes. They wanted to make sure The Store was kept in good hands. Good, Korean

hands.

The Store is an hour-long drive from the dystopian perfection of my suburban home of

Playa Mesa. It’s in a poor, sun-crumbled part of Southern California largely populated by

Mexican- and African-Americans. A world away.

The poor customers give Mom-n-Dad food stamps, which become money, which becomes

college tuition for me.

It’s the latest version of the American Dream.

I hope the next version of the American Dream doesn’t involve gouging people for food

stamps.

I’m at The Store now. I’m leaning against the counter. Its varnish is worn in the middle like

a tree ring, showing the history of every transaction that’s ever been slid across its surface:

candy and beer and diapers and milk and beer and ice cream and beer and beer. [...]

It makes no sense that I’m helping Mom-n-Dad at The Store. My whole life they’ve never

let me have a job.

“Study hard, become doctor maybe,” Dad would say.

“Or a famous newscaster,” Mom would say. [...]

I grab my phone and step into the even hotter heat outside. [...]

Buzz-buzz. It’s Q.

Pip pip, old chap, let’s go up to LA. It’s free museum night. Bunch of us are going.

Deepest regrets, old bean, I say. Got a Gathering.

I shall miss your companionship, fine sir, says Q.

And I yours, my good man.

Q knows what I mean when I say Gathering.

I’m talking about a gathering of five families, which sounds like a mafia thing but really is

just Mom-n-Dad’s friends getting together for a rotating house dinner.

It’s an event that’s simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary: ordinary in that hey, it’s just

dinner, but extraordinary in that all five couples met at university in Seoul, became friends,

moved to Southern California together to start new lives, and have managed to see each

other and their families every month literally for decades.

The day ends. Dad changes shirts, trading his shop owner persona for a more Gathering-

appropriate one: a new heather-gray polo that exudes success and prosperity. We lock up,

turn out the lights. Then we drive forty minutes to the Kims’.

It’s the Kim family’s turn to host the Gathering this time, and they’ve gone all out: a Brazilian

barbecue carving station manned by real Brazilians drilling everyone on the word of the

night (chu • rra • sca • ri • a), plus a wine-tasting station, plus a seventy-inch television in the

great room with brand-new VR headsets for the little kids to play ocean explorer with.

It all screams: We’re doing great in America. How about you?

Included among these totems of success are the children themselves, especially us older

kids. We were all born pretty much at the same time. We’re all in the same year in school.

We are talked and talked about, like minor celebrities. So-and-so made academic pentathlon

team captain. So-and-so got valedictorian.

Being a totem is a tiresome role, and so we hide away in the game room or wherever while

outside, the littler kids run amok and the adults get drunk and sing twenty-year-old Korean

pop songs that none of us understand. In this way we have gradually formed the strangest

of friendships:

We only sit together like this for four hours once a month.

We never leave the room during this time, except for food.

We never hang out outside the Gatherings.

The Gatherings are a world unto themselves. Each one is a version of Korea forever trapped

in a bubble of amber—the early-nineties Korea that Mom-n-Dad and the rest of their

friends brought over to the States years ago after the bubble burst. Meanwhile, the Koreans

in Korea have moved on, become more affluent, more savvy. Meanwhile, just outside the

Kims’ front door, American kids are dance-gaming to K-pop on their big-screens.

But inside the Gathering, time freezes for a few hours. We children are here only because

of our parents, after all. Would we normally hang out otherwise? Probably not. But we

can’t exactly sit around ignoring each other, because that would be boring. So we jibber-

jabber and philosophize until it’s time to leave. Then we are released back into the reality

awaiting us outside the Gathering, where time unfreezes and resumes.

Annotations:

All language mistakes in the original text have been corrected.

David Yoon, Frankly in Love, London: Penguin Random House 2019, pp. 11 – 17.

Michael Foran, CC BY 2.0, WTC smoking on 9-11.
Tyler Merbler from USA, CC BY 2.0, 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.
Lesekreis, CC0, NYC Liberty 4.
Gobierno CDMX, CC0, Partido NBA.
Continental Congress, Public domain, US-original-Declaration-1776.
Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, PPOC, Library of Congress, Public domain, Emigrant party on the road to California .
Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, Black Lives Matter Protest Times Square New York City.

(Evaluation: re-creation of text) (14 Punkte)