The Surrendered: Chang-Rae Lee

This book was a masterpiece. It followed three lives throughout Asia and the United States. The three people meet during the Korean War, then separate, only for two of them to find each other again. The book starts with June a Korean girl who was travelling with her mother, older sister, and twin siblings after her brother and father were conscripted into the army. Her mother and sister are killed by a bomb right before their eyes. The three remaining children climb aboard a train and the twins are killed from a horrible accident. She meets an American soldier (Hector) who leads her to an orphanage he decides to work at after killing a Korean soldier, who we are lead to believe could have been June's brother. At the orphanage we meet Sylvie who is with her minister husband running the orphanage. Her parents were ministers and she watched them die during the Sino- Japanese war. Sylvie becomes a drug addict and even though they were eventually supposed to adopt children form the orphanage when they returned home, her husband realizes she is too sick to do so. Two of the children, Min and June, once they realize they aren't going home with Sylvie, and no one will want them, decide to die in a fire. The fire ends up killing Min and Sylvie and her husband. Hector ends up marrying June and brings her to the US, just so she can escape the orphanage. They copulate once and June has a son, which Hector does not find out about until June is dying and tracks him down because she wants them to have each other after she's gone. After tracking down the son June is too sick to realize "Nick" is not her son, but a con artist (her son had died). Hector gives him money to fulfill June's dying wish to see her son once more. The Story ends with June, the last of her family, dying.