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A Retrospective Look Back to Racial Tensions in 1990s L.A.
A Korean-American novelist’s new book focuses on two families’ reckoning of the 1992 L.A. riots
Steph Cha told me she wanted to write about the L.A. she knew. Her new novel, Your House Will Pay, is a literary thriller that intertwines the fates of two families from a murder. The novel is told through the perspectives of its protagonists: Grace Park is a sheltered, second-generation Korean American woman who works as a pharmacist for her family’s business in the Valley. Shawn Matthews is a middle-aged African American ex-con, who cannot seem to shake his violent past while trying to live a quiet family life in Palmdale.
The novel’s conflict centers around a shooting in the summer of 2019, which leads Grace to confront her naivete about her family’s hidden history, and Shawn to grapple with the decades-long aftermath of his teenage sister’s murder.
Reading Cha’s novel, told in part, through the lens of a young Korean American woman, was like unlocking a door of memory for me to consider Korean American Angelenos as a community. As the novel’s timelines shift from 2019 to the early 1990s, I was compelled by a perspective of L.A. that I had not previously encountered on the page, but hauntingly reflected my own memories of the city…
