by Jane Park
HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS
2026/$26.99/352 pp.
Growing up as the daughter of Korean immigrants in Crow Plains, Alberta, in the 1990s was difficult for Anne. Decades later she’s a successful lawyer in New York City. She sees her parents only when they travel from their new home in Edmonton to visit, and she seldom sees her alcoholic older brother. But when her father dies, Anne returns to Alberta to help her mother settle his affairs. While there she discovers a part of her father’s past she never knew—he was originally from North Korea and left his brother behind, never knowing what became of him. She finds letters her father wrote during her childhood to this unknown uncle and must reckon with her past and the secrets her dad was hiding.
Inheritance paints a moving and authentic picture of the immigrant experience in small-town Alberta, where young Anne’s parents own a grocery store. We see flashbacks of Anne’s attempts to fit in by repressing her Korean identity. She stops eating foods such as kimchi, convinced classmates will smell it on her, and envies a white friend’s family, whom she sees as a perfect representation of normality. She shuns the only other Asian girl in town, the Chinese restaurant owner’s daughter, who attempts to befriend her. Anne worries that if she hangs out with her, it will draw more attention to her Asianness.
We also see the sacrifices many immigrants make in Canada, and the emotional costs. In one moving scene, as Anne watches her father struggle through a transaction at a checkout counter, she reflects: “He was an engineer back in Korea, I want to say aloud, as if this were a punchline to a joke we’re all participating in. The English my father has mastered through his exercise books leaves him at a loss here, as he—a man clever enough to graduate from the Harvard of Korea—can’t conduct the simplest transaction without some inevitable fumbling.”
For Anne and her brother Charles, all that their parents gave up for them feels like a crushing pressure. It weighs heaviest on Charles, as the eldest child and a boy, but when he falters, Anne takes on the mantle of her parents’ expectations. She loves her parents, but her relationship with them is permeated with resentment and guilt. As she bonds with her remaining family after her father’s death, she begins to find peace and healing.
Readers who grew up as the children of immigrants to Canada might see themselves in Anne’s struggles to reconcile her parents’ culture with that of her peers. Meanwhile, those whose families have been here for generations may appreciate a window into their neighbours’ lives. Inheritance is a beautifully written and quintessentially Albertan book with a propulsive and realistic family drama at its heart.
Jillian Bell is a writer from Calgary.
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