57 pages • 1 hour read
Miracle Creek
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “A Year Later—The Trial: Day One”
Chapter 6 Summary: “Young”
At home, Young is feeling an emotion she hasn’t felt in a long time—joy. She was terrified that somehow the truth would come out, but Matt’s testimony indicates that no one knows. Additionally, Pak tells her that the insurance company will finally send the money the following week, and they can move forward. Young tells Mary, but Mary is still traumatized from the explosion, experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and she yells at Young. However, even this pleases Young because it reminds her of the way her daughter used to be, “the real, pre-explosion Mary” (57).
Indeed, prior to the explosion, Young and Mary did not have a good relationship. Mary blamed Young for all the hardship she experienced when Pak decided Young and Mary should move to America. Young remembers how she even envied Teresa’s relationship with Rosa, even knowing that it “was ridiculous to feel jealous of a woman with a daughter who couldn’t walk or talk, with no college, husband, or children in her future” (61). However, now Mary allows Young to comfort her, even to touch her, “letting Young rake her fingers through her hair while she cried, being comforted by this intimate act” (58).
This simple act brings Young pure joy, and explains her happiness despite what should be “the lowest point of her […] entire […] life: her husband paralyzed; her daughter a catatonic mess, her face scarred and psyche shattered; their finances nonexistent” (59). However, Mary allowing Young to touch her and comfort her, Pak’s joy in receiving the insurance money, and the secret still safe, all “left [Young] in a kind of celebratory state she associated with milestones such as engagements and graduations” (60).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Mary Yoo”
Mary wakes up to the sound of her mother whispering that dinner was ready. Mary enjoys the way her mother strokes her hair, but still blames her for all the bullying and loneliness she endured in the four years before Pak joined them in America, when they lived with the Kangs. Young was supposed to help them run their store in Baltimore, and the Kangs would allow them to live in their home, 30 minutes away, and pay for Mary’s school. However, the Kangs instead force Young to work in the store every day, from 6:00 AM to midnight. Most nights, Young didn’t even return home, but slept on a mattress in a cupboard in the store.
Mary was completely alone most of the time, and bullied in school for her accent and her differences. Furthermore, Young didn’t want Mary to come to the store because it was in a bad neighborhood. The few times Mary did visit the store, she was jealous of the way her mother interacted with the customers. In Korea, Young was an attentive and involved mother, but in America, she seems to ignore Mary. In fact, Mary quits calling her “Um-ma” the Korean version of mom, and calls her mom instead. She sees them as two different people: “Um-ma was the mother who knitted her soft sweaters, who greeted her every day after school with barley tea and played jacks with her while listening to stories about what happened that day” (67-68). Mom, on the other hand, was “a woman who left her alone in someone else’s house, who didn’t know about the boys who called her ‘stupid chink’ and the girls who giggled about her in front of her […]” (67-68).
Once Mary is fully awake, she recalls with horror Matt’s testimony, and the images torment her. Mary also thinks about Elizabeth, how she had acted like a real mother, like her own mother used to act, but was really a “sociopath who’d placed a cigarette inches from an oxygen tube, knowing that the oxygen was on and her son inside” (70).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Elizabeth Ward”
While waiting for the press to leave the courthouse, Elizabeth remembers the “first time she hurt her son on purpose […] when Henry was three” (72). Elizabeth had long suspected there was something wrong with her child: he had refused to breastfeed, cried for hours, and been slow to meet developmental milestones. However, at a birthday party when Henry sat on the floor rocking rather than play with the other children, Elizabeth knew for sure, and she was mortified at his behavior. To get him to stop, she pinched his shoulder, “forcing the soft flesh between his neck and shoulder into a thin strip and pinching, harder and harder, wanting, needing it to hurt, for him to scream or hit her or run away, something to indicate that he was alive in the same world as hers” (76).
When Elizabeth and her lawyer, Shannon, finally get to the car, Elizabeth vomits, remembering Matt’s testimony. Shannon asks Elizabeth why she couldn’t have shown some emotion during the trial itself, telling Elizabeth that “the entire jury thinks you don’t give a damn what happened to your son” and that “[t]hey’d love to send you do death row right now” (77). Elizabeth responds that she was just trying to be calm as Shannon had requested, but really the point for Elizabeth is to be sent to death row. She had considered committing suicide, but has decided that the public humiliation of the trial and the death penalty “would be the best atonement for her sin—the irrevocable, unforgivable action she took that day during one moment of anger and hatred, the moment that played over and over in her mind, morning and night, awake and asleep, and tore away at her sanity” (78-79). Shannon tells Elizabeth that Matt lied on the stand and she “can prove it”; in fact, Shannon has “evidence that someone else deliberately set the fire” (79).
Part 1, Chapters 6-8 Analysis
This section provides a window into the vexed relationship between Mary and Young. After the first day of the trial, Young is oddly elated. She is relieved that no one seems to know what she thinks is their only secret and overjoyed to learn that they will soon receive the insurance money and can move away from Miracle Creek. However, Young’s joy doesn’t come from keeping secrets or receiving money. Instead, Young’s joy comes from the moment of connection she shares with Pak when he tells her that the insurance money is coming, when “she put her hand on his shoulder” and Pak, rather than “rolling away, […] placed his hand on hers and smiled. Their hands together—a team, a unit” (56).
Similarly, despite Mary’s emotional reaction to Matt’s testimony, and the horrible way that Henry died, Young is also delighted that Mary allows her to comfort her. She realizes that her joy in Mary’s willingness to accept Young’s touch—despite everything else—reflects Teresa’s joy when her daughter had said “Ma.” At the time, Young “hadn’t really grasped how Teresa could look happy, be happy, when her life was by any objective measure, so hard and tragic” (62)
Mary is grateful for Young’s comfort, and it reminds her of the way things used to be, when they were still in Korea. She also remembers how lonely she was when they first came to the United States, and her fury that Young allowed the Kangs to mistreat her, just as Young had allowed Pak to dictate that they move to the United States. Mary’s anger at Young seems unfair, but it is the logic of childhood. Pak was not there to blame, and Mary probably believed that if her father were there, he could have prevented the Kangs’ abuse of Young, and that Young was a coward for not standing up to them. Furthermore, Young seems to acclimate better to the United States than does Mary. The people in the neighborhood like Young, but Mary faces mockery at school. She hates her mother for “being her mother. For bringing her to a place that made her hate her own mother” (68).
Mary’s hatred for her mother gets mixed up with her feelings about Elizabeth. She believes that just as the mother she had known in Korea, “who knitted her soft sweaters, who greeted her every day after school with barley tea and played jacks with her while listening to stories about what happened that day” had disappeared as if she had never existed, so too must Elizabeth’s motherhood be superficial. She thinks that the way Elizabeth “looked at HBOT: always pulling Henry close, smoothing his hair, reading with him” had “all been a ruse” (70). Elizabeth’s thoughts confirm Mary’s belief, as she reveals that she abused Henry. Although Elizabeth felt “shame and fear” after hurting Henry, at the time “all she felt was a release. Not the sudden release of slamming a door or hurling a plate, but a slow, gradual dissipation of her fury, giving way to pleasure, the sensuous delight of squeezing something soft, like kneading dough” (76).
However, Elizabeth’s violent reaction to Matt’s testimony makes clear that she loved Henry, and this behavior indicates to the reader that Elizabeth’s relationship with Henry is just as complicated as Young’s relationship with Mary. In fact, Elizabeth reveals that she was planning on suicide but decided that “going through the trial would be the best atonement for her sin” (79); it would be “better than some easy, blink-and-it’s over death” (78). Elizabeth wants to be punished, not for Henry’s death, but for how she treated him before his death.
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