57 pages • 1 hour read
Angie KimHappiness Falls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Language and Silence
Throughout Happiness Falls, Angie Kim addresses the complexities and paradoxes of language, silence, and meaning. As the sister of a brother with autism and AS, Mia describes communication as the “the focal point around which our families’ lives have come to orbit” (102). Kim emphasizes the importance of linguistic choices, as well as the inconsistencies and paradoxes of language, which Mia describes as “a funny thing” (309). Further, the novel also foregrounds the meanings of silence. Most centrally, Kim argues that the Korean American experience comes with an ingrained bias for verbal acuity as representative of intelligence. Rejecting this binary approach, Kim suggests that communication is nuanced, and that intelligence is not necessarily correlative to language skills.
The novel questions the purpose of euphemism, wondering about its tendency to obscure or cushion meaning. After a school assembly featuring police officers, Mia came up to Detective Janus to “discuss the police officials’ use of the phrase committed suicide [...] you commit a crime, commit fraud, murder, sin; you don’t commit strokes or depression” (32). As a well-read progressive, Mia takes issue with the outdated term, preferring the more neutral “died by suicide.” For Detective Janus, the distinction is semantic—she sees the adjusted language as an unwillingness to face the reality of the event. Similarly, when Mia’s principal informed her and John that Eugene was in the hospital for a bowel obstruction, he beat around the bush for so long that she realized, “there’s a direct correlation between the amount of verbal padding and the level of worrisome news; the more cushioning, the worse the situation. Here, the number of insulation words to impact words was 5:1, which was all wrong” (171). Both Mia and Detective Janus were annoyed by the obscuring euphemistic language; the novel asks readers to consider when “verbal padding” is doing positive work, and when it is damaging. Related to this idea are language superstitions, like the “Korean bias against the number four,” which “sounded like death” (167), in its Chinese root form.
Happiness Falls also portrays language as mystical and amazing. When Hannah and Mia saw an opera in Klingon, Mia connects the work of building a conlang with attempting to coax language out of Eugene: “how amazing it was that linguists like her turned an actor’s random, alien-sounding gibberish into a working language, and could we maybe turn Eugene’s splaughs into a language based on pitch and rhythm, like Morse Code” (172).
But the desire to get Eugene to speak is tricky because it rests on the bias of associating verbal language with intelligence. Mia highly values effective verbal communication, which makes her dismiss Eugene to some degree: “language is inherent to and distinguishes human brains—what makes us truly human—which begs the question, What does that make Eugene?” (83). After watching the video of Eugene talking about her with Anjeli, Mia is simultaneously horrified by her prejudice and elated at having a means to communicate with her brother because she cannot help but see language as representing one’s humanity.
Mia’s and Hannah’s experiences as Korean Americans show native and learned languages biases. Hannah speaks English with an accent, something that makes her a target in the often xenophobic US: “an accent can make you assume the speaker doesn’t quite have the language down. You expect them to get by, but not to use the nuances of language/syntax/diction/etc. to be particularly witty or quick” (181). Meanwhile in Korea, people assumed that because Mia looks Korean, she should be fluent. Connecting her negative experiences with those of Eugene, Mia wonders, “[I]f it was this painful for Mom and me, what was it like for those who have beautifully formed thoughts they can’t express their entire lives?” (226).
Silence is offered as a counterpoint to language, and just as rich in meaning. The paradoxical practice of “whispered screaming” (298) that Harmonee taught Mia and John before Eugene’s birth highlights a liminal state between sound and silence. Silence is also associated with guilt and criminality. For example, during a conversation with Detective Janus, Mia wonders: “[W]as her silence a test? Was our silence atypical, and in the same way she’d questioned why we didn’t call the police, was she wondering why we weren’t ravenous for information?” (74). Similarly, Eugene’s silence may indicate his involvement in Adam’s disappearance: “He could do anything with anyone, and we would never know because Eugene can’t say anything. It’s actually a brilliant alibi, if you think about it” (130). Highlighting the ways silence can produce meaning subverts the idea that spoken language is the only mode of meaningful communication, presenting a nuanced view of what it means to be nonverbal and thus decoupling a neurotypical view of speech from the more complex concepts of communication and meaning.
Consequences of Small Actions
Mia often imagines how different courses of action could have yielded different results. From what would have been different if she’d gotten up rather than lying on the ground after Eugene pushed her, to what may have happened to Adam, Mia is preoccupied with the idea of the multiverse and alternative history. By emphasizing the effect of small actions on outcomes, Kim takes a philosophical approach to mystery, imbuing the missing-person narrative with theories of metaphysics and determinism.
Happiness Falls includes various reflections on liminal, or in-between, states. At one point, Mia takes a second to recollect her father’s disappearance, caught in the universal experience of waking up “after something horrible has happened, and everything seems normal. A halfway point between asleep and awake, where both worlds seem equally plausible” (46). In terms of narrative structure, most mystery narratives hinge on the idea of multiple options being equally plausible, presenting several suspects and theories of the crime until these potential pasts are collapsed into one factual one with the revelation of the true answer to the puzzle. Happiness Falls subverts the genre by leaving uncertainty in its plot structure and including philosophical commentary on liminality and the relationship between cause and effect. Mia wonders whether Eugene’s scream results from his dreams, “or maybe the scream was related, but the causal chain reversed” (289).
Mia’s understanding of the 100 days she narrates often hinges on the idea that “it’s the tiniest difference that can make the most difference” (34), which emphasizes the randomness of life and that disastrous events can occur coincidentally. Thinking about whether Eugene’s story is true, Mia acknowledges that “It’s not all or nothing […]. Every variation […] between those two extremes of absolute belief and conspiracy-theorist skepticism, forms a dizzying array of narratives” (360). The ultimate small decision that has enormous ramifications is Mia’s choice to mistype Adam’s phone password, deleting his phone data and, with it, any definitive proof of Eugene’s version of events. Unlike with many of her actions, she does not second-guess this one, accepting the mystery she leaves unsolved by refusing to consider its alternatives. Nevertheless, throughout the novel, the emphasis on what else might have happened highlights the idea that outcomes are fragile, based on an intricate combination of action and inaction.
Unbreakable Family Connections
The Parksons are always characterized as a unit, and nuanced family dynamics are central to the narrative. Kim emphasizes the uncanny and potentially magical connections between family members that Mia calls a “mystical familial Bluetooth neuro-network” (329); this bond defines family by constancy in the face of dramatic change or conflict.
As twins, Mia and John have an almost supernatural link: For example, she and John prepare for the park efficiently, in a “triumph of ingrained fraternal coordination” (61). One of the central questions left at the end of the novel is whether they experienced Eugene’s story in advance through a shared family vision, or whether they gave him the idea for a false story:
As my fingers grazed his forehead, I felt a tingling zap, a mild static electricity. Eugene’s legs twitched, and John felt it, too, sat up a little [...] I’d later come to regard it with suspicion, wonder, and everything in between, depending on the day, but at that moment, it felt almost magical—John’s and my hands touching Eugene, the three of us connected skin to skin, bonded into one unit. […] I could see it in my mind—the misty veil of the waterfall, Dad and Eugene at the picnic table at the overlook, red birds in the tree nearby (294).
The visceral sensory details that foreground touch heighten the realism of the moment and contrast with Mia’s later doubts about its veracity. The description of the siblings “skin to skin, bonded into one unit” ties this scene to Mia’s discussion of “jeong, the Korean sense of belonging to a whole” (235) and her sense that she, Hannah, and John form a “collective base at the familial level” (80). The indestructible family unit has a core of “foundational memory” (151), such as Hannah and Adam’s near divorce, Eugene’s fake facilitated communication therapist, or Harmonee’s wartime memories that imply generational trauma.
This unit cohesion is tested by difficult choices related to family loyalty and priorities. When Anjeli’s voicemail makes it seem that she and Adam were having an affair, Mia “would take a pathetic, two-faced, deplorable Alive Dad I could hit and scream at over a noble, funny, lovable Dead Dad a thousand times” (96): Familial love supersedes Mia’s anger at her father’s potential actions. More crucially, Shannon declares that exonerating Eugene must supersede finding out what happened to Adam because the two are probably mutually exclusive: “[A]s unfathomable as it was, as disloyal as I knew it was merely to consider the possibility—what if finding out what happened to Dad and saving Eugene were incompatible?” (201). Prioritizing Eugene’s safety validates Adam’s unconditional love for Eugene, paradoxically preserving familial constancy and connection by cutting ties with one of its members.
