Ahn Love

Visiting her widowed father, Margaret Ahn recalls the summer of ’69 when she experienced both dreamy first love and ugly realities on the family’s weeklong cruise across the Pacific

A dreamy romp, Ahn Love opens with Margaret visiting her widowed father Sam Ahn for his ninetieth birthday. His crippling loneliness – marked by a conviction that if his orchids ever bloom, his wife will come back to life – transports Margaret to the Ahns’ seven-day cruise across the Pacific in the summer of ’69 when she was a lovesick teen nicknamed Monkey, when her beloved if not servile Uncle Bong betrayed the family, and when her beautiful mother’s encounter with a Brazilian playboy ultimately charted her death a decade later.

Like the seas, the journey had its highs and lows. It was magic, tragic, exotic, and erotic – all things new to Margaret, including her romance with the dashing Adam Kang, a young Korean Brit who loved her but hated himself as the two sailed through a whole courtship as if ship years were measured in hours. Indeed, clocked love and lost paradise lay the seeds of Ahn Love.