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‘Our Paths Shall Cross Again’: Novel Connections
The mystery of violence in ‘Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun’ by Jeff Chon
Jeoseung Saja, envoy of the afterlife, appears throughout Jeff Chon’s 2020 novel Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun. Popping up in the lagoon now and then, quite separately — or is it? — is the perennial question of the fictional Holden Caulfield about the missing ducklings in The Catcher in the Rye.
Why do we have recurring, unresolvable questions? Why do some people cite their unanswered questions as they turn to violence? Why do the rest of us have recurring, unresolvable questions about why other people turn to violence?
In Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield asks his cab drivers where the ducks in the Central Park lagoon go in the winter. He gets a response that the fish stay where they are. Not fish, but ducks? “Nothin’s different about it,” the cab driver adds. Perhaps the cab driver’s suggestion is that flying away to a warmer place and returning when able (as ducks do) is equivalent to hibernating without moving (as fish do), since, when you are in the lagoon, it doesn’t matter where you were when you weren’t there. This literary passage has been much-discussed. Do the ducks represent innocence? Volatile emotions? Actual migration to other lands?
The ducks appear in Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun with the reflection that “the young Korean boy who massacred his classmates at Virginia Tech had contemplated his crime at the school duck pond — even purchased thirty-seven rubber ducks on eBay.” Maybe it doesn’t matter to the ducks where they fly. Maybe they’re not migrating because of the weather but are instead avoiding the hunters.
In Chon’s Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun, the history of the main character is revealed slowly. His father is the Rev. Cary Bonneville, a white USAmerican who, together with his wife Wilma, had gone to Korea as a missionary but went off-brand and developed his own end-times cult. In Korea, Bonneville had an affair with a teenager, Soo-mi. In 1981, Soo-mi left her newborn on the Bonnevilles’ doorstep. The couple decided to raise the baby, even though Wilma knew it was her husband’s child by another woman. Three years later, the Bonnevilles left Korea to found another church in Hawaii, and…
