A Tender Age

An adult Korean American man named Jeon-Gi, who goes by J.-G., reflects on the period that shaped him most: the near-year leading up to his 11th birthday in the summer of 1976. He frames the story through the family dog, Pu-chu, whose permanent anxiety traces back to a child who secretly tormented the dog as a puppy. The animal's conditioned dread becomes a lens for the narrator's own formative traumas.

J.-G.'s family are recent Korean immigrants living in Cove Gardens, a sprawling apartment complex in a working-class town north of New York City. His father works as a physiotherapist at a Bronx VA hospital; his mother, isolated and barely able to speak English, is fiercely devoted to her children. J.-G. and his younger sister Ella grow up among a diverse, unsupervised group of children who play rough games with no adults in sight. He idolizes Cleon Washington, the complex's universally admired alpha. The family also attends a Korean Presbyterian church in Flushing, Queens, led by Reverend Hahm, though friendships there remain fleeting.

J.-G.'s first tormentor is Katie Croker, an aggressive older girl who catches him urinating in the laurel bushes and forces him to continue while she watches, initiating a recurring ritual of humiliation. The cruelty escalates when Katie drags him beneath his family's kitchen window and, threatening to tell his father fabricated stories, forces him to shout obscenities up at his mother. His mother's expression shifts from expectation to silent hurt before she shuts the window. Mother and son keep a painful distance afterward; she never speaks of it. Katie eventually moves away, and the rift slowly heals.

A conflict with Joshua Messing, a sharp friend in the neighborhood gang, turns racial when Joshua calls J.-G. "Chinky Chow" during a basketball game. J.-G. retaliates with an antisemitic slur he does not understand but instinctively recognizes as devastating. A more menacing threat emerges in Tommy Reilly, an isolated boy who targets J.-G. with a slingshot and metal throwing stars. Terrified, J.-G. takes his mother's carving knife and hides it in his school bag. The next day, Tommy arrives at school escorted by his parents and a plainclothes officer, having been reported for threatening other children. Stripped of his revenge fantasy, J.-G. turns to leave, but Joshua confronts and punches him. J.-G. snaps, leaping at Joshua with the knife and screaming threats. Joshua is physically unharmed but deeply traumatized, withdrawing from school and the playground. J.-G. is immediately suspended.

J.-G.'s parents are devastated, but he refuses to explain his motivations or disclose anything about Tommy Reilly. At a Family Court hearing, the judge privately tells him not to think himself "so great." The Messings support probation and therapeutic care. During weeks of psychological assessments, J.-G. learns to perform for his evaluators, discovering the power of being indecipherable. Due to a clerical error, he is placed in a program meant for older juvenile offenders and taken to a decommissioned prison, where inmates sexually menace the teenagers in his group. The experience deepens his sense of kinship with those who operate outside moral norms.

J.-G.'s parents send him to Camp Charminster, a two-week Korean church camp in Dutchess County. Between planning sessions, J.-G. pieces together from overheard conversations that his mother underwent an elective procedure, implied to be an abortion, driven partly by the stress of their lives and his own troubles. At camp, he meets his cabin counselor, Ben Frost, a tall, gentle Bible college student from Vermont whom he immediately idolizes. His Antler cabin includes Mickey, a protective older boy; Recipe, an antic comedian; and several others who become close companions.

On the first day, J.-G. is captivated by Susan Sun, a quick-witted girl from Staten Island with extraordinary speed. He also encounters Dickens Rho, a broad-shouldered boy from the rival cabin. After the relay races, Dickens kicks J.-G. hard in the chest at a well pump, then bewilderingly helps him up, compliments his running, and shakes his hand. J.-G. tells no one. At the first bonfire, Susan reveals that his name means "electricity" in Korean and confirms she witnessed Dickens kick him. They form a pact against Dickens, who bullied other kids the previous summer.

J.-G. settles into camp but develops a compulsive habit of telling small lies, testing how readily his new friends trust him. The only people he never deceives are Ben Frost and Susan. Dickens earns public praise for turning in found money while privately targeting campers with calculated cruelty. J.-G. kills a turtle by forcing it into a too-small jar for a terrarium he and Susan are building, then finds Susan playing with Dickens in the lake, her cheeks flushed. Hurt, he leaves the dead turtle as a notice of his wounded fidelity.

The final days center on a campout at remote Trench Lake. Recipe confides his feelings for a fellow camper named Minha, and he and J.-G. share tender promises to visit after camp. Ben Frost reveals that his father died at 38, and J.-G. fantasizes about joining his family. When Dickens rides the camp's Tarzan rope swing with effortless grace and earns Ben Frost's handshake, J.-G. is speared with envy. Dickens tells Susan she would be "really pretty" with long hair, a compliment nested inside an insult that devastates her. J.-G. begins fantasizing about engineering an accident.

On the final campout night, J.-G. comes upon a utility hut during a rainstorm and sees Dickens pushing up Susan's shirt. Susan stands stiffly but faces him, unafraid. J.-G. is shattered. At predawn, he walks into the lake alone, swims to its deepest point, and lets himself sink. His legs save him involuntarily. During the rain-soaked hike back to Charminster, his damaged boot causes excruciating pain. Susan helps him walk, but when they rest, he offers, in a disturbing echo of his encounters with Katie Croker, to urinate on her legs to clean them. She recoils and hurries away.

At the top of the falls, now swollen and dangerous, J.-G. launches himself through an opening in the crowd toward the precipice where Dickens stands. In a moment described with deliberate ambiguity, he has "no thought," and then Dickens is in the rushing stream. Ben Frost jumps in and grabs the boy but loses his footing. Together, they go over the 25-foot falls.

Both survive. Dickens has a broken shoulder and arm. Ben Frost, who shielded Dickens with his body, is in much graver condition. A camper tells her counselor she saw J.-G. knock Dickens into the water. The police rule it an accident, but J.-G. will not explain. Reverend Hahm tells the narrator's parents to ask their son what really happened. They never do.

In the aftermath, J.-G. sleeps in his parents' bed for many nights and slowly reintegrates into ordinary life. The family contributes to a collection for Ben Frost's surgeries, but their church attendance eventually stops. The narrator reveals scattered future details: Ella becomes a renowned geneticist; Susan appears at his college dorm years later in a distressed state and is never seen again. His mother, near death, asks if he can forgive them, for everything. He tells her he has no idea what she means, and it breaks his heart. He has never returned to any of the old places except once visiting the family's former Korean Presbyterian church in Flushing, now occupied by a Chinese congregation, where he wades into the colorful crowd streaming from the service.