Your House Will Pay

“See, it don’t matter what you do if you’re black in America. You can stay in your neighborhood, on your street, and still, some cop can find you in your own backyard. You can be an unarmed black boy, and someone can just come in and kill you with the full blessing of the law.”

At the memorial for Alfonso Curiel, the pastor summarizes the injustice at the heart of the novel. While racial injustice is a complex issue and the sociopolitical system of the United States is responsible for wronging Black individuals on many levels, the most visible example of this is the lack of punishment for the murder of unarmed Black youth.

“Miriam was right. It was wrong of Grace, selfish of her, to look away when there was so much injustice in the world. It had been too easy for her to feel nothing for Afonso Curiel, to do nothing to honor his death. She had let herself luxuriate in apathy, her world separate from the real world.”

Grace grew up in a sheltered environment and demonstrates how, for those who have the privilege of ignoring injustice, it takes effort to be informed about and active within the spaces where racial injustice is a more direct matter of life and death. Cha frames apathy as easy, luxurious.

“[Miriam] talked about the Valley like Grace had heard some people talk about tiny rural hometowns in Alabama or Ohio—as a place she’d escaped on her way to her true life, some shameful primitive village.”

Miriam cut ties with her parents, and her upbringing, two years ago. She now condescends to Grace by treating her as living in the past (because they share a past). By comparing San Fernando Valley to the Midwest and American South, Miriam borrows the stereotype that California is more culturally and socially advanced and, by extension, suggests that the Valley is less culturally and socially advanced than Los Angeles proper—or at least Grace’s version of it.

“That part of his life had been disjointed, sometimes hellish and always uneasy, the ground never quite safe beneath him. Each release was disorienting, like waking up from a coma, the time he might have had outside beyond recovery. He remembered being jealous of other people’s memories: their quiet days, their friendships, their Christmas dinners.”

Shawn reflects on his time in and out of prison. He describes it as marked by a precarity, where every moment has the potential for loss but is also full of yearning for what he didn’t have: friends, family, and the ability to exist without constant worry. He empathizes with his cousin Ray, whom he knows feels like he has just woken up from a “coma” and will have trouble getting himself oriented again. The mention of a coma also mirrors Yvonne’s experience of waking up from a coma later on.

“For as long as he could remember, Shawn had battled a seasick feeling—one that came and went, but stayed for years at a time—that he was loosely held by the world, that he was one snap away from a total unmooring. If it weren’t for his aunt and uncle, he would have grown up without parents; if it weren’t for his cousin, he would have grown up without a brother. These tightenings and reinforcements had helped him survive.”

Shawn reflects that his life has been marked by uncertainty. He lost his parents as a child and then his sister as a teenager, leaving little to keep him grounded. The only thing that anchored him and gave him a reason to stay focused was the rest of his family: his aunt, uncle, cousins, Ray’s wife, and Ray’s children. The use of “seasick” continues the extended metaphor of a ship that is “unmoored” and adrift.

“The kids knew the family history, but they hadn’t been there when Ava died, when Aunt Sheila learned that she could trade their pain for attention, which at times felt almost like justice while being nothing like it at all. Darryl and Dasha were angry, sure, but their anger was inherited, abstract and bearable. They could indulge it without getting burned.”

Shawn believes Darryl and Dasha have been fooled by the rhetoric of Sheila’s activism. He understands why Sheila fights to keep the attention of the media on the memory of Ava, but he also knows that such attention never brings him a sense of justice—just a repeat of the trauma he already knows. When he thinks about Ava, his need for justice burns so brightly that to indulge in it is potentially dangerous. However, Darryl and Dasha only desire justice secondhand, and so understand Sheila’s urgency without feeling Shawn’s desperation.

“The waiting room was packed, some of the people in it clearly in need of medical attention. Others waited without visible injuries, and she wondered who they were waiting for. A young Latina woman sat with a little boy on her lap. She dozed lightly, but the child was awake, and he gazed at Grace, his wide eyes a watery brown. Were they waiting on a gunshot victim, too? The gangbanging baby daddy? This was racist, she knew. But this chola-looking woman, she was asleep in this terrible place; maybe a night in the ER was no big surprise. All these people, they looked like nothing if not friends of misfortune. What was Grace doing here with them?”

Grace’s life has been so separate from violence that she struggles to comprehend the reality of her situation. She’s never been to a hospital before and assumes that everyone else there, unlike her, belongs there. She stereotypes them as people who live dangerous lives and, unlike her, deserve the consequences of violence. This sentiment, because it is based on feelings of superiority, translates into a racist, stream-of-conscious description of people as “chola-looking” and “gangbanging.”

“Grace felt a new certainty click into place. The interview with the detective, the looks passed between her sister and her father, Grace the monkey in the middle. And before that, for months, for years, the sense of being left out, of missing some crucial thing: her failure to understand the breakdown in her own family. She had imagined none of it. There was something Grace didn’t know, and Miriam had hidden it from her.”

For two years, Grace has known that Miriam has been hiding some secret about their family. Before Yvonne is shot, she has been able to disassociate from the secret and assume it concerned Yvonne and Miriam alone, but now she realizes she is missing something “crucial.” She is missing the key to understanding her family.

“Nothing Jung-Ja Han could ever do would neutralize the shield of her fragile little Asian lady persona. She had the stamp of a victim, someone in need of heroism and protection. This was true when she murdered Ava and sobbed and blubbered when the police arrived. This was true when she sold her story of self-defense, testifying in tearful, shaky English, her dome of a stomach on full display. Unless she murdered a white girl, it would always be true.”

For the most part, Asian women enjoy the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of the law because of stereotypes around Asian women—that they are “fragile,” “meek,” and “soft-spoken.” Black women do not get the same benefit because of stereotypes that paint them as “aggressive,” “angry,” and “rude.” Because Jung-Ja Han fits the stereotype of the fragile Asian woman, she was able to manipulate the legal system to play victim—even though she was the shooter—while painting Ava as the attacker. Shawn believes that despite these stereotypes, the law is designed to protect white women above all.

“You know what happens to a girl like Ava, people start thinking she was a bad girl? She gets tossed in with the rest of them. The pile of black girls no one’s ever heard of. It is a mass grave, Shawn. Baby, we don’t even know their names, ‘cause no one’s talking about them or writing about them for any of us to hear.”

Shawn accuses Jules Searcey of flattening Ava into a symbol—the perfect victim, innocent and full of potential. But when he says he prefers to think of Ava as she was, flawed, Sheila tells him that Ava does not have the privilege to be remembered as she was. She can either be forgotten or remembered as a good girl, due to stereotypes around Black women.

“The shooting was everywhere, the only thing that came up when she searched her mother’s name. As far as most people were concerned, it was the only thing that defined her. This single act, the pull of a trigger, one moment eclipsing every other.”

Just as Shawn is frustrated by the simplistic manner in which Ava is remembered, Grace becomes frustrated by the press only framing her mother as the person who killed Ava. She is frustrated because people are more than any single act, and Yvonne was a good mother despite anything else she did. However, Grace also wants to compartmentalize her mother, to partition away the part that killed Ava so she can continue to defend and love the one who raised her.

“Made it harder to imagine him getting in trouble. And that’s what it came down to, in a way—people were lazy, they reached for the first thing that came to mind and held on to it like it was true. These cops were white boys: healthy, clean-cut, beef-eating kids in starched uniforms who’d been taught to fear black boys with tattoos and baggy pants. They were the same kids who quoted Samuel L. Jackson and thought they’d like to have Morgan Freeman for an uncle.”

Shawn diagnoses the racism of white cops toward Black people as a crisis in imagination. White cops might not consider themselves racist because they have an idea of Black people whom they like—represented by Samuel L. Jackson or Morgan Freeman, a narrow category of Blackness that they consider appropriate. If a Black individual exists outside of this category, these white cops might automatically recategorize them as one of those “black boys with tattoos and baggy pants” whom they have been taught to fear. This mindset lacks nuance.

“My sister was murdered, Detective. I was angry about it twenty-eight years ago, I was angry about it last Friday, and I’m angry about it today. You wasted your time coming out here. Any fool could’ve told you I was angry. If you’d just called ahead I would’ve told you myself. I know that’s all you got ‘cause that’s all there is to get.”

Detective Neil Maxwell thinks he has trapped Shawn into confessing his involvement in the shooting of Yvonne, but Shawn simply acknowledges his anger over the death of his sister. Shawn knows his anger proves nothing, that it would be ridiculous if he wasn’t angry, but is also conscious of not making his emotions an easy target for people like the detective.

“That was before, when she was just the second-generation daughter of two quiet, hardworking Korean immigrants who went to church, ran a store, and raised a family, their lives as contained as a tended garden. Now she knew—they’d built their house on sand, and the rain had come down and the waters risen, the cold swallow of the real world.”

The comparison of “sand” to community invokes a famous quote by the mother of Edward Lee, the Korean boy who was killed during the Los Angeles uprising and inspired the documentaries Sa-I-Gu (1993) and Wet Sand (2005) by filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. In Wet Sand, Lee’s mother compares the drying of wet sand to the dissolution of a community. Grace describes her life in the Valley as built on this idea of false unity—wet sand. But instead of the sand drying because her community has fallen apart, the sand is drowned by too much of it.

“You don’t want to think Mom’s a bad person, but to think otherwise, you have to contort yourself to justify a murder—and if you bend too much that way, you’ll become a different person. A worse person.”

Miriam tells Grace that she wants to defend their mother, but knows defending loved ones who do terrible things ends up doing even more damage: “their evil makes you evil” (145). The way Miriam explains it, defending Yvonne could, in essence, change who Grace is as a person.

“She’d started with a public defender, but by the time the case went to trial, she’d hired a silver-tongued black lawyer, who painted her as party to the tragedy. He was a smart man and a fervent speaker, but Grace knew that wasn’t why her mother hired him. She paid him to stand in court, his black body forgiving her on behalf of his community.”

Like her real-life counterpart, Jung-Ja Han hires a Black lawyer to defend her in 1991 (paid for by the same Korean church). Grace believes the lawyer’s race is no accident. In addition to using Jung-Ja Han’s meekness to paint her as a victim, the Black lawyer performs the act of forgiveness on behalf of Black people, thus allowing the jury and judge to lighten the burden of her guilt.

“It was strange being back home. The tidy, quiet house now felt like a haunted place, a place of secret violence. Grace couldn’t help thinking the house itself had betrayed her, in league with the rest of them, masquerading all her life as a normal house and not the house of a murderer.”

Grace grew up not knowing her mother committed murder. She associates her childhood, and all her knowledge of her family, with the only house she’s ever lived in. Returning to it, it does not seem the same, because she now knows that her childhood was marked by secrets: their real surname and her mother’s crime. Grace frames this feeling as a “haunting” because the repressed darkness of the past has now touched the surface of their lives again.

“Of course that’s what she was after. The same thing that Searcey was after, more or less, and every nonblack person who found out who he was, and what had happened to him, and looked longingly his way. Ava wasn’t there to receive their goodness, so they poured it, sloshing, wherever they could.”

Whenever someone learns who Shawn’s sister is, he becomes the object of their pity. This happens when Shawn’s well-intentioned boss Manny learns about Ava. Shawn resents this pity because he recognizes it as something people do for themselves. They feel the need to pay for the tragedy with their kindness like they are paying back a debt, and Shawn feels like he is forced to accept this kindness on Ava’s behalf.

“The LAPD chose our story. They called a big press conference. Made speeches about justice. They promised to get your mother charged with first-degree murder. Do you think they did that every time a black teenager was killed?”

Paul explains to Grace why he doesn’t trust the police. In the past, the LAPD were under pressure because the Rodney King video was being played on the news every day. When Jung-Ja Han murdered Ava Matthews, the LAPD saw an opportunity to create a new “villain” besides themselves (229). The cops promoted the case, promising justice and painting a target on the back of every Korean shop owner in South Los Angeles. Then, after April 29, 1992, the police did not come to protect the people whom they vilified.

“He looked at Quant, this man who oozed confidence and aggression, tattoos gleaming on every inch of his thick, brawny arms. Shawn remembered Uncle Richard—quietly kind, careful with his words, measured in his emotions. The only father Shawn had ever known, but how little he’d admired him, after Ava died. He found other men to look up to, men who wanted to leave their mark on the world, whatever that mark might look like. So why did it surprise him that Darryl would look at Shawn and turn elsewhere?”

Shawn reflects on his Uncle Richard, who was a good father figure to him in a similar way that Shawn is a good father figure to Darryl. However, Shawn did not look up to his Uncle Richard because he was too kind and mild-mannered to reflect Shawn’s desire to make his “mark on the world.” In hindsight, he should have expected Darryl to look at him the same way and desire role models elsewhere. This reflection comments on the way ideals of masculinity can change as one matures.

“Grace had always believed, without really thinking, that the world was fair and reasonable. There were systems and structures to keep society alive and safely regulated, and it didn’t make sense for her to mistrust them when she understood them so little in the first place.”

Grace does not know much about the legal system. Like most people who have no interest in politics, she assumes that, because she does not know how various systems work, they must be functionally fair. Grace has had the privilege to ignore this lesson until now.

“What I believe won’t keep you out of prison. Haven’t you noticed? I don’t run the police. Judges don’t listen to me. If they think black lives don’t matter, then black lives don’t matter. People can fuss all they want about how things should be, but I’m talking about your neck, you stupid child.”

Shawn admires but is wary of his aunt’s activism because he is cynical about the possibility of real change. He differentiates between Modes of Activism and believes that there is a wide gulf between well-meaning, idealistic messages—such as “Black Lives Matter”—and the principles which guide the way the world works. Shawn is practical. He is reactive rather than proactive in his thinking toward authority. Thus, he assumes the worst in order to protect Darryl, and does not begin to question his outlook until the final moments of the novel.

“He felt the anger spark in his own chest, the anger that had lodged in him when he was thirteen, a permanent, unruly companion that filled the hole in his life torn out by his sister’s killer. Over the years he’d fed and loved it, then tamed and silenced it. He gave up the easy outlets of his youth, those days of open hostility, on the outside of civil society. He’d done it because he was tired, and because he’d been taught, despite it all, to expect rewards for hard work and good, clean living. And it was true, too, that he’d reaped them, at least for a little while. A steady job, a stable home, a loving, beloved family, safe from trouble. Well, he didn’t have that anymore, and the anger was still there, had been there all along, Shawn never once able or even wanting to let it go.”

Life in the United States often relies on people buying into myths regarding hard work. For instance, a poor person can supposedly become rich if they work toward their dream. Shawn has lived his life following a similar myth—that if he makes the right choices and doesn’t end up in prison again, he will be rewarded with a life worth sacrificing for. But life is more complicated than this, and without a myth to buy into, he is uncertain if he will be able to control his anger anymore.