Book Review: Trail of Crumbs (2008)

Each Wednesday, I review a French-related book. The subject varies, from culture to film to memoir to biography to whatever the heck I feel like reading that week and whatever strikes my fancy at the library or bookshop.

Even occasional dabblers of Tibetan Buddhism will be familiar with the story of the hungry ghosts. Dwellers of a particularly nasty form of hell, they’re described as having enormous stomachs but reed-thin necks too small to allow food to pass through and which thus make it excruciating to eat. Buddhist teachings tell us that they represent the futility of seeking fulfillment by indulging in the illusory pleasures of samsara, or the physical, illusory world between birth and death.

I don’t know why this image replayed itself over and over in my mind as I read through Trail of Crumbs, the very sad memoir of Kim Sunee, founding food editor of Cottage Living magazine and a native Korean who was adopted at the age of three and grew up in New Orleans. Perhaps it’s the relentless reminder throughout the book of Sunee’s origins as a hungry orphan and her newfound persona as a seeker of truth, all the while fearful that she will never find it. Sunee, trained as a poet and now a professional wordsmith, does write beautifully. The book showcases her exquisite command of language and her deft use of food as metaphor, not only of her life but of the emotional struggles she underwent as a young and impressionable college graduate tentatively embracing life in France.

Sunee only dimly remembers her earliest memory: that of being abandoned in a crowded Korean market by her mother sometime in 1973. This unknown woman left her with literally just a handful of food, which over the course of three agonizing days is reduced to mere crumbs as Kim waits anxiously on the bench for a mother who will never return, but whose ghost will forever haunt her. Discovered by a policeman and whisked to the station, she’s eventually adopted by a young American couple who had already adopted another infant girl on that same trip but who were apparently enchanted by the solemn three-year-old who kept jumping into their laps.

Sunee grows up in New Orleans with her younger sister Suzy (as well as brother Joshua, later born to her adoptive parents) experiencing many of the same racist-fueled incidents common to many Asian-born children living in the United States, particularly during that tumultuous time when immigration from that continent increased in earnest. In college she makes her way to France, where she turns a semester-long study abroad program into a longer stay, eventually graduating from the University of Nice. She falls in love with a Swedish fellow student and follows him to Stockholm. It’s there in 1993 that she meets the great passion of her life — aside from food — and the man who will dominate her next ten years on the Continent: the boyishly handsome and gregarious Olivier Baussan, founder of the famed French beauty company L’Occitane.

This is where the book really takes off and explores very intimate territory. Sunee doesn’t spare the reader the details of her affair with the married Baussan (he and his wife separated years before and share custody of their eight-year-old daughter Laure) and their idyllic life in Provence, Baussan’s childhood home. Baussan had by then sold L’Occitane to a group of investors and venture capitalists, and although he retained the title of managing director and continued to be involved in company, he apparently had turned his focus to two new passions: his beautiful new “mistress” and a fledgling olive oil project that would later evolve into the phenomenally successful Oliviers & Co. (Sometime in the late 1990′s, a consortium that includes Baussan and the French beauty powerhouse Clarins buy back L’Occitane, now a privately held company.)

Sunee’s account of their love story is both fascinating and painful. She depicts the much older Baussan as being an almost Svengali-like lover who showers the very young and very impressionable Sunee with lavish gifts, trips to exotic destinations, and promises of fidelity and eternal happiness, while at the same time smothering her dreams for herself and her life by controlling nearly every aspect of their life together. Their love is obviously genuine and heartfelt, their attachment to each other overwhelming in its rawness and power. But Sunee’s frail heart — still nursing the bruises of her long-ago abandonment — has a difficult time processing this very strange new world into which she’s been thrust.

Reading the book was much like reading the secret diary of an awkward, self-conscious young woman blossoming in the midst of — or perhaps because of — the cruelest facts of life. The tenderest moments between Kim and Olivier are laid bare in these pages, and at times I felt almost compelled to look away, embarrassed at being an unwitting observer to the most private moments between a man and a woman. The book’s journal-like nature certainly succeeds in drawing the reader into the darkest corners of Sunee’s keen, hypervigilant mind; the amount of detail is stunning, slices of a superficially charmed existence come to life with the evocation of sounds, scents, textures. And her training as a poet certainly works in her favor here, as she weaves a compelling love story using her finely honed expertise in words and language. Her life may seem to consist of a number of accidents and uncertainties, but on the page at least her mind is sure, her grasp of her native tongue firm.

I have a difficult time reading memoirs such as these without thinking of the others involved in the story, particularly those who figure so prominently in them as Baussan does here. Sunee’s mother — whom I presume is still alive — would likely find her adopted daughter’s description of their relationship painful and sharp. Like all mothers and daughters, they share a very complicated relationship, but it’s a different level entirely when you expose its anguish to the entire world (or at least, those who read this book). I also can’t help but wonder about Olivier Baussan, who must have read the manuscript, and how he must feel having his personal life and that of his daughter dissected on the page. Sunee obviously understands the difficulty inherent in writing so exhaustively about such a public figure (he’s apparently one of the most well-known personalities in France), as she informs the reader in an author’s note that some names have been changed and that the timeline has been manipulated somewhat “to protect certain individuals’ privacy.” Furthermore, she ends that same note with the reminder that “this story is as much mine as theirs.”

In the end, none of it matters, of course, as the book is now on shelves around the country and Sunee is currently hard at work promoting it via an extensive national book tour. It’s an interesting read, both prurient in its glimpse of the personal life of a very well-known person and sympathetic in its narration of the all-too-familiar theme of first love and its direst consequences. I came away from it feeling inexplicably frustrated and sad, disturbed by Sunee’s almost self-destructive behavior while also empathizing with her youthful naivete. Readers impatient with the fragility of the human heart and the mistakes we make pursuing its capricious desires may find some of her actions infuriating, especially in the seemingly rushed final chapters as she attempts to heal her broken spirit by attaching herself yet again to another self-absorbed Frenchman, this time a prominent poet with his own demons to wrestle. However, to her credit Sunee doesn’t excuse her actions so much as psychoanalyzes her questionable decisions, obviously still in search of that elusive truth behind her origins and the source of her perpetual spiritual hunger.

I’ve written before about my quest to find a book set in France and written by an expat who can depict a world far removed from the well-traveled streets of Paris and the tiresome stereotype of the Hermes-and-Chanel-clad Parisian socialite. I want more grit and realism, more dark and shadow, more depth and philosophy. Sunee’s book comes closer than most to trampling the romanticized facade of France and showing us a life that — while still filled with some of the images we most closely associate with rural Provence (lavender, olives, country food, le terroir) — plunged into depths not often plumbed by starry-eyed expats. The fact that she’s of Asian stock and comes to France with a rather tenuous grasp to her own adopted country endear her to me even more, as I can relate so well to so much of her recurring feelings of displacement. To Sunee, this book is as much about a search for home as it is about love (hence, the subtitle), and it’s this circuitous pursuit that informs both her life in France as well as her love story with Baussan.

Of course, home and love can never be separated from that which often is wielded as the physical manifestation of both: food. Sunee ends many chapters with a delicious recipe that’s somehow emotionally connected to the stories in the preceding pages. A summer holiday in Corsica, for example, ends with a recipe for Chocolate Cake with Mascarpone-Chestnut Cream, an homage to the incomparable chestnuts that are so abundant on that sun-dappled Mediterranean island. A visit to family in Louisiana concludes with detailed instructions for French-Fry Po-Boy with Horseradish Creme Fraiche. The recipes do indeed sound so appetizing, and I imagine that after having read a few paragraphs about delectable dinners under a Provencal moon or a hearty New Orleans meal surrounded by family and friends, one might indeed be anxious to recreate some of that magic in one’s own kitchen. To me, however, they served only as distractions to the text and may have been better off in a separate Appendix.

Overall, Sunee offers us a very thoughtful, oftentimes sad but ultimately rich story about an unusual life both charmed by chance and stifled by circumstances. There’s a great deal of promise in these pages, introducing her to a readership beyond that of Cottage Living. I would love to see more of her work in the future, hopefully in a novel where she can unleash her gift for language and narration that she clearly displays here. In the meantime, however, I hope she’s found what she’s looking for, the happiness that has eluded her since that moment on a Korean park bench thirty-five years ago.

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