Your House Will Pay

Grace Park is a 27-year-old Korean American woman who lives with her parents in the San Fernando Valley. She is the younger, more loyal daughter of the family who followed the desires of her parents to pursue a degree in pharmacy and take over the family business. While she does not share her parents’ first-generation American commitment to hard work and sacrifice, she has never rebelled against her strict upbringing. Grace was raised in the Korean church, stays beholden to her parents’ rules, and has little experience of the world outside of the one she knew growing up. Even her bedroom still looks the same as it did when she was in high school, suggesting that Grace’s worldview never developed beyond this period. At the start of Your House Will Pay, she does not understand why she would ever move away from home, where her rent is free, and her mother does her laundry and cooks her meals. She also does not understand why her sister Miriam will not reconcile with their mother.

Grace was born after the events of 1991-1992, after her parents lost their convenience store in South Los Angeles and moved to Granada Hills. While she would have been too young to remember this time—like her older sister, Miriam—this clean break from her parents’ previous life is also a figurative divide.