Park's Quest

Park’s Quest is a 1988 children's novel written by American novelist Katherine Paterson.

Finally, to satisfy his curiosity, Park goes and gets on a bus for the short ride from his home to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC.

After Randy, Park's mom, writes to Park's dad's side of the family, Randy sends him on a bus for a two-week vacation in south-western Virginia where his grandfather and Uncle Frank maintain the farm on which his father grew up.

His uncle has a Vietnamese wife, and shares his home with a Vietnamese girl about Park's age whose origin and status is not clear to Park until he discovers, after a number of uncomfortable encounters, that she is his half-sister, and that because of his father's infidelity, his mother divorced him before his second, and fatal, term in Vietnam.

Park, whose fantasies about his father's past and his own future have been highly romanticized, does some important growing up in the short visit that puts him in touch with a more complex idea of family, grief, forgiveness, and acceptance than he has ever before had to develop.