about last week.

this minion perfectly illustrates my mood as it is now, as it was last week, as it has been the last few weeks.

last week was a [insert-adjective-here] week, what with the republican zombie healthcare bill that just won't die (or has it finally?!? i'm not holding my breath) and what with the cheeto vomiting more crap on twitter, this time about banning trans people from serving in the military, never mind that trans people display more courage in their day-to-day than the cheeto has shown in the entirety of his life — and never mind that trans people are apparently such terrifyingly formidable people that they should be barred from public bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

last week was also a low week personally, and it continues to be a series of low weeks as my insomnia continues to take its toll. my mood has been low, my dreams/nightmares/whatevers gone haywire, and i'm tired, tired, tired.

i wish i could sleep for days and wake up well-rested for once.

i can't seem to get that, though, so here, let's talk nice things.

when i think about nice things, i think automatically about food, so here is this: republique makes my favorite breakfast in all the land.

if you’re ever in los angeles, go to republique and order the regular breakfast with soft scrambled eggs (because they can actually soft scramble eggs), an iced dirty matcha latte (it’s better iced than hot), and a chewy chocolate-chocolate chip cookie (it has nuts, though, so nix this if you’re allergic). add a slice of tres leeches cake if you’re feeling indulgent (it’s not too sweet, don’t worry) and/or a hand pie if you’re starving and need something to tide you over while you wait for your food (they’ll heat the hand pie up for you; ask for sri racha).

come back and thank me for the bombass recommendation.


i spend a lot of time on twitter during the week, and i have no shame admitting that it’s my major news source, like, in that, it’s the source that alerts me to the fresh new hells being launched on the world — that, and the new yorker, which i also read religiously during the week. 

there was a nice thread on twitter last week, talking about work and creating art and why that matters today. it talked specifically about why writing books matters, books about made-up worlds and made-up people, books that don’t make overt political statements and/or take moral stances, and i understand that struggle, that conflict, that desire to create something of meaning, except what does that look like? what does it mean to create something that means something?

the twitterer (whom i unfortunately do not remember) made the point that it’s not about being an activist or about taking political stances or about delivering moral messages. it’s about the fact that the work itself is hope; whether we write fiction or memoirs or treatises, doing the work itself, the act of creating itself, is an example of a way to be. the work in its own, the act of doing the work, is to demonstrate a way to fight back.

and, so, we work, and we create, and that looks different to each person. i take photos of light and shadows, of minions from mcdonald’s happy meals, of everything i eat. i read. i write on this site, and i edit my short story collection, and i rewrite that essay on living with depression and suicide and falling in love last year. i take ages to reply to DMs on instagram, and i give up on ever catching up on comments, and i apologize for that, but that’s just the way things are.

i think about buying an actual camera, like a DSLR, instead of just using the camera on my iphone 7. i think of new projects, earmark restaurants to try, envision future collaborations and chart amorphous ways to making those ideas a reality.

i try.


i also spend a stupid amount of time during the week tracking my lunch deliveries. it’s kind of creepy, the fact that i can do this at all, stare at my browser and watch the little icon that signifies my drivers moving along the map. it gets funny when they near the office, the rounds they sometimes make around the block, and i’m just like, i put a note on there, saying you can call or text me, and i’ll come down to the street. parking’s an ass in LA. LA’s an ass of a city for deliveries, too sprawled out to allow for efficiency.

LA’s an ugly, weird city, and, yeah, it’s got its charms, but i feel the frustrations when i’m trying to get from point A to point B, for example when i’m trying to get from koreatown to west hollywood for a reading. i think, god, this place is hideous, and, ugh, it’s like someone just vomited flat ugliness onto hot land, and i think, okay, fine, maybe i shouldn’t be so uncharitable — LA’s not that bad, and it gets great light. you can’t deny the fabulous, kind of magical qualities of california light, but see how i can't even give LA that? i have to generalize to all of california to make any praiseworthy statement possible, though i don't mean to impart hostility here — it amuses me, this mess of a relationship i have with this place.

sometimes, i wonder if i've simply become so accustomed to hating on LA that it comes so naturally to me. other times, though, especially when i'm landing at LAX and looking down at the sprawl below me, i think, nah, it kinda deserves it.

and maybe part of me feels entitled to this, kind of like how i also feel entitled to hate on NYC for all its ills. in some way, LA is also my city after all, and it bears the baggage of my history and trauma, and i feel unbridled in expressing my distaste of this place because i’ve lived so much of my life here and it is a part of me.

in some way, this is my way of claiming this place as my own.

all i’ve been craving these days is something cold and sweet, and that’s all kinds of terrible when you’re type 2 like i am. i feel like i spend an incongruous amount of time making bargains with myself — like, okay, i can eat three pieces of watermelon, but only three. or, okay, i can eat some ice cream if i walk there and back. or, okay, yeah, i know this is all bullshit, i should just be abstaining, should be more afraid of the consequences of not eating well, of not getting my glucose levels down lower, of not taking care of myself because self-care, blah blah blah, i want something cold and sweet.

it doesn't help that i've finally tried jeni's and am obsessed. jeni's delivers everything i want in ice cream — it's creamy and not too sweet, and it tastes like the ingredients it uses, instead of like processed, sugary crap. like, the mango buttermilk frozen yogurt tastes like a creamy, frozen, pureed mango (i. love. mango), and the roasted strawberry buttermilk is one of the best ice creams i've eaten, and the brambleberry crisp is like pie in ice cream form, complete with crumble topping — and, omg, i can't get enough of jeni's. i went again on sunday, and i'm going again this weekend.

i know, i know, self-care, blah blah blah, but four and twenty blackbirds is also in town this weekend, and they're going to be at jeni's, and one of my favoritest people is back stateside, so pie and ice cream, there will be. i'll make up for it by eating cleaner meals.


in 45 days, i'll be back home in brooklyn.

here's some big, exciting news: jenny zhang’s sour heart comes out into the world today!!! go hie yourself to a bookstore and dive into this wonderful collection!


cue storytime?

i grew up reading exclusively (and i mean, exclusively) from “the classics,” aka the white canon, aka mostly dead white guys. i mean, sure, there were a few dead white women thrown into the mix, too, but they were mostly men, and i didn’t read contemporary fiction until i was well into college. the closest i got before then was in the twelfth grade, when my AP lit teacher (still one of my favorite teachers) spent the year having us read existentialists and absurdists.

one day, several years ago, i was browsing the internet for one reason or another when i came across a blog called fashion for writers. at the time, it was written by jenny zhang, but it had been founded by esmé weijun wang (whose debut novel, the border of paradise, was published last year and is incredible), and there were links to their respective websites, links i followed to obsession, basically. i read esmé’s site religiously, and i mildly stalked jenny in new york, going to all her readings and totally having mini-omg! moments when i passed her twice — once, in powerhouse arena (in its former space) on my way to the bathroom and, once, on my way into mcnally jackson to pick up my preordered copy of the border of paradise.

it was so weird and so cool to read their writing, and you have to remember that i was this asian-american kid who'd always loved literature and loved writing but had never stopped to think that writing was this thing that i could do. i had no freaking idea that you could get paid to write, that people were doing this all the time, and, no, i wasn't stupid — i knew that people wrote for a living — i didn't think people like me did. you know. asian-american kids. asian-american daughters.

because, as far as i knew, in the world in which i grew up, we didn't write — we went to med school or law school or business school. we got married to nice [christian] asian-american boys. we had kids and stayed home and home-schooled.

we didn't write, and, more than that, we didn't write about mental health or bodies or the grimy, sticky areas of life. we didn't write about ourselves, our asian-american backgrounds, our experiences with sexism and racism and bigotry. we didn't write about sex or death or violence. we didn't do these things; we didn't put words on or give voice to anything that ran counter to the accepted status quo.

one of the things i have come to love the most is coming across a writer who makes me imagine different ways of writing, of being. jenny and esmé's writing introduced me to that, to new ways of thinking about myself, my asian-american identity, my own writing, and it's been an incredible experience since, seeing how all you really need is a spark to shed new light on the world and make it open up. i think about the women i've come to read and love in the last few years and have helped shape me as a writer — alice sola kim, patty yumi cottrell, nicole chung, rachel khong, krys lee, susan choi, celeste ng, women who do different things with their writing, who tell stories that illuminate different facets of the human experience and bring a rich vibrance to the world of books.

and i think about women in general, women whom i admire who live their truths and excel at their craft — barbara lynch, kristen kish, gabrielle hamilton, ellen bennett — omg, help me name someone who's not related to food — molly young, molly yeh, julia turshen — i suppose it's unavoidable; i love food; what can i say?

and all this loops back to what that twitterer said in that thread last week and what sherman alexie said to buzzfeed and what i wrote at the end of my hunger post — that what matters is that we are out here, that we are trying and creating and working. sometimes, most times, i dare say, at least on the everyday, day-to-day level, it's not about activism, and it's not about overt politicism. sometimes, it's just about telling our own truths, whatever those truths are, and all fiction — all good fiction, all good art — stems from the writer's truth.

and maybe that's how we effect change, not [solely] by converting those who stand against us but by bolstering and supporting those like us, by living alternate ways to be, to see the world, to write and tell stories and exist. i think we kind of undermine the amount of hope and encouragement that alone provides because it never feels like bravery or courage or like anything significant, just getting through the day and doing the work given to us, but it means something — at least, it means a whole lot to me, to be able to look up and see women who are doing the work simply by doing their work, whether it's writing, cooking, bookkeeping, raising children, teaching, whatever it is, women who are out there, living their truths and trying to bring about a better, more equal world.

and, so, i'll repeat what i said before because this is something i'll keep repeating, over and over and over again: stay.

we're out here, and we're women of color, and we're straight and queer and religious and not religious and able-bodied and disabled and you name it, we are it, and we write and cook and live, so stay. stay curious, stay open-minded, stay alive.

stay.

i ate at bestia last week. :3

it was delicious and amazing and everything i hoped it would be.

i want to eat there again.


here’s a summer reading list, given in no particular order, if you’re looking for something good to read in these last few weeks of summer:

  1. jenny zhang, sour heart (random house, 2017)
  2. rachel khong, goodbye, vitamin (holt, 2017)
  3. patty yumi cottrell, sorry to disrupt the peace (mcsweeney’s, 2017)
  4. celeste ng, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014)
  5. yoojin grace wuertz, everything belongs to us (random house, 2017)
  6. esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016)
  7. ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin books, 2013)
  8. alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harper, 2015)
  9. julie otsuka, when the emperor was divine (knopf, 2002)
  10. jung yun, shelter (picador, 2016)
  11. susan choi, my education (viking, 2013)

2017 international women's day.

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  1. yiyun li, dear friend from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017)
  2. julie otsuka, the buddha in the attic (anchor books, 2012)
  3. annabelle kim, tiger pelt (leaf-land press, 2016)
  4. rachel khong, goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, forthcoming, 2017)
  5. catherine chung, forgotten country (riverhead, 2012)
  6. susan choi, the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004)
  7. min-jin lee, pachinko (grand central publishing, 2017)
  8. esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016)
  9. ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
  10. krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016)
  11. celeste ng, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014)
  12. jung yun, shelter (picador, 2016)
  13. padma lakshmi, love, loss, and what we ate (ecco, 2016)
  14. alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harper, 2015)
  15. shawna yang ryan, green island (knopf, 2016)

it’s international women’s day, so here’s a stack that i am so fucking jazzed i can even make: i have no substantial data to back this up, but i do feel like, in the last few years, we've seen a greater rise of asian[-american] writers being published. who knows, though; maybe i've only noticed this because i've become much more intentional about who i'm reading in recent years, so maybe it’s more correct for me to say that i’m jazzed that i have a collection of books that allows me to curate such a fine stack.

(is that too self-congratulatory? but i do generally stand by my taste.)

it's international women's day, and you might be saying that this stack is so narrow in scope as to miss the point. however, i wanted to make a stack of asian-american women, so here is a stack of women writers who are either immigrants or the daughters of immigrants because the point i wanted to make is simple and universal: that we, under whichever broad ethnic umbrella people want to place and stereotype us, come from a myriad of different backgrounds, carrying so many different struggles and concerns and fears, and one of the things we, as immigrants and immigrant children, bring to this country are our stories.

to be asian-american, to be anything-american, is not to be one collective person from one collective culture. it is to be a myriad of people, to contain multitudes of women, and i wanted to create a stack that would reflect this, the international backgrounds we come from that influence, in so many different ways, the stories we are compelled to tell.

in a political climate under a toxic administration that is feeding and fostering hate against non-white, non-christian, non-straight immigrants, this is what i wanted to celebrate today — that this is a country that has welcomed people from so many places, and this, this stack here is a result of that. i want to point at this stack and say, look, look at this wealth. look at the worlds these pages contain. look at the humanity these books expose. look.

so, here is to us, all of us women, regardless of ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or the physical bodies we were born into. here is to the countries, the cultures, the peoples we come from. here is to the women we come from, women who have sacrificed much so we can be the women we are, women who have shown us strength and love and dedication. here is to the women who have failed us, to the women we will fail, to the women who are broken and fucked up and damaged because they are women, and to be a woman is to be human.

and here is to us. here is to the women we are and the women we are becoming and the women we will be. may we be strong and continue to tell our stories and refuse to be silenced.

korean/korean-american literature i recommend!

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when i say “korean/korean-american literature,” i don’t mean literature written by koreans/korean-americans strictly about koreans/korean-americans or about the korean/korean-american experience.  one of the things about life (and art) is that we aren’t restricted to “what we know,” that we are more than our ethnic or lingual identities, and this has been the really cool part of reading more from korean/korean-americans (“kor-/kor-am” from hereon out), that we write across a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of styles and voices and perspectives.

that might sound like an obvious thing, but [mainstream] publishing is not one that has been friendly to diversity — and, taking it further, to diversity within diversity.  it’s still the case that certain narratives are desired, that certain expectations and burdens are placed upon the shoulders of writers of color, that we’re expected to play within these lines and deliver stories that fit within the narratives shoved onto us, oftentimes immigrant narratives, narratives of hardship and racism and prejudice.

* also, if you haven’t read this fabulous essay by jenny zhang, you should.

it’s fun to see what writers of color are doing, the stories they’re telling, their obsessions and interests, the weird things that make them tick.  it’s also a relief to find a general understanding of intersectionality amongst writers of color, that we are not one thing but many things, that we are not only people of color but that we are also, i.e., queer people of color, that we are the sum of our parts.  it’s also fun to see how we don’t restrict ourselves only to narratives that involve “our experience;” like, i love that alexander chee wrote a massive novel about a french opera singer in the nineteenth-century.  all these things might sound like nothing but aren’t.

it’s also fun to see what’s making it into english translation from korea.  i’m thrilled that the korean government is finally investing in its literature and actively trying to get more korean literature into translation and to make it more visible throughout the world.  i was also so, so happy that the vegetarian recently won the man booker international prize, not only because it was written by a korean woman but also because it’s this weird, dark, korean novel that i’m also impressed and thrilled has picked up a lot of attention, even before the man booker win, in the book community.

and, so, here’s some book talk.

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mise en place is french for “everything in its place,” and i fully blame top chef for my current obsession with it.  (and for my current obsession with baking asian sponge cakes, no electric mixer involved.)

a big part of it is my love and appreciation for the aesthetics of order; there’s something so visually satisfying about having “everything in its place.”  another part is that it makes cooking a lot easier once everything has been chopped, measured, separated because all the mechanical labor is out of the way.  what any of this has to do with kor/kor-am literature is anyone’s guess.


i do sometimes question my strong interest in kor/kor-am literature (i think it’s worth examining our obsessions and gravitations from time-to-time).  i acknowledge that a significant part of it is informed by the fact that i am korean-american, that i am bilingual and bicultural, that i am consequently very interested in the gap and disconnect that often occurs between my korean and american sides.  naturally, i turn to literature to see how we, as this tangle of thinly-related groups, wrestle with and negotiate identity, and i’m interested in exploring that tension, seeing how others struggle with it, the various results of that struggle.

that, partly, is why i started making more deliberate attempts to read from kor/kor-am authors, though, to be honest, another incentive was guilt.  i’d always followed korean pop and cinema and television (and still do), but, a few years ago, i knew almost nothing about korean literature, which would give me twinges of shame because i have always loved books and yet had nothing to say when it came to korean literature because of my own ignorance.  once i started reading, though, from both korean and korean-american authors, i fell in love, enchanted by how richly and differently these authors saw the world and expressed themselves, and it’s what’s brought me here and keeps me diving deeper and wanting more and wanting to put these incredible books out there into the world as much as i can.

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i might live and breathe books, but i also think a lot about food.

it’s a mystery to my family where my love for food comes from, and they find it simultaneously amusing and distressing that i love it so and think about it constantly, what i want to eat for my next meal, what i want to cook, what i want to try baking.  (right now, i’m playing with the idea of breaking down a whole chicken, brining and searing the breasts, freezing the wings, frying the legs, and roasting the carcass to make broth.  i’ve roasted whole chickens before, but i haven’t broken one down yet, and i find the prospect so exciting, especially when the result is homemade broth.)

food is the thing i loved most about han kang’s the vegetarian — that all that unravelling begins to exhibit in yeong-hye’s sudden refusal to eat animals.  while meat isn’t a huge part of korean cuisine, korean food is not one i’ve necessarily thought of as vegetarian-friendly, despite people (usually not korean) trying to herald it as such; we use anchovy broth for our stews, beef broth for our soups, shrimp paste in our kimchi; and i don’t mean this to say that korean food can’t be made vegetarian, simply that, in its current form best known to me, it is not one that is inherently accessible to vegetarians, at least not in the ways people seem to assume.

which is a total tangent because the vegetarian is not a novel about vegetarianism — or even, food.  instead, han uses korean food culture to get to issues in korean culture overall, whether it be the patriarchy, conformity, the unit over the individual, and this is what i love so much about food culture in general, how much it absorbs so much of culture and reflects it back or subverts it and makes it into something else.

in this case, though, it’s the former, and han delivers a wallop of a criticism against patriarchal korean society.  (i should probably say i’m focusing mostly on the first part of the novel.)  not only is it narrated by yeong-hye’s husband (except for dream segments), thus placing her in position to someone else, but the fall-out from yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is defined entirely in how it affects the men in her life, specifically her husband and her father.

her husband is angry because his wife is no longer performing her wifely duties by preparing him meals with meat and declining to have sex, and he’s shamed because her vegetarianism (really, veganism) sets her apart from everyone else.  when he takes her to dinner with his boss and coworkers and their wives, yeong-hye refuses to eat meat and sits there, silent and not eating, marking herself as willfully different and outside social norms as she refuses to bend even to social etiquette and social niceties.  that isolates her husband as well because his wife isn’t like other wives, which means that he’s also no longer welcome, because social norms and etiquette and niceties are the glue that holds korean society together.  it’s a conformist world, one driven by trends and sameness, the group over the individual, and yeong-hye’s refusal to participate in food culture places her outside that world.

her father is enraged, too, because he’s the patriarchal head of the family and should be obeyed.  if he tells his daughter to eat meat, she should eat meat, and he shouldn’t be shamed by the actions of a contrary daughter.  her failures to perform her wifely duties shame him as well; the best thing a daughter can be is a good wife; so yeong-hye is an embarrassment, ungrateful and rude — yeong-hye’s rejection of the oysters and food and black goat her family offers her is gravely rude and offensive; in korea, when someone senior to you offers you something, you take it, no questions asked.


it’s funny because what i love so much about korean food culture is everything that maybe runs against korean culture.  i love how the 밥상 can often represent a safe space for strangers and outsiders, for people to find refuge and forge and solidify new connections, to create family where blood does not flow.  i love the emotional significance of being invited to someone’s 밥상, of being given a place of your own, a rice bowl of your own, an invitation to share a meal (and very literally share a meal — korean food is communal, doesn’t come neatly plated) — and maybe this sounds romanticized and idealized, but, as someone who has taken part of this very culture, who has shared 밥상s with people and created them for people, it’s a very real, very precious thing to me.

that’s likely why the first part of the vegetarian had the strongest impact on me (and why it’s the only part i’m really discussing here).  like i said, han uses korean food culture to point at ugly aspects of korean culture overall, namely the intense patriarchy, the casual acceptance of violence, the extent to which any kind of individualism or any kind of deviation from the norm is shunned.  korea is still a xenophobic, homophobic country, obsessed with academic excellence, a single standard of beauty, and, sometimes, i wonder at the kind of fear that keeps koreans so compliant to this social conformity, that keeps them working themselves to death since childhood to get into SKY, get that job at samsung, get that face, that apartment, that family, that lifestyle.

and so, underneath it all, underneath the extreme reactions to yeong-hye’s vegetarianism lies that fear.  it’s a fear of the unknown, of the different, of someone’s rejection of the norm and the accepted and expected.  it still boggles my mind that people fear (and hate) difference so much, to the point that they will ruthlessly, deliberately murder people because of it, because they so fear any disruption of the so-called norm, of the status quo — i will simply never understand this insane fear.  like, what makes you, the [hetero]normative majority so great that you feel everyone must fit into your single goddamn mold?

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here are 13 recommendations for books by korean/korean-american authors in alphabetical order by last name (korean names are formatted the korean way, family name first):

  1. choe yun, there a petal silently falls (columbia university press, 2008) [link]
  2. susan choi,  my education (viking, 2014) [link]
  3. catherine chung,  forgotten country (riverhead, 2012) [link] [2]
  4. han kang, human acts (portobello, 2015) [link] [2]
  5. jung eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013) [link] [2]
  6. lady hyegyong, the memoirs of lady hyegyong (university of california press, 2013)
  7. chang-rae lee, a gesture life (riverhead, 2000) [link]
  8. krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016) [link]
  9. park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014) [link]
  10. patricia park, re jane (pamela dorman books, 2015) [link]
  11. shin kyung-sook, i’ll be right there (unnamed press, 2014) [link]
  12. unknown, the story of hong gildong (penguin classics, 2016) [link]
  13. jung yun, shelter (picador, 2015) [link]

why these thirteen?  what were the criteria?  how did i select them?  is it terrible if i admit that i chose them a little arbitrarily?  and that there’s also kind of a cheat in there because i haven’t actually finished reading the memoirs of lady hyegyong yet?

reading is an intellectual act, but it’s also a visceral and emotional act.  (it’s also, partly, a visual experience.)  we respond to different things, connect with different characters, identify with different conflicts and struggles, and these are simply books that have resonated with me for one reason or another.  some of them also have what i call staying power, books that have stayed with me since i read them, even if i might not have felt super strongly or positively about them after i’d initially read them.

the one rule i did follow is that i only allowed one title per author*, and i did try to provide titles by an equal number of korean authors and korean-american authors.  if i reviewed or wrote about a title, whether via instagram or on this site, i linked them as well because i’m not going to go into in-depth reviews here.

this is not a comprehensive list by any means, and it is entirely 100% subjective.  however, i can assure you that they are all well-written, smart, thoughtful books, and i think they each add to the general dialogue of literature, of korean/korean-american literature, of translated literature.  some of them (there a petal silently falls, human acts, a gesture life, i’ll be right there) consider human brutality within history; others (forgotten country, re jane, shelter) consider korean-americanism, what that means and how that fits into and impacts people’s lives in different ways; and even others (no one writes back, pavane for a dead princess) look at contemporary korean society and its ailments.  and then there’s how i became a north korean, which is currently by far my book of the year, a brilliant, heart-breaking story of north korean refugees, as well as a searing indictment of everyone (and i mean everyone) in the exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of north korean refugees.

* if i hadn’t given myself that rule, i would have also included krys lee’s drifting house (viking, 2012), han kang’s the vegetarian (hogarth, 2016), susan choi’s the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004), and shin kyung-sook’s please look after mom (vintage, 2012).


so there we have it!  thanks for reading, and please do feel free to share any thoughts, especially if you do pick up or have read any of the books mentioned/listed!

jung yun with alexander chee!

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2016 march 23, UES barnes and noble:  i've been raving about jung yun's shelter since i read it last year, and i'm glad it's finally out in the world for everyone to read.  if you haven't read it yet, read it; it's amazing; and it will wreck you.


jung yun:  i used to live in new york city but left fourteen years ago with this vague idea of being a writer.

JY:  i started writing [shelter] in 2010, but it's set in 2008.

[the scene they discuss below is the one she read -- pages 12-17 from the novel.]

alexander chee:  i think the incredible power that you give the mother as she approaches is just one of the moments when i knew that i loved this novel because you allowed her the dignity of her suffering, in a sense, amid the humiliation that was happening.  and the misunderstanding of the son -- it's so heartbreaking.  that's not a question.  how did you come to this idea?

JY:  so that scene -- i was an MFA candidate, it was 2004, and, at the time, my parents were getting older and heading toward retirement.  you know, my parents are fantastic and they're loving people, but i was thinking [...] [about how you can love someone, but it can be inconveniencing].

that was sort of the beginning, then i put it away in a drawer, then, in 2007, there was this high-profile home invasion in cheshire, connecticut.  [two men broke into a home of a family of four; the mother and two daughters were brutally raped and murdered, while the father survived.]*  i became really obsessed with that case, but i didn't understand how this man was ever going to have a life.  i didn't know how this man was going to recover knowing that his loved ones had all died in fear.

that particular crime that happened in real life was the connecting thing between the scene in the field and everything else.

* wiki page here

AC:  the parents are also remarkable characters, and i think that was part of what moved me about the novel, this sense that i was reading characters i'd never really seen in a novel.  and, to some extent, that includes your portrayal of kyung.  it's hard for someone like to understand that there is a great deal of love in all of the demands placed on him, and yet that's also part of the heartbreak.  so this is a kind of crisis in which crisis happens -- this gap.  what were the biggest challenges in structuring that?

JY:  i think, in not making it overly sentimental.  i wanted kyung to be kind of unlikable from the start but also for readers to understand him.  there are times my husband would be like "he's so frustrating," and i was like, "good!"  i wanted to capture some of the tension and expectation of someone who came to the country with his parents and has felt the weight of having to do just as well or better than his parents did.

JY:  i tried to avoid delving into too much sentimentality but tried to subvert expectations and to avoid stereotypes and make him more three-dimensional.

AC:  how much did you research the family and kyung?  maybe the expectation would be that you're korean so you wouldn't have to, which is ridiculous.

JY:  i did a lot of research into domestic violence in immigrant communities.

AC:  what surprised you in what you learned?

JY:  i don't speak korean very well myself, and one of the most messed up things i learned was about the korean language.  in english, you can say, "you hurt me," but you can't say that directly in korean.  but you can say, "it hurts."*

* i had to sit and puzzle over this for a good five minutes there.  it's kinda blowing my mind ... but not.  sounds very korean.

audience Q&A

Q:  did you purposely want to write about korean-americans?

JY:  i write a mix of characters, but i did want this character to be korean-american, and i wanted him to be married to someone who wasn't korean-american because i wanted that question.

JY:  when i was doing press, i'd get the question, "are these people based on real life?" a lot.

AC:  the most boring question.

JY:  taking care of parents -- taking care of lousy parents -- that's not a korean-american problem; that's a universal problem.  struggling with money, having financial problems -- that's a universal problem, too.

JY:  [explained how she gets up at 4:30 in the morning to write before work because she realized that, after the work day, she has no wherewithal to write.  writing is the most important thing to her, though, so she'd start getting up at 6, then 5:30, now 4:30 to write, and now she wakes up without an alarm.]

JY:  when i don't write, i'm terrible.  it's better for everyone if i start my day doing the thing that's most important to me.

JY:  there's a whole lot in my life that i can't control.  i can control what's on the page, and that's about it.

AC:  i think the thing that's so frustrating about the autobiographical question is that you put all this energy into creating something and the thing people want to talk about is the thing you didn't write about.

my year reading korean and korean-american literature.

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i.

in 2015, i read 11 books (of 70) by a korean or korean-american author.  it was an interesting experience, surprising in some ways that i didn’t expect.  the most surprising was the shock of recognizability and the pleasantness of it, never having been the kind of reader (or viewer) who needed or wanted to relate to characters in books (or film or tv).  truth be told, it never occurred to me to be bothered by the whiteness of the world around me until i was in my twenties; i suppose there’s a privilege in that as well as a significant measure of unawareness and, probably, self-absorption.

a lot of it, though, came from the fact that, when i fell into pop culture and entertainment as a pre-adolescent, i fell into korean pop culture and korean entertainment.  my boy band was h.o.t., not ’n sync or backstreet boys.  my celebrity crushes were tony and junjin and jang geun-seok.  the women i considered beautiful were jeon ji-hyun and song hye-gyo and shin mina.  i grew up watching korean dramas, not american television, and, to this day, my nostalgic cultural references are all korean and i often sit silently, confused, when listening to friends talk about their adolescence because i can’t relate.

the strangeness of that also didn’t occur to me until i was in my twenties.  i was born and raised in the states and have never lived in korea, and it wasn’t like my parents forced me to partake only of things korean.  (they actually hated my k-pop obsessions; i often joke that, had i grown up in korea, my parents would have shaved my head because you know that drama answer me 1997?  i was sung shi-won, minus the cute romance.)  maybe it was that i had friends who were also into k-pop; maybe it was that, growing up, 80% of my friends were korean and the remaining 20% asian.  maybe part of it was that i am fluent (to a degree) in korean, so the language barrier never existed, and maybe it was also that this was all during the days of wimpy dial-up internet when on-line forums were starting to become a thing and making things more accessible.

and yet, though my sources of entertainment were korean, my reading life was solidly fixed in the west.  my parents didn’t encourage me to read outside the classics when i was young, so i grew up on the brits, the french, the russians.  when i started reading contemporary literature circa 2005, i still stuck with the familiars — the british, maybe a few americans, haruki murakami — and i have to confess i stayed away from “asian-american literature,” uninterested in what felt predominantly like “immigrant narratives,” stories i couldn’t relate to and wasn’t interested in, as horrible and snooty as that sounds.  (i’ve since come around and seen the errors of my prejudice, so don’t judge me too harshly.  i was young and very immature.)

the stupid part of that is that relatability (which is apparently not a word but i am running with anyway) is such a broad thing.  we can relate to so many things, so many different circumstances, because there’s something universal about human struggle, about human pain, about human love and desire and fear.  that’s why it’s so infuriating to me to see such a narrow focus in publishing, the dominance of white stories, the reluctance for publishers to take risks and throw their weight and support behind diverse writers of color from different places who have different stories to tell from the lives they’ve lived because there’s that fear that the american public “won’t relate.”

maybe that’s one reason i never put much stock in the idea of being to relate to what i was reading or watching.

there is a pleasure and comfort in it, though — i’ve learned that as i read more from korean and korean-american authors last year.  there’s something pleasurable about being able to immerse yourself in a world and find yourself there in the specifics, to see that there are other people out there who’ve had similar experiences, who’ve struggled with belonging, with balancing what oftentimes feels like a dichotomous existence.  it’s one of those things i didn’t really learn until i realized how nice it felt, these oddities of being korean-american, never really belonging in any group, whether it be white americans or korean-koreans or, even, kprean-americans.  being korean-american, in and of itself, isn’t a unifying force; there are so many of us growing up in different cities, in different neighborhoods, in different second-generation upbringings that the only common thread between us sometimes is that we are korean-american.

all that said, though, only two of the eleven books i read in 2015 really brought that sense of relatability to the surface in a dominant way:  patricia park’s re jane (pamela dorman books, 2015) and jung yun’s shelter (picador, forthcoming 2016).  both books follow a korean-american and beautifully capture that dichotomy of being korean-american without that identity being the focus of the story, and both park and yun weave it into the narrative rather, showing how our ethnic identities do influence us in ways that we might not intend or realize, how many of our decisions and actions are unconscious reactions to the way we grew up.

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ii.

what’s not surprising is that my awareness of myself as an Other came through my experiences with book culture.  i grew up in southern california, specifically in the valley, and i never like a minority because there were just so many asians and i grew up in the korean community.

the first book event i ever attended was an ian mcewan reading at the LA public library.  it was for solar (jonathan cape, 2010), and i was excited for it because, one, i’d never seen an author “in real life” before and, two, i loved ian mcewan and had recently gone through his backlist in a frenzy.  it was weird to me, then, to queue before the doors opened, looking around at the white crowd around me — in an auditorium in little tokyo, no less — feeling like i must stick out like a sore thumb, this twenty-something asian girl among all these white people, most of whom were much older than i was.

part of me relished it.  another part of me wondered where all the other readers of color were because i knew i couldn’t be the only one, and that’s been the question that has remained with me over the years as i’ve attended many, many more readings but haven’t lost that sense of being the asian unicorn in the room.  i know we’re out there and, to take it further, that we’re out there reading from a range of authors, so it’s an honest wonderment of mine, and i love when i go to a reading of an author of color and find the room filled with a diverse range of readers, which goes to show that we are here and we want diverse books.

to bring this back to the topic at hand, though:  the concept of the Other obviously exists differently in korean literature.  i feel like all the korean books i read last year told stories of people who lived outside the norm, on the fringe, almost to the point that i wonder if that is the role literature plays in korea or if it is simply reflective of what editors here are compelled toward and want.  the filtration system of translated korean literature is of interest to me.

it’s true that society gravitates towards hierarchies and groups, and homogeneous societies will draw lines, too, making Others of people according to criteria other than skin color.  in many ways, to korean-koreans, the korean-american is the Other — the time i felt most acutely like the Other was in 2012 when i went to seoul for the first time in twelve years.  i spent ten days in seoul after spending three weeks in japan, which in itself was a crazy experience because i couldn’t communicate, so i’d anticipated some comfort going to korea where i could speak the language and was familiar with the culture.

i suppose that familiarity with the culture should have prepared me for how acutely aware i would be of myself as the Other.  i speak enough korean well enough for koreans to be impressed, but my limited vocabulary and weird accent set me apart and put me down.  more importantly, though, i don’t fit the korean (or the seoul) “type” or standard of beauty — i’m not thin; i’m too tan; and i don’t wear make-up.  i don’t wear the right clothes, and i don’t have aegyo or a “cute” personality, all of which is fine, until you step into a homogeneous society that is very open about giving you the look over and judging you by your appearance.

in the face of seoul’s trend-obsessed mainstream, it’s not surprising to come across very different lives in korean literature.  there’s a bleakness to korean novels that isn’t found in literature elsewhere, and many of the characters in the korean novels i read were people who had somehow been left behind or cast aside, who were struggling in these “outside” communities, who were Others because of their lack of prestige or education or financial stability.

korean-american literature, on the other hand, explores the korean as the very obvious Other, and i think the one korean-american author i’ve read who really straddles the korean/korean-american divide well is krys lee.  i read her debut collection, drifting house (viking, 2012), in 2013, and i’m still amazed when i think about it today because it’s like she has one foot firmly in korean-america and the other in korea.  that’s not an easy thing to do, but she does it beautifully and hauntingly, and i can’t wait for her novel, whenever that’s published.  i hope it’s soon.

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iii.

reading in translation when you’re partially fluent in the original language is an interesting experience.

when i’m reading, say, a russian novel-in-translation, i admittedly don’t really think about it as a translation — as in, i’m not acutely aware of it, even though i know i’m reading in translation.  as in, because i lack any familiarity with or knowledge of russian, i’m able to take the translation with little resistance, almost at face value.

when reading korean novels-in-translation, though, i’m always aware that i’m reading in translation.  i frequently pause to wonder what the original korean says, how many liberties the translator has taken, how much nuance has been lost.  this awareness is more acute with certain books (i.e. han kang’s the vegetarian [hogarth, forthcoming 2016]), less noticeable with other books (i.e. jang eun-jin’s no one writes back [dalkey archive press, 2013]), and, sometimes, i’m so bothered that i have to stop reading the translation altogether (i.e. gong ji-young’s our happy time [atria books, 2014]).

this often has little to do with the translators.  the nature of translation is that it isn’t hard or rigid but porous with each translator bringing his/her own method and philosophy to each book, and translating from korean to english is hard.  english, as lovely as it is, is a limited language; it doesn’t have the width or breadth of words that korean has, words like 원망 or 정 or 아쉽다 — words that encompass so much more than their english counterparts can possibly convey.  korean is also structurally looser, more prone to poetic freedom and ambiguous pronouns, and there’s a rhythm to the way sentences usually end — 했다 한다 간다 — that creates a tone and cadence that simply cannot translate.

the inevitable by-product of translation is, therefore, loss.  we lose nuance; we lose points of cultural significance; we lose layers of voice and tone and mood.  one of my favorite books from 2015 was han kang’s human acts (portobello books, 2016), and, in the introduction, translator deborah smith writes:

born and raised in gwangju, han kang’s personal connection to the subject matter meant that putting this novel together was always going to be an extremely fraught and painful process.  she is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalising the sorrow and shame which her home town was made to bear.  her empathy comes through most strongly in ‘the boy’s mother’, written in a brick-thick gwangju dialect impossible to replicate in english, korean dialects being mainly marked by grammatical differences rather than individual words.  to me, ‘faithfulness’ in translation primarily concerns the effect on the reader rather than being an issue of syntax, and so i tried to aim for a non-specific colloquialism that would carry the warmth han intended.  though i did smuggle the tiniest bit of yorkshire in — call it translator’s license.

one of this translation’s working titles was ‘uprisings’.  as well as the obvious connection to the gwangju uprising itself, a thread of words runs through the novel — come out, come forward, emerge, surface, rise up — which suggests an uprising of another kind.  the past, like the bodies of the dead, hasn’t stayed buried.  repressed trauma irrupts in the form of memory, one of the main korean words for ‘to remember’ meaning literarily ‘to rise to the surface’ — an inadvertent, often hazy recollection which is the type of memory most common in han kang’s book.  here, chronology is a complex weave, with constant slippages between past and present, giving the sense of the former constantly intruding on or shadowing the latter.  paragraph breaks and subheadings have been inserted into the translation in order to maintain these shifts in tense without confusing the reader.  (human acts, 4-5)

i loved this.  i almost wish more translators would address such things in introductions or afterwords or something.  in some ways, i think smith’s introduction actually helped me read human acts when han’s other book-in-translation, the vegetarian, left me feeling a little frustrated and lost because i could feel the things that had been lost in translation.

that said, the idea of loss shouldn’t discourage us from reading in translation.  i think it’s absolutely crucial that we read in translation, if only because we lose so much (or fail to gain much, i suppose is the better way to put it) when we read only the offerings of english, and i find it discouraging whenever i hear how reluctant americans are to read books-in-translation and, in connection, how publishers are reluctant to acquire and publish books-in-translation, which is why i give major props to dalkey archive press for its “library of korean literature” published in collaboration with the literature translation institute of korea.  i read a number of titles from them in 2015 and am planning to read more in 2016, and it’s been a pleasure to read their translations, not only for the quality of their work but also the range of books they choose.

(also MUCH love to mcnally jackson for regularly carrying several titles on their shelves.)


there was more i wanted to write here, but, as i plan to read even more from korean and korean-american authors this year, i’ll end this here.  in 2016, i also plan to make good on my 2015 goal to read a book in korean every month, so i anticipate that there will be a lot for me to think about as i read, so we shall continue this discussion over the year!

thanks for reading!