An Interview with Eugenia Kim
An interview with Eugenia Kim (b. 1952), originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2016.
The only fistfight in Eugenia Kim’s adult life erupted on a bus in Washington, D.C. A man behind her on the bus started taunting her about being Asian, making derogatory comments and using an exaggerated accent to mock her.
She asked him to stop, told him he was being rude. Egged on by his friends, he kept insulting her. The passengers all grew quiet; the bus driver was keeping an eye on them in the mirror.
Kim was standing near the door, and her stop was approaching.
She asked the instigator one more time to be quiet. He said one last, awful thing. She reared back, balled up her fist and punched him as hard as she could in the chest, then slipped out the door the driver had quickly opened. The bus took off, with the offender still on board and Kim fuming at the curb.
The fight is ironic, Kim says, because she always thought she wasn’t Asian enough.
The child of Korean immigrants, Kim wrote her novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, based on her parents’ lives. But the author herself was born in New York, loved the Beatles as a teenager and often winced at her parents’ Korean ways. In order to write her novel, she read more than 350 books of Korean culture, history or fiction.
Her characters — just as her parents did — struggle to exist in Japanese-occupied Korea, and fall in love and are separated by war and tyranny. The novel, which won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, is historical fiction, with some small deviations from her family’s story. But much of it is true — her mother’s imprisonment for 90 days in a freezing cell in the heart of the Korean winter, her struggle to be educated in a world that thought women belonged in the kitchen or with their needles, her falling in love with her arranged husband, and her separation when her passport is revoked as the husband travels by boat to America. World War II and censors prevented their communicating for years. But after a decade or so, they reunite. The novel took Kim 12 years to write. She was a painter, not a writer, at first. And she needed to do an immense amount of research, didn’t speak much of the language, and had never even been to her parents’ country of origin.
She was drawn to write about her family’s stories, and urges others to do the same. The youngest of six children, all born in the United States, Kim grew up assimilated to America, slightly embarrassed at her father’s J.C. Penney suits and his jobs as a pastor of a huge Korean church near D.C. and at the Voice of America in the Korean service during the Cold War. She and her mother didn’t speak much of each other’s languages, but the stories her mother told helped to connect them. Those stories, with a flourish of fiction, became The Calligrapher’s Daughter.
In the long period while Kim was writing her novel, she was awarded fellowships by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Yaddo, Stanford Calderwood, MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from Bennington College and now teaches for the Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA in creative writing program.
Sybil Steinberg, in The Washington Post Book World, wrote ”Eugenia Kim's sensitive first novel, which depicts 30 years of Korea's modern history in light of its ancient past, is an illuminating prequel to present-day events. . . . Kim recounts a poignant family history, much of it based on her own mother's life. . . . A satisfying excursion into empathetically rendered lives."
Kim spoke with me from her home in D.C. by phone, and joked and laughed throughout the interview. She also asked if I could edit out all the curse words. I declined.
__________
Susan Thornton Hobby: I read that you took a class at The Writer’s Center. Could you describe your path to writing?
Eugenia Kim: I started much later in life, only because of some family circumstances. I’m an artist, a painter, and was never really thinking about writing. Circumstances led me to be unable to paint, and I decided I needed to do something creative or I would go crazy. I thought, I’ve got these family stories, let me write them down and see what happens. And before you know it, I think I’m enjoying what I’m doing it. It’s a good creative outlet.
It feels the same, you get lost in painting, you can get lost in writing. But I had no idea if I was any good, or if the work had any merit. So I took a class at the Writer’s Center [in Bethesda]. There were 18 people in class. The instructor singled me out afterwards, she said, you should go for this, it’s good. That was good encouragement. Then I kept working on it, and a year passed, and I submitted to a juried workshop place, and was accepted, so that was my second huge bump in the arm. Maybe there is something here. I thought then that I’d better go learn what I was doing, so I went and got an MFA at Bennington. So that was a two-year immersion into hell and back. Which is funny for me to say that, because now I’m a professor in an MFA program.
I learned that I had the chops, and I had a story to tell. Most of what I learned was how to read in a way that continued to feed me and my writing. On my own, I learned about grammar, because I knew I had none. In my MFA program, I didn’t really learn about craft, I learned about literature. In a way, that was more valid, because I picked [craft] up on my own. It wasn’t really part of their program. It’s part of how I teach today, because I think it’s important. During that program, I got a couple of things published, so that was encouraging. Also during the program, a couple of things happened. … I didn’t work on the piece that got me started, which was the family story, which is now The Calligrapher’s Daughter, because I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was fiction or nonfiction, I didn’t know if I had the right to tell the story, I didn’t know if I was Korean enough. I was born here, my Korean really sucks. I thought, how can I write this Korean novel?
And it’s about my mother, and I didn’t really like my mother. I had all my own family issues, but yet I thought this was an important issue. The more I started doing research, the more I realized, there was just so little — in the early 2000s — there was very little published, very little written, by Korean women of that period of history. Also that period of history [the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945) was so rarely mentioned in the history books. Because of the national shame and whatever. It’s very different now, because of the Internet. But back then, it was impossible. So I thought, OK, here’s an area that needs redressing. Bully for me, I’m going to go for it.
The second question I asked in my program was, is this fiction or nonfiction? I took a semester of nonfiction to learn how it’s written, what is creative nonfiction, what is personal essay. I discovered that, with nonfiction, it wasn’t my story. It was my mother’s story. I wasn’t able to get an emotional sense of what was happening to the family at that time, in the story. As soon as I made the decision to make it fiction, the work just kind of took on a life of its own. My character became her own character, and her family became her own family as well.
STH: Your upbringing seems a combination of Korean pride and American assimilation. You loved the Beatles, but your parents also took you and your siblings around in traditional Korean dress to talk about Korean with all these community groups. How did that mixture affect your fiction?
EK: Maxine Hong Kingston, who wrote The Woman Warrior and several other books, she’s a big heroine of mine. I did a lot of research on her, and one of the things she said — she’s Chinese, I think she was born here too — she was really fortunate, in terms of talking about being a Chinese-American writer, having the Chinese cultural background, it was a gift to hear these sounds of her family origin, and to pick them up as people were talking, to have them assimilated into her consciousness. She grew up like I did, completely American. It was just a part of who she was, and natural, and that’s kind of how I feel about it too.
I always knew I was a woman of color, a girl of color, but I’ve never really understood about what that meant. By the time of this book, I was in my early 50s when the book came out, I finally understood what it meant to be a writer of color. One of the things I was afraid of was that by writing this book, I would be pigeonholed as a Korean-American writer. What I realized was — hello — I am a Korean-American writer. All of that is because of growing up different in a culture. I think we all have this in our own way, even if we’re as white as the person next to us, or whatever.
There’s always something that marks us as being different from the next person over. And so we struggle to make that not appear that way, but when you’re a person of color, it’s so much more obvious. And when you’re one of three in your entire elementary school, and the others are your siblings, it becomes kind of a mark that you’re not sure what to do with. Half of you is, “I’m so glad to be different, and let me take advantage of it,” and the other half is, “Damn, I wish I could be like everybody else.” You’re constantly walking that line, and negotiating it, and trying to find peace within it. Some people never do it, and it took me that long. Because I got shit from both sides, “Oh, you’re not Korean enough,” or “Oh, you’re so not American.” Even looking at what’s happening in the culture today, the need to be homogenous is just huge. The xenophobic desire is very clannish, you want to be like everybody else.
STH: Could you talk about the loss of tradition and its role in the novel? Writing the book seems itself a way to recapture that tradition. Could you talk about that idea?
EK: That’s really true. Well, it’s not that I had the traditions, but I knew of them, because my mother talked about them a lot. It’s not that I recaptured them, but I understood them more. And of course, I understand them as an American person who has done the research. Arthur Golden, who wrote Memoirs of a Geisha, when that first came out, I wasn’t a writer then. I was just so outraged that this white man would write from the point of view of a Japanese geisha woman. Even though I thought the book was really good [Kim laughs]. And then years later, when I did become a writer, I understood that he was doing what I was doing. He did as much research, he had some cultural background, he had lived there for years, he knew more than I did, he knew the language. He knew more history. But like me, he wasn’t born there, he didn’t grow up there. There are things that are never going to be accessible to us.
So [The Calligrapher’s Daughter] was a way to recapture some of my Korean-ness that I never really owned before. I was ashamed of it, or whatever. And so I attribute that less to the writing of the book than of the research that it took to write. I just learned so much more. My mother, during the writing of the book (she never saw the book, nor would she have cared, I don’t think) there were times when I asked her certain questions, like, “If you were going to go on a walk with a friend in the city in 1936, where would you have gone?” And she was like, “What a stupid question.” That was always her response to me, “Why are you asking me these really stupid questions?” But those are the things I really needed to know to make the story really real. She couldn’t remember of course. She’d say things like, “Well, there was a zoo in a park, and it was sort of fun, but it was disturbing because it wasn’t our zoo.” And then I did the research and found that it was a Japanese zoo that had been placed on the grounds of the [Korean royal] palace as a way to belittle the royalty. I don’t know if she knew that, because the Japanese were already there before she was born. So she didn’t know why the zoo had that aura or whatever. That’s what got me so excited about writing historical fiction: the things that you discover that are really so subtle and so small, but they speak to exactly what was happening in that time.
STH: The anecdote in The Calligrapher’s Daughter about your protagonist’s marriage prospect (and eventual husband) Calvin Cho reading the Bible and Karl Marx simultaneously, was an echo of an anecdote about your father. And your mother was imprisoned like your protagonist. Could you talk about modeling Mr. Cho and Najin on your parents?
EK: I just recently did a school residency, I did a panel with my fellow teachers about how to write about sex in literature effectively. We have to do it, right? As part of the panel, each of read a portion of our novel that was a sex scene. Of course, this was between my parents on their wedding night. It’s completely imagined, but I’m reading it, and I have never been so embarrassed or nervous in my life reading something. [She laughs.] But it hadn’t really affected me before.
I think one of the reasons I had the question about whether this should be fiction or nonfiction was because I wanted to properly honor them. Even though our relationship was conflicted, it didn’t mean that I didn’t have that old Confucian need to honor my parents. It was not easy, it was really only until I had made that separation between “this is not my parents’ story, this is inspired by my parents’ story,” and I can adhere to it as much as I want, or not. There are several departures, but not that many. The other, fictional tone of the piece is the first major departure, and there are about six other fictional elements to make a more compelling story.
STH: The father in your novel refuses to name his daughter as a form of political protest, because she was born the same year as Japanese occupation of Korea began. Can you explain the significance of her namelessness and how that lack of a name changes for the main character?
EK: That’s a fiction. [She laughs.] Art is often serendipitous, and what happened was that I couldn’t figure out what her name was. I was more than halfway through with the novel and ready to look at how the book was going to be structured. I started on what is now chapter 27; I didn’t write it in sequence. By the time I had twenty chapters, I needed to put them in order, see how the story was going to run. … I also knew that I didn’t have a beginning. Then I was started to write the beginning, and I thought, I don’t even know what her name is! Goddamn it, what is her name? And so I kept trying different names, and then I decided, you know what? She doesn’t have a name, because she wasn’t given a name, because she’s a girl. That’s how it happened.
Once I decided that, and I understood that, and how the convention in Korean culture is to never really call anybody by their first name, I already sort of knew that. Even if one of us was talking at home about a church member, and one of us would name this person by name, my mother would get so embarrassed, and say, “Oh, you can’t say that.” I always knew it’s so improper and impolite to say that. This was in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s not that way now. But it is for older people. You still can’t do that with older people, it’s really really rude, too familiar. That whole thing about, this is Susie’s mother, this is Jeannie’s mother, this is Nan’s father, that’s how you identify people, by their children. That’s how they have validity, because they’ve had children. Or if it’s a man, it’s by the position. It’s very complicated, but kind of interesting, it spoke a lot to the nature of the culture. The society is very conscious of its roles and how important that is in a successful society. So I thought, I can use this. So I made the mother come from this very remote, northern region. I looked at the map. I wanted to name her something that meant nothing. So I made her the woman from Najin [and so she was called Najin].
STH: Did you discover anything about your family that you hadn’t known before you began your research and writing?
EK: I think I relearned them in a different way. Because now I was learning these things with intent. I did learn new things, but the book was coming out and I made a trip to Korea with my sister. I learned a whole bunch of stuff.
STH: So you had not been to Korea before the book came out?
EK: Right. Which is one of the reasons I had to go. I thought, how can I write this book and never have been there? … It’s interesting what doors open when you begin to ask questions. This is one of the things I tell book groups; I think it’s one of the reasons why I don’t mind doing talks and stuff. We all have this in our lives. We all have parents, or we have parents who we don’t know who they are. But there are things in our past, we don’t know who we are until we know what those things are. Especially the things that are secrets. The secrets that we don’t know, how do they affect us over the generations? That’s one of the things I learned about writing this book. We all have this. Not that everybody should become a writer, but it’s how important family is. No matter how far you try and run, you just can’t.
STH: Christianity is a real source of comfort to your characters. Can you talk about its centrality to your book?
EK: Yeah, because I’m not Christian. [She laughs.] It was something I was very conscious of. These are people who had faith. My mother never had doubts. That is a fictional element that I had to put into the book, because I had doubts. So I can’t really believe her, unless I inserted [doubts]. I don’t have Christian faith, because my father was a minister. A lot of preachers’ kids, they go one way or the other. They become preachers or they become non-religious. Almost everyone in my family chose the second path, except for one sister who became Jewish. And not because of marriage. But that’s another story.
I was conscious of having that be a part of their lives, in a way that was active, but not too intrusive. Yeah, they went to church, they said “Praise God.” There’s a funny story about who to listen to when you’re getting edited, in the final stages of your book. I’ll just talk about two editors, and I won’t name where they’re from. The first editor said, “There’s just too much religion in here, everyone’s praising God, and there’s a lot of prayer, and there’s a lot of Jesus talk. I just don’t think it’s going to work for a secular audience.” So I thought, OK, whatever, so I took a lot of it out. And the second editor said, “These people are Christian, but it’s not really part of their lives.” [She laughs.]
STH: I hope you saved those paragraphs you cut out and tucked them away somewhere!
EK: Yeah, I put half of them back. That seemed to be the happy medium. It gave me a very important lesson that anyone who’s a writer needs to know, which is editors are always going to have their own opinions and you can’t please everybody.
STH: There’s an image in the book that stuck with me, of Najin putting her needle and thread away in their “proper places” as she “tucked her hopes aside — their proper place for now.” Women, especially, suppress their feelings in this book. Was that a difficult position to express?
EK: No, because I’ve been doing it all my life. [She laughs again.] I don’t know if it’s so Korean, as it is my family. My parents were so reserved because they were public figures. At home, my mother, especially when she was going through menopause, she was a screaming banshee. But in public, no. But also, I didn’t speak Korean, I didn’t know if they were talking about their feelings or talking about what’ s on for soup. I had no idea that people talked about feelings. It was like sex, you never really talked about it, but everybody has it. So that wasn’t hard to do. Especially because it was in my nature to be that way.
STH: Najin exults in the “joyous code of learning,” of writing, and there is a motif in your book of writing being erased for fear of discovery. I thought that was a great series of images and it seemed to relate to women and education.
EK: My mother was a minister’s wife until my father died at age 78; so my mother was 77. And my mom died in ’94, so in the decade and a half that she survived my father, she became an artist and a writer, she wrote stories and essays. She got published in the newspaper, in the Korean newspaper that always publishes literature. She published poetry. She was always a creative person, I knew this, but it was always dedicated to industry. She would sew, she would cook, she was always creative with her hands. … She taught herself the cello. She did all this stuff after my father died, because she didn’t have to do his stuff any more. She was finally free. That lesson of her life in those last 15 years, the joy she got out of it. It was like, wow, what if she had been able to do that from the age of 12. But that wasn’t her role. So that was one of the gifts she gave us, was her example of pushing us toward that creativity. And her own mother had pushed her toward the domestic arts, but also the education. That was a ground-breaking, rule-breaking thing.
STH: You’ve described your writing process as terrifying — why?
EK: [She laughs for a long time.] I don’t think there’s anything scarier for any kind of artist — even composers — than the blank page. You might have all the inspiration in the world, but when it comes down to translating what you’re feeling and seeing and the sensations, to actually translate that into something that is both understood by other people, in a way that you hope they understand it, and for it to be successful, that’s terrifying. I still have problems with that, that’s why I still prefer to edit. At least I have something. The creative part is just so hard.
STH: Can you talk about your new novel?
EK: Not really. I already am more excited about the third one, but — hello — I have to finish this one.
STH: Yes, I have a file on my computer with all these novel ideas, and you’re right, it’s always the next one that you’re always more excited about, because you don’t actually have to write it, you just have to think about it.
EK: And that’s so much more fun, isn’t it? The only thing I’ll say is that it’s undergoing a major overhaul. It’s all good, and I’m excited, but I have a lot of work to do. It’s going to take a long time. But the first novel took ten years, twelve, really, but this one, we’re on year six, that’s not too bad.
© Susan Thornton Hobby, 2016, all rights reserved.
The only fistfight in Eugenia Kim’s adult life erupted on a bus in Washington, D.C. A man behind her on the bus started taunting her about being Asian, making derogatory comments and using an exaggerated accent to mock her.
She asked him to stop, told him he was being rude. Egged on by his friends, he kept insulting her. The passengers all grew quiet; the bus driver was keeping an eye on them in the mirror.
Kim was standing near the door, and her stop was approaching.
She asked the instigator one more time to be quiet. He said one last, awful thing. She reared back, balled up her fist and punched him as hard as she could in the chest, then slipped out the door the driver had quickly opened. The bus took off, with the offender still on board and Kim fuming at the curb.
The fight is ironic, Kim says, because she always thought she wasn’t Asian enough.
The child of Korean immigrants, Kim wrote her novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, based on her parents’ lives. But the author herself was born in New York, loved the Beatles as a teenager and often winced at her parents’ Korean ways. In order to write her novel, she read more than 350 books of Korean culture, history or fiction.
Her characters — just as her parents did — struggle to exist in Japanese-occupied Korea, and fall in love and are separated by war and tyranny. The novel, which won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, is historical fiction, with some small deviations from her family’s story. But much of it is true — her mother’s imprisonment for 90 days in a freezing cell in the heart of the Korean winter, her struggle to be educated in a world that thought women belonged in the kitchen or with their needles, her falling in love with her arranged husband, and her separation when her passport is revoked as the husband travels by boat to America. World War II and censors prevented their communicating for years. But after a decade or so, they reunite. The novel took Kim 12 years to write. She was a painter, not a writer, at first. And she needed to do an immense amount of research, didn’t speak much of the language, and had never even been to her parents’ country of origin.
She was drawn to write about her family’s stories, and urges others to do the same. The youngest of six children, all born in the United States, Kim grew up assimilated to America, slightly embarrassed at her father’s J.C. Penney suits and his jobs as a pastor of a huge Korean church near D.C. and at the Voice of America in the Korean service during the Cold War. She and her mother didn’t speak much of each other’s languages, but the stories her mother told helped to connect them. Those stories, with a flourish of fiction, became The Calligrapher’s Daughter.
In the long period while Kim was writing her novel, she was awarded fellowships by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Yaddo, Stanford Calderwood, MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from Bennington College and now teaches for the Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA in creative writing program.
Sybil Steinberg, in The Washington Post Book World, wrote ”Eugenia Kim's sensitive first novel, which depicts 30 years of Korea's modern history in light of its ancient past, is an illuminating prequel to present-day events. . . . Kim recounts a poignant family history, much of it based on her own mother's life. . . . A satisfying excursion into empathetically rendered lives."
Kim spoke with me from her home in D.C. by phone, and joked and laughed throughout the interview. She also asked if I could edit out all the curse words. I declined.
Susan Thornton Hobby: I read that you took a class at The Writer’s Center. Could you describe your path to writing?
Eugenia Kim: I started much later in life, only because of some family circumstances. I’m an artist, a painter, and was never really thinking about writing. Circumstances led me to be unable to paint, and I decided I needed to do something creative or I would go crazy. I thought, I’ve got these family stories, let me write them down and see what happens. And before you know it, I think I’m enjoying what I’m doing it. It’s a good creative outlet.
It feels the same, you get lost in painting, you can get lost in writing. But I had no idea if I was any good, or if the work had any merit. So I took a class at the Writer’s Center [in Bethesda]. There were 18 people in class. The instructor singled me out afterwards, she said, you should go for this, it’s good. That was good encouragement. Then I kept working on it, and a year passed, and I submitted to a juried workshop place, and was accepted, so that was my second huge bump in the arm. Maybe there is something here. I thought then that I’d better go learn what I was doing, so I went and got an MFA at Bennington. So that was a two-year immersion into hell and back. Which is funny for me to say that, because now I’m a professor in an MFA program.
I learned that I had the chops, and I had a story to tell. Most of what I learned was how to read in a way that continued to feed me and my writing. On my own, I learned about grammar, because I knew I had none. In my MFA program, I didn’t really learn about craft, I learned about literature. In a way, that was more valid, because I picked [craft] up on my own. It wasn’t really part of their program. It’s part of how I teach today, because I think it’s important. During that program, I got a couple of things published, so that was encouraging. Also during the program, a couple of things happened. … I didn’t work on the piece that got me started, which was the family story, which is now The Calligrapher’s Daughter, because I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was fiction or nonfiction, I didn’t know if I had the right to tell the story, I didn’t know if I was Korean enough. I was born here, my Korean really sucks. I thought, how can I write this Korean novel?
And it’s about my mother, and I didn’t really like my mother. I had all my own family issues, but yet I thought this was an important issue. The more I started doing research, the more I realized, there was just so little — in the early 2000s — there was very little published, very little written, by Korean women of that period of history. Also that period of history [the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945) was so rarely mentioned in the history books. Because of the national shame and whatever. It’s very different now, because of the Internet. But back then, it was impossible. So I thought, OK, here’s an area that needs redressing. Bully for me, I’m going to go for it.
The second question I asked in my program was, is this fiction or nonfiction? I took a semester of nonfiction to learn how it’s written, what is creative nonfiction, what is personal essay. I discovered that, with nonfiction, it wasn’t my story. It was my mother’s story. I wasn’t able to get an emotional sense of what was happening to the family at that time, in the story. As soon as I made the decision to make it fiction, the work just kind of took on a life of its own. My character became her own character, and her family became her own family as well.
STH: Your upbringing seems a combination of Korean pride and American assimilation. You loved the Beatles, but your parents also took you and your siblings around in traditional Korean dress to talk about Korean with all these community groups. How did that mixture affect your fiction?
EK: Maxine Hong Kingston, who wrote The Woman Warrior and several other books, she’s a big heroine of mine. I did a lot of research on her, and one of the things she said — she’s Chinese, I think she was born here too — she was really fortunate, in terms of talking about being a Chinese-American writer, having the Chinese cultural background, it was a gift to hear these sounds of her family origin, and to pick them up as people were talking, to have them assimilated into her consciousness. She grew up like I did, completely American. It was just a part of who she was, and natural, and that’s kind of how I feel about it too.
I always knew I was a woman of color, a girl of color, but I’ve never really understood about what that meant. By the time of this book, I was in my early 50s when the book came out, I finally understood what it meant to be a writer of color. One of the things I was afraid of was that by writing this book, I would be pigeonholed as a Korean-American writer. What I realized was — hello — I am a Korean-American writer. All of that is because of growing up different in a culture. I think we all have this in our own way, even if we’re as white as the person next to us, or whatever.
There’s always something that marks us as being different from the next person over. And so we struggle to make that not appear that way, but when you’re a person of color, it’s so much more obvious. And when you’re one of three in your entire elementary school, and the others are your siblings, it becomes kind of a mark that you’re not sure what to do with. Half of you is, “I’m so glad to be different, and let me take advantage of it,” and the other half is, “Damn, I wish I could be like everybody else.” You’re constantly walking that line, and negotiating it, and trying to find peace within it. Some people never do it, and it took me that long. Because I got shit from both sides, “Oh, you’re not Korean enough,” or “Oh, you’re so not American.” Even looking at what’s happening in the culture today, the need to be homogenous is just huge. The xenophobic desire is very clannish, you want to be like everybody else.
STH: Could you talk about the loss of tradition and its role in the novel? Writing the book seems itself a way to recapture that tradition. Could you talk about that idea?
EK: That’s really true. Well, it’s not that I had the traditions, but I knew of them, because my mother talked about them a lot. It’s not that I recaptured them, but I understood them more. And of course, I understand them as an American person who has done the research. Arthur Golden, who wrote Memoirs of a Geisha, when that first came out, I wasn’t a writer then. I was just so outraged that this white man would write from the point of view of a Japanese geisha woman. Even though I thought the book was really good [Kim laughs]. And then years later, when I did become a writer, I understood that he was doing what I was doing. He did as much research, he had some cultural background, he had lived there for years, he knew more than I did, he knew the language. He knew more history. But like me, he wasn’t born there, he didn’t grow up there. There are things that are never going to be accessible to us.
So [The Calligrapher’s Daughter] was a way to recapture some of my Korean-ness that I never really owned before. I was ashamed of it, or whatever. And so I attribute that less to the writing of the book than of the research that it took to write. I just learned so much more. My mother, during the writing of the book (she never saw the book, nor would she have cared, I don’t think) there were times when I asked her certain questions, like, “If you were going to go on a walk with a friend in the city in 1936, where would you have gone?” And she was like, “What a stupid question.” That was always her response to me, “Why are you asking me these really stupid questions?” But those are the things I really needed to know to make the story really real. She couldn’t remember of course. She’d say things like, “Well, there was a zoo in a park, and it was sort of fun, but it was disturbing because it wasn’t our zoo.” And then I did the research and found that it was a Japanese zoo that had been placed on the grounds of the [Korean royal] palace as a way to belittle the royalty. I don’t know if she knew that, because the Japanese were already there before she was born. So she didn’t know why the zoo had that aura or whatever. That’s what got me so excited about writing historical fiction: the things that you discover that are really so subtle and so small, but they speak to exactly what was happening in that time.
STH: The anecdote in The Calligrapher’s Daughter about your protagonist’s marriage prospect (and eventual husband) Calvin Cho reading the Bible and Karl Marx simultaneously, was an echo of an anecdote about your father. And your mother was imprisoned like your protagonist. Could you talk about modeling Mr. Cho and Najin on your parents?
EK: I just recently did a school residency, I did a panel with my fellow teachers about how to write about sex in literature effectively. We have to do it, right? As part of the panel, each of read a portion of our novel that was a sex scene. Of course, this was between my parents on their wedding night. It’s completely imagined, but I’m reading it, and I have never been so embarrassed or nervous in my life reading something. [She laughs.] But it hadn’t really affected me before.
I think one of the reasons I had the question about whether this should be fiction or nonfiction was because I wanted to properly honor them. Even though our relationship was conflicted, it didn’t mean that I didn’t have that old Confucian need to honor my parents. It was not easy, it was really only until I had made that separation between “this is not my parents’ story, this is inspired by my parents’ story,” and I can adhere to it as much as I want, or not. There are several departures, but not that many. The other, fictional tone of the piece is the first major departure, and there are about six other fictional elements to make a more compelling story.
STH: The father in your novel refuses to name his daughter as a form of political protest, because she was born the same year as Japanese occupation of Korea began. Can you explain the significance of her namelessness and how that lack of a name changes for the main character?
EK: That’s a fiction. [She laughs.] Art is often serendipitous, and what happened was that I couldn’t figure out what her name was. I was more than halfway through with the novel and ready to look at how the book was going to be structured. I started on what is now chapter 27; I didn’t write it in sequence. By the time I had twenty chapters, I needed to put them in order, see how the story was going to run. … I also knew that I didn’t have a beginning. Then I was started to write the beginning, and I thought, I don’t even know what her name is! Goddamn it, what is her name? And so I kept trying different names, and then I decided, you know what? She doesn’t have a name, because she wasn’t given a name, because she’s a girl. That’s how it happened.
Once I decided that, and I understood that, and how the convention in Korean culture is to never really call anybody by their first name, I already sort of knew that. Even if one of us was talking at home about a church member, and one of us would name this person by name, my mother would get so embarrassed, and say, “Oh, you can’t say that.” I always knew it’s so improper and impolite to say that. This was in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s not that way now. But it is for older people. You still can’t do that with older people, it’s really really rude, too familiar. That whole thing about, this is Susie’s mother, this is Jeannie’s mother, this is Nan’s father, that’s how you identify people, by their children. That’s how they have validity, because they’ve had children. Or if it’s a man, it’s by the position. It’s very complicated, but kind of interesting, it spoke a lot to the nature of the culture. The society is very conscious of its roles and how important that is in a successful society. So I thought, I can use this. So I made the mother come from this very remote, northern region. I looked at the map. I wanted to name her something that meant nothing. So I made her the woman from Najin [and so she was called Najin].
STH: Did you discover anything about your family that you hadn’t known before you began your research and writing?
EK: I think I relearned them in a different way. Because now I was learning these things with intent. I did learn new things, but the book was coming out and I made a trip to Korea with my sister. I learned a whole bunch of stuff.
STH: So you had not been to Korea before the book came out?
EK: Right. Which is one of the reasons I had to go. I thought, how can I write this book and never have been there? … It’s interesting what doors open when you begin to ask questions. This is one of the things I tell book groups; I think it’s one of the reasons why I don’t mind doing talks and stuff. We all have this in our lives. We all have parents, or we have parents who we don’t know who they are. But there are things in our past, we don’t know who we are until we know what those things are. Especially the things that are secrets. The secrets that we don’t know, how do they affect us over the generations? That’s one of the things I learned about writing this book. We all have this. Not that everybody should become a writer, but it’s how important family is. No matter how far you try and run, you just can’t.
STH: Christianity is a real source of comfort to your characters. Can you talk about its centrality to your book?
EK: Yeah, because I’m not Christian. [She laughs.] It was something I was very conscious of. These are people who had faith. My mother never had doubts. That is a fictional element that I had to put into the book, because I had doubts. So I can’t really believe her, unless I inserted [doubts]. I don’t have Christian faith, because my father was a minister. A lot of preachers’ kids, they go one way or the other. They become preachers or they become non-religious. Almost everyone in my family chose the second path, except for one sister who became Jewish. And not because of marriage. But that’s another story.
I was conscious of having that be a part of their lives, in a way that was active, but not too intrusive. Yeah, they went to church, they said “Praise God.” There’s a funny story about who to listen to when you’re getting edited, in the final stages of your book. I’ll just talk about two editors, and I won’t name where they’re from. The first editor said, “There’s just too much religion in here, everyone’s praising God, and there’s a lot of prayer, and there’s a lot of Jesus talk. I just don’t think it’s going to work for a secular audience.” So I thought, OK, whatever, so I took a lot of it out. And the second editor said, “These people are Christian, but it’s not really part of their lives.” [She laughs.]
STH: I hope you saved those paragraphs you cut out and tucked them away somewhere!
EK: Yeah, I put half of them back. That seemed to be the happy medium. It gave me a very important lesson that anyone who’s a writer needs to know, which is editors are always going to have their own opinions and you can’t please everybody.
STH: There’s an image in the book that stuck with me, of Najin putting her needle and thread away in their “proper places” as she “tucked her hopes aside — their proper place for now.” Women, especially, suppress their feelings in this book. Was that a difficult position to express?
EK: No, because I’ve been doing it all my life. [She laughs again.] I don’t know if it’s so Korean, as it is my family. My parents were so reserved because they were public figures. At home, my mother, especially when she was going through menopause, she was a screaming banshee. But in public, no. But also, I didn’t speak Korean, I didn’t know if they were talking about their feelings or talking about what’ s on for soup. I had no idea that people talked about feelings. It was like sex, you never really talked about it, but everybody has it. So that wasn’t hard to do. Especially because it was in my nature to be that way.
STH: Najin exults in the “joyous code of learning,” of writing, and there is a motif in your book of writing being erased for fear of discovery. I thought that was a great series of images and it seemed to relate to women and education.
EK: My mother was a minister’s wife until my father died at age 78; so my mother was 77. And my mom died in ’94, so in the decade and a half that she survived my father, she became an artist and a writer, she wrote stories and essays. She got published in the newspaper, in the Korean newspaper that always publishes literature. She published poetry. She was always a creative person, I knew this, but it was always dedicated to industry. She would sew, she would cook, she was always creative with her hands. … She taught herself the cello. She did all this stuff after my father died, because she didn’t have to do his stuff any more. She was finally free. That lesson of her life in those last 15 years, the joy she got out of it. It was like, wow, what if she had been able to do that from the age of 12. But that wasn’t her role. So that was one of the gifts she gave us, was her example of pushing us toward that creativity. And her own mother had pushed her toward the domestic arts, but also the education. That was a ground-breaking, rule-breaking thing.
STH: You’ve described your writing process as terrifying — why?
EK: [She laughs for a long time.] I don’t think there’s anything scarier for any kind of artist — even composers — than the blank page. You might have all the inspiration in the world, but when it comes down to translating what you’re feeling and seeing and the sensations, to actually translate that into something that is both understood by other people, in a way that you hope they understand it, and for it to be successful, that’s terrifying. I still have problems with that, that’s why I still prefer to edit. At least I have something. The creative part is just so hard.
STH: Can you talk about your new novel?
EK: Not really. I already am more excited about the third one, but — hello — I have to finish this one.
STH: Yes, I have a file on my computer with all these novel ideas, and you’re right, it’s always the next one that you’re always more excited about, because you don’t actually have to write it, you just have to think about it.
EK: And that’s so much more fun, isn’t it? The only thing I’ll say is that it’s undergoing a major overhaul. It’s all good, and I’m excited, but I have a lot of work to do. It’s going to take a long time. But the first novel took ten years, twelve, really, but this one, we’re on year six, that’s not too bad.
© Susan Thornton Hobby, 2016, all rights reserved.
