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Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar, and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations—especially within the Asian diaspora in the West—as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown.
Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers across cultures who sustain her. As borders close in and nations enter lockdown, the journey that Kim traces is fraught—and at once illuminates that the act of remaining present has its own power, allowing boundless hope.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 16, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798855523737
- File size: 139601 KB
- Duration: 04:50:50
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 1, 2024
In this trenchant and inventive debut essay collection, Kim, a creative writing professor at the University of Warwick, reflects on her family’s immigrant experience. The pieces focus on the hardships Kim faced moving with her mother and father from Seoul to rural North Carolina at age seven, and then as an adult to England, where she earned a PhD in literature from the University of Manchester before securing a professorship at Warwick. Kim reflects on feeling othered throughout her life, such as when she was the only person in her high school English class forced to take a standardized test, presumably meant to prove fluency. Experiments with form keep the proceedings fresh. For instance, Kim writes one piece as a free associative “play” showing how she relied on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry for comfort while dealing with familial and academic stressors in graduate school. Another, “Dear Manchester Chinatown,” is delivered in the second person as a love letter to the eponymous neighborhood: “You were the pocket of a foreign city where I could breathe easier among faces that looked more like mine.” Throughout, Kim’s astute observations reveal the varied meanings of silence, whether she’s discussing her struggle to connect with her parents or holding her tongue after a white interlocutor’s racially insensitive comment. Probing and deeply felt, this entrances.
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