Are you even living if you are not feeling?
It’s been a month since I quit my job. Uncertainty has glamor, I’ll give it that. It also has anxiety. It also makes me crawl in my skin. Panic look up jobs on Idealist. But it also makes me realize how much of our lives are made up of our routines, both self induced and forced parameters of our lives. It’s also given me time to think again, read and write everyday. My old job and really my career as a city government employee was something I wanted, badly, as a young person growing up. I thought a career in government meant the ability to change the world, bring resources to my community and it was that to a certain extent. But I also started to see how crucial it is to divorce your ‘self’ from your work.
I’m drawn to the way life can suddenly shed all its outlines and become completely different. I’m more afraid of the kind of life that can creep up on you, gradually, until it manifests in those quarter, mid, 3/4? life crises. Though nowadays, so many of us don’t even have that privilege. So many of us are living underpaid, undervalued. Maybe I expect too much too. Too much of my life.
*
I asked my parents about our family lineage. Immediately they were suspicious, “Is it for your book?” then resigning to saying, “주애는 그런걸 관심있지”. Or Julie always had interest in that kind of stuff.
Tell me about grandpa, I asked my dad after he passed away and suddenly, I realized I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t even remember his name as I always called him 할아버지, grandpa. He would call from Virginia and leave voice messages just stating 할아버지다, it’s grandpa, and hang up. Tell me about grandpa, I asked, suddenly guilty.
My parents, they can only remember their own parents, my grandparents, and that is the extent to our family line. My mom’s side of the family, her mom committed suicide and her father also died at an early age, due to alcoholism. My dad’s side of the family, my grandma lived in Japan for a little while and my grandfather came from a lineage of pottery / ceramicists but luck failed him as he quit his ceramic job for a better one in Japan. At that moment, the attempted assassination of South Korean president Park Chung Hee which resulted in the death of his wife, Yuk Young Soo strained relationships with Japan and my grandfather’s visa and trip got cancelled. His former job already filled by another, he immigrated to the U.S when the opportunity arose. My aunt married an American who was serving in Korea.
“Julie, the past is past. Look to the future. What it can bring you instead”.
*
Sometimes I wonder about my desire to write a memoir or a book really. Nobody has ever pitched that to me as an idea though I grew up as an avid, avid reader, the type to borrow the max limit from the library (25 books) at a time. As a child, I used to copy fairytales into a notebook, line by line. Write down every single word I saw looking out the window of a car ride into my notepad. It just wasn’t in the cards until I found the card and brought it into my fold but even that process took years. My first workshop with Bushra Rehman at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop — I just wanted to write. A break up two years ago that devastated me had me writing for hours at my desk about it, trying to understand it. People say not to use writing for therapy but I say use it for whatever the hell you want. The most important thing is to connect, to feel, that’s what life is about.
Am I writing to be seen? To be heard? To have something that is completely my own for once.
Fiction never appealed to me as much as a memoir because I find reality and the life I currently live, the people around me, and how I react, the things I feel, so bizarre. Bizarre really is the way I would describe it. I find it interesting how I react to certain situations, but also then it makes me think, why do I have that reaction? So basically, my love of overanalyzing.
More recently, I’ve been thinking about the ethics of it. I write about people the closest to me, people who make me feel something, mostly family and lovers. Part of formative childhood and girlhood experiences.
I’ve been participating in The Grind for the last month and a half — for the month of June and now July which is an email chain sent to a group daily to keep each other accountable. I recently published a short story that I wrote in a morning session for my daily Grind in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood about Riis Beach. I felt a pull to publish something, probably to show something for the last few months that I’ve spent writing almost everyday, from a sentence to a 1000 words, and have accumulated over 10k words. What I didn’t foresee is the embarrassment that I would feel once the piece got accepted and published. Embarrassment on a couple of different levels — it felt like a frivolous piece that would’ve been alright just never being published. The personal nature of it also felt like an imposition.
An important thing to come out of it though was having the discussion with my partner who is in the piece. Approaching them with this was nerve wracking, grappling with what if they want me to kill it, hate it, what is the right recourse to take then? But it made me think more thoroughly about the role of others in a memoir or a nonfiction piece. I don’t ever aim to write about others just for that sake, it’s how they interact with my life, feelings, situation.
The ethics of nonfiction is also not talked about enough. The power of the writer’s perspective over any other’s. People say, well then they can write their own account but we all know that that may not be feasible or accessible for multiple reasons. So then, what is the responsibility of the writer here?
Reading
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Your silence will not protect you.” — Audre Lorde
My current booklist:
Just finished The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
Picked up Chemistry by Weike Wang which I had laying around and finished in a night. A good read for when you are feeling a sense of ambivalence?
Just bought Ghost Forest by Pik Shuen Fung (a former Kundiman mentorship fellow in my cohort!) & Pop Song by Larissa Pham
What’s going on & coming up?
Come to an upcoming reading I’ll be at, hosted by Yasmin on Sunday in Bushwick! It’s basically my entire writing group and I love all of their writing so much. RSVP for address & more information here.
I’m taking a class with Celeste Mohammed during the 2021 KWELI International Literary Festival! Check out all of their free readings & sign up for workshops if you desire here
<3,
Julie Ae Kim
Thank you so much for subscribing. I want to keep this a private monthly letter from me to you. It’s more to connect rather than just putting my stuff into the world for random consumption if that makes sense. If you liked this, click the heart ❤️. Feel free to reply with anything this newsletter may have brought up for you too. Sending all my love.