because we have faces.

when i think about beauty, i think about a few things.

i think about this quote by professor elaine scarry: “if people become cut off from the love of beauty, that sabotages their love of the world and increases their willingness to compromise it.”

i think about all the women i find beautiful, how beauty is subjective and not entirely physical, how a personality is really what gives someone that glow that catches your eye and keeps it. i think, too, about how beauty is used to value and devalue women, to build them up and tear them down, to say, “you’re beautiful … but that’s all you are” because beauty is made to be something desirable until it becomes a weapon with which to undercut women and their accomplishments. if a woman succeeds, if she stands out, especially in undeniably male-dominated fields, it must have been because of her beauty.

in that vein, i think about that asinine but telling comment by that food critic to put down dominique crenn, a two-michelin-starred chef, to say that, yes, she might have talent, but she’s also a beautiful woman, which, it is implied, is obviously a factor in her success. i think about what kristen kish said about how much had been written about her, her looks, her sexuality, but nothing about her food when she was chef du cuisine at menton. i think about that ridiculous ruckus raised over stephanie danler being blonde and pretty when her debut novel, sweetbitter, was published by an acclaimed literary house (knopf) last year.

and i think, god damn, it’s 2017. this is so fucking boring.

---

sometimes, i look in the mirror and wonder what people might make of me, my face, my body.

for much of my life, i felt hyper-visible, even while i tried to disappear myself, because, for much of my life, i was overweight. it was something that was made a Thing of because to be fat was to commit the worst offense. i was called names, mocked for my love of food, told that no one would hire me because of my size, that no one would date me, that, essentially, my life wouldn’t begin until i was thin enough to be accepted by the world. i couldn’t wear dresses or bright colors, anything that would bring attention to me and show off or accentuate my body in any way — the point was to hide, to mask, to cover.

the point was to disappear.

when you spend so much of your life, your entire adolescence and young adulthood, attaching value to your body, hating your body and detaching yourself from it, that kind of thing seeps into every aspect of your life. i see that consequent insecurity, that complete lack of self-esteem, in everything — how i conduct myself in the workplace, how i approach relationships with people, how i regard myself. it’s in the way i regard food, in the decisions i’ve made throughout my life, in the lack of confidence to pursue the things i love and want to do. it’s in the fact that i didn’t start dating until last year, haven’t had sex, haven’t pursued any kind of intimacy because i’m afraid of touch, of being considered repulsive, of not being attractive enough to be wanted or desired. it’s been easier to retreat and pretend to be indifferent than put myself out there to be rejected because of my size.

my history of being body shamed is what makes my recent diagnosis of type 2 diabetes so agonizing. on a cognitive level, i acknowledge that this is not the end of the world; there are worse things with which to be ill. i can manage it by managing what i eat, taking my meds, and exercising. i can bring down my sugar levels and reintroduce foods into my diet, and these limitations don’t have to destroy my life.

however, i have spent much of my life obsessively controlling what i eat (or trying) because i was always on one diet or another, always trying to lose weight, always reading labels and counting calories and logging gym time. i would hate myself when all that effort came to nothing because i would inevitably dive off that diet wagon and binge and gain weight instead, caught in a vicious cycle that just reinforced all my self-loathing and self-hatred and reminded me that i was worth nothing — i couldn’t even maintain the discipline or find the willpower to lose weight; what could i do with my life? if i couldn’t even have the perseverance to maintain my body, then how would i ever accomplish anything professionally? personally? relationally?

and this is what has made this type 2 diagnosis so fucking painful — that i have spent the last four years letting go of all that, of healing, finally learning to love myself, at least to respect and appreciate my body if i couldn’t love it, to be generous and kind to myself. it’s been a process to unload all that self-hatred, to stop conflating my ability (or lack thereof) to lose weight with everything else in life, and i’d finally reached a point where i was fairly comfortable in my body and didn’t hate myself for everything i put in my mouth and was finally able to wear what i wanted, be who i wanted, and be okay with me as i was in the present moment, flaws and all.

to have to come back to a place, then, where i need to read labels and obsess over what i eat, where i feel so guilty when i miss a single workout or eat a bite of something i shouldn’t — i don’t think words can fully express how devastating that has been. no matter how much i try to remind myself that this is okay, this is necessary for my health, this feels like disordered eating.

of course, this restrictive diet means that i’ve been continuing to lose weight (hilariously, the weight started coming off once i stopped giving a shit last year), and, of course, that brings with it the expected chorus of delight around me — omg, you’re getting so pretty! you’ve lost so much weight! — and i hate it all. i wince every time someone compliments me for how i look; it makes me twist and rage inside; and, even now, as clothes fit better and i feel lighter, still, i hate my body.

---

i didn’t start wearing makeup until last year, when glossier released their skin tint and stretch concealer.

i’d been reading into the gloss for a few years, but i hadn’t paid muchattention to glossier until last january when they launched their milky jelly cleanser. i loved milky jelly, which is still one of my top two favorite glossier products (the other being boy brow), so, when they started launching their makeup products, i was paying attention — and intrigued.

two things about me, i suppose: (01) i hate having things on my face, and (02) i’m lazy. i can’t be bothered with brushes, and i can’t be bothered with makeup routines that take more than ten minutes. i’m also lucky enough to have clear skin and, thus, not require heavy foundation or concealer, which sticks me right in that glossier niche — their products really do work freakishly well on my skin.

i’m a skin girl, in that i’m obsessed with skincare (i do actually do the korean 10-step routine) — and, then, i’m a lipstick and mascara girl. i don’t wear makeup everyday, not even to work, but i’ll usually always apply a lip color because, otherwise, i look pretty damn tired and kind of dead. when it comes to lip colors, i’m obsessed with oranges and reds, maybe some corals thrown in there, and, as much as i try to get into more wine or vampier shades, i just can’t get away from those bright oranges and reds. i love a bright lip; there’s just something so fun and sassy about it.

when it comes to skin, i’m a huge proponent of the double-cleanse — i use an oil (currently, using laneige; previously, used banila co; love/loved both) to remove all my makeup, and then i use milky jelly to wash it all off. then i’ll splash some son & park beauty water on a cotton swab and run that over my face and neck to get any last oil/makeup/residue off, and, then, it’s emulsion, serums, lotion, maybe a pack. every other night, i use the bite lip scrub because all that lipstick makes my lips peel, and i slather on a thick layer of balm dotcom in mint. (i carry all the other flavors around with me for day use.)

in the morning, i use a cleanser from the face shop in the shower, and, in the evening, if i’ve put on my face, i’ll wipe the day off my face with neogen’s cleansing water in rose (on a cotton swab).

and that is pretty much it. simple, no? simple is good. i mean, 75% of the reason i wear makeup is to make sure i wash my face at night.

i’m aware that there is a fair amount of privilege involved in my being able to write this. i don’t think i’m some great beauty, but i know i’m not ugly. i don’t feel super self-conscious posting the occasional selca on social media — or, well, i do, but not because of the way i look, per se. i might be bigger than some, but i can run into any big box retailer and find clothes that fit (the ethics of big box retailers is another topic).

it might, thus, appear a little nonsensical that i might be writing any of this at all, but body shaming is something very real with very real, deep consequences that i have dealt with for much of my life. it didn’t stop until i fought for it to stop a year ago, until i finally found the confidence in me to give voice to all that pent-up rage, to say, no, this wasn’t right, this had to come to an end. that’s not something i developed over night, either; i was well into my late-twenties before that even happened.

even now, i still see the shaming peeking out at me, except now it’s cloaked in praise and glee — oh, you lost so much weight; oh, you look so pretty; oh, do you have a boyfriend? (heteronormativity is also another topic — and, no, there is no boyfriend. there will never be a boyfriend.) some might say that compliments are good, and i wouldn’t disagree, but there is the opposite to everything and that glee is an expression of something far more insidious — this pervasive mentality that prettiness is to be desired, to be praised, that thinness is the baseline for a woman’s, a girl’s value.

and part of me sometimes feels weird for celebrating beauty and beauty products, for getting excited over shit like this because i don’t want to be complicit in a system or a cultural mentality that metes out so much harm upon young girls, upon women. it makes me uncomfortable, sometimes, to celebrate a woman’s looks, to notice her thinness because a part of me still gets jealous, still believes (irrational and untrue though it may be) that life would have been so much easier had i been thin. 

like many (most) people, though, i respond to beauty, not only in people but also in the world around me, and i think it’s worth noticing, celebrating, remembering. and i think there’s nothing wrong with makeup or with beauty products either, that we all (most of us) want to be attractive and have that confidence going into the world. i know that, sometimes, oftentimes, putting our faces on is akin to putting our armor on, and i think that is worth celebrating, too.

and, so, here are some products i like, some things i enjoy and wear on a regular basis, and here are the books i’m currently reading and/or will be reading soon — because, idk, i’m really into these or excited for them, and this space is all about geeking out over shit that gets me going.

---

glossier:

• milky jelly cleanser
• priming moisturizer
• stretch concealer (medium)
• skin tint (medium)
• boy brow (black)
• cloud paint (dusk)
• haloscope (topaz)
• balm dotcom (all of them)
• generation g (zip and cake)

other face things:

• neogen cleansing water (rose)
• son & park highlighter cube
• lancome mascara
• bite lip scrub 

lipsticks:

• clinique chubby stick (heftiest hibiscus)
• mac lipstick (vegas volt)
• fresh sugar lip balm (coral)
• sephora cream lip stain (always red)
• dior fluidstick (639 artifice)
• dior addict lipstick (756 my love)

deborah smith!

2016 october 5 at AAWW:  deborah smith is the translator of han kang's the vegetarian (hogarth, 2016) and human acts (hogarth, forthcoming 2017) and bae suah's a greater music (open letter books, 2016). i can't believe she only started learning korean six years ago and is already translating literature — i've known korean my whole life (it was actually my first language, despite the fact that i was born in new york), and i get so tangled up with insecurities over how my korean isn't fluent that i don't translate, even though i can (and have for fun).

that's not the point, though — i was so thrilled that deborah smith was going to be at AAWW, talking about translation and korean literature, and i loved hearing her talk. in general, i'm loving that there is a larger, concentrated effort being made to translate korean literature and get it out into the world, and i just love the work that translators do. it's not easy work; it's so much more than simply converting words; and i think it's awesome that smith pretty much just dove in because she wanted to be a literary translator and there was an opportunity with korean literature.

smith is also translating bandi's the accusation (grove, forthcoming 2017), which i am so excited for. i've read some of the accusation in korean, too, so it will be interesting to read it in translation.

---

• ed park:  this idea of — i think, it's easy to put a lot of attention on the vegetarian because it's had such a strong reception here. did you know as you were reading it or contemplating translating it, that this was something new, something fresh, something that a western reader perhaps would not be familiar with?
  • deborah smith:  definitely, i felt that it sort of, in one sense, exemplified what made south korean writing different from what was going on in the US, [the book] also being an outlier in korea at the same time. it wasn't a bestseller, but it became a steady seller.
  • DS:  one of the things that excited me about korean literature as a whole was the formal diversity because the short story historically had more prestige attached to it than it does in anglophone writing.
  • DS:  the way the vegetarian does read as a novel — it has one central story and is fairly chronological — the fact that it hangs together as these three tone pieces and these perspective shifts are really offering you a really different story in a sense felt not completely unheard of but sufficiently different, and that difference was incredibly well-done, so i thought it could at least be appreciated as that.
  • DS:  [han kang] published [the three pieces] in order. it just happened that the second won the prize.
• EP:  would you say that this is typical of the way other novelists' novels are constructed? kind of building off short stories?
  • DS:  this was the first book that i read in korean all the way through, which was very lucky for me.
  • DS:  i'd recently discovered [it] in 2011; it was a year after i started learning korean. 
• EP:  why did you settle on korean?
  • DS:  it's a really boring answer. it was almost a random decision. i didn't know any other languages, and i wanted to be a literary translator, and that was a barrier. it was a sort of pragmatic decision.
  • DS:  i'd always read more in translation than anything else, and i think that was because, at the time, i felt a bit alienated from mainstream british fiction. to someone who is british, the booker prize is very class-marked, and, as someone from the working class, i found this all very bizarre. the books written in other languages do not feel Other in that way.
  • DS:  i had been obsessed with japanese literature when i was in school, which is something that could happen because it was already there [in translation]. it was murakami.
  • DS:  i read everything i could read [in korean]. and, yes, i read a lot of female authors, authors who are doing something different. [...] nowadays, the people winning the prizes are women.
  • DS:  the first thing i read that i was really excited by was a story by o jeonghui.
• DS:  both of these books (the vegetarian and human acts) are describing things of great violence, but the prose is so restrained and carefully restrained that it never allows itself to become hysterical. i think that's something i had to pull back on as well. different languages have different ideas of what is too much.
  • DS:  the relationship with working with [han kang] on both these books was very different because the vegetarian was the first book i was in contract for. i wasn't sure what the procedure was, so i wasn't in touch with her — i wasn't in touch with anyone — and no one [was in touch with me], so i didn't think about it.
• DS:  bae suah is another contemporary korean writer who started in the 1990s. she also translated from the german to korean. this book (a greater music) is semi-autobiographical in the sense that the narrator is a young female south korean writer who is in berlin learning the language, having a go at writing in the language and existing in this nebulous state where words don't really exist in reality. this one was the first i translated at all in 2012, and it was — it i did it in the winter in seoul. and this is also set in the winter in berlin. so i was having pretty much an identical experience of korean as a language i was learning but i didn't know much of it and here i was trying to translate one of the most difficult writers to translate.
  • EP:  not just this work, but all of bae's work is seen as difficult.
  • DS:  someone described her as doing violence to the korean language. her korean sounded translated; it sounded particularly as though she had translated it from the german. you cannot replicate that in english because the structure of german is much more similar to english than korean is. i tried to make it sound more dissonant in other ways.
• DS:  i don't read korean like i read english. i don't think i will ever read it like i read english. [i only read short sentences without translating it into english. i don't read it the way a korean reader would.]

boston!

why do humans have this desire for possession, and why do we grow savage when we cannot satisfy it? (bae suah, a greater music, 60)

i find that there are two kinds of cities:  the ones i explore and the ones i settle into.

the latter is the rarer city, the kind of city that embraces me and makes me think, “hey, this feels familiar. i think i could see myself here; i think i could feel whole here.” it’s the kind of city i’m not frantic to see, the kind of city that discourages lists of things to do and foods to eat and neighborhoods to visit. it’s the kind of city that encourages slowing down, sitting in a cafe with a book and pastry and cup of coffee, absorbing moods instead of simply passing them by or walking them off. it’s the kind of city that says, “you have time. you’ll be here again, so slow down.”

it’s the kind of city that feels like it could be home, at least for a little bit because nyc will always be home. so far, i’ve only come across two cities like this:  sapporo and boston.

ultimately, “learning a foreign language” is too simplistic an expression for a process which is more like crossing a border; similarly, an individual’s development as a human being is only possible through language, not because language is our only means of communication, but because it is the only tool precisely calibrated for the application of critical thought. but to me, these thoughts of m’s were nothing but phantoms. a mother tongue isn’t a border that can just be crossed, not even with the strongest will in the world. even after fully mastering a foreign language (if such a thing is ever possible), your mother tongue still acts as a prison for your consciousness — this wasn’t a view that m ever expressed in so many words, but i knew that it was true. the fact that my mother tongue was different from m’s caused me unbearable grief. (61)

---

i took one book with me to boston because i didn’t want to carry more than one because i was traveling with friends and didn’t anticipate much down-time to read. on our second (and last) day, though, we split ways, and i found myself back in beacon hill, at tatte with a pear tart and a latte, exhausted and starving from walking and not really wanting to do much more city-seeing and/or touristing.

i spent the afternoon reading and finished this slim korean novel, a greater music by bae suah. two weeks ago, i went to hear deborah smith, the translator, speak at AAWW (that write-up is coming soon), and she’d briefly discussed a greater music and the language within — the narrator is a korean writer who returns to berlin to house-sit for her on-again/off-again boyfriend, and there’s a sense of the novel being in this in-between place language-wise because the narrator is in a foreign country, learning a foreign language, and feeling the frustrations of that linguistic barrier.

it’s been a few years since she’s been in berlin, and much of the novel is spent in remembering, in thinking back to her previous stay in berlin as a student. much of those thoughts, in turn, circulate around her former lover, m, whom the narrator hasn’t seen since she was last in berlin, though we meet m more as a ghostly figure who’s both central and peripheral to the narrator’s thoughts.

m views the world through theory. she’s clearly intellectual, and she thinks a lot, but there’s a sense through the novel that she’s removed from the world, not only intellectually or emotionally but physically, too, because of her health. this isn’t to make it sound like m’s reclusive or closed off to the world because she works, interacts with people, and so on; it’s more to say that i recognize her way of thinking, of thinking so deeply about things that everything is broken down into theories and nothing is simple or grounded.

the narrator is rather aligned with m’s ways of seeing the world, which leads to the thinking presented in the quote above. and it’s not that i have a problem with theory or that i don’t appreciate these deeper, more abstract ways of thinking about things, but here was (and is) my constant gripe with theory — that it often gets twisted up in itself and exists on its own self-elevated planes and eludes intersection with reality.

---

if m’s soul was with me then why did erich need to be a problem, if mere flesh, limited and inconsistent, really did amount to nothing, then why did i have to suffer on account of their one-night stand, why couldn’t i break free of this permanently unsatisfied desire for possession, when i was only too aware of how utterly base it was? i couldn’t come up with a single word of consolation or justification for myself. when its corollary is a hunger to monopolize m’s gestures, her shadow, her voice, love soon becomes a hell. (97)

you’d think that, given that this was the first time i was in boston, i’d be eager to try all these different restaurants and cafes.

instead, i went to flour for breakfast every single morning (read: three mornings) — and, then, i went back for cake and cocoa on saturday afternoon. i went to tatte twice, once for lunch, a second time for a pear tart and an iced latte. if i’d gone to the salty pig on saturday night as i’d hoped to, i likely would have gone back on sunday night, it was that good.

i am a creature of habit, and that’s also the thing about cities you settle into. there’s no frenzy to try everything, no need to cram everything in, no guilt at going back to somewhere you like and maybe ordering the same thing (i did that) or trying something new (i did that, too). also, there is nothing like a bowl of noodles and a plate of dumplings late at night.

my year reading korean and korean-american literature.

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.

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.

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.)

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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!