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I get this question a lot, so I’m going to come across as a bit short or annoyed, but it’s not about you, I promise (I don’t know you after all).
It’s about your question.
It is a rude question, and I don’t appreciate it. Frankly, what I am and how that affects what I write is none of anyone’s business. If you want to know why I wrote Wintersong and not something Asian, I write a little about it here. And it isn’t that I don’t intend to write something Asian-inspired; I do. Why did I choose to write something European? Many things. I like Mozart. I like the German language. I like European folklore. I am pretty goth. I grew up with these things, so I know them pretty intimately.
But I want to unpack this question a little. Why is it that women of color are expected to write or perform their own marginalizations? Do we go around asking out queer people to only write queer stories? Do we ask disabled people to only write their disability? Incidentally, I wrote my disability into Wintersong. I gave Liesl my bipolar disorder. But the praise and censure I get always stems from the most obvious marginalization I have: my face, and by extension, my ethnic background.
If you want to get into the weeds of why I didn’t write something Korean first, it’s because I’m not Korean. I am of Korean descent, yes. I am a member of the diaspora. But neither am I truly a part of the Korean-American immigrant experience. I grew up pretty privileged: my dad is white, I went to an all-girl’s private school, was part of swim and tennis clubs, etc. I had a lot of the markers of cultural whiteness, which is tied with class. My Koreanness is whitewashed, not just by my cultural privilege, but because I didn’t have access to a Korean extended family. My aunties, uncles, and cousins all live in Seoul, or some didn’t make it out of Pyongyang before the establishment of the 38th Parallel. I’ve been to Korea twice. The only Korean members of my family are my mother and my grandmother. Everyone else is white.
That cultural whiteness? It comes across to a lot of people, and it especially came across to other Koreans. There are reasons I don’t speak the language as well as I should, considering it was my milk tongue. I went to Korean school and attended Korean church for a while, but I was bullied and ostracized so badly I stopped going back when I was 9. I wasn’t bullied because my dad was white; I was bullied because I wasn’t Korean enough. I didn’t share their cultural language. I didn’t even share the same parental pressures. My mother is the one who had been pressuring me to quit my day job and become a full-time writer, not my dad. As a result, I was the outcast in every Asian group I ever tried to be a part of as a kid. Some were open about it to my face. You’re not Korean enough. Some were more insidious about it. They would deliberately choose subjects and topics about which I had no handhold, freezing me out of conversation. My friends? The theatre kids, the artist freaks, the writers. The vast majority of them? White.
This obviously left pretty deep psychic scars. I can’t eat doughnuts, for one. They smell of Korean school and shame. But it also left me with a deep insecurity about even approaching a Korean subject in writing. Am I enough? Am I enough, am I enough, am I enough? It’s only as an adult that I’ve made Asian friends, that I’ve slowly started to find my way back to the heritage I’ve kept at arm’s length.
I’m telling you my history, nonny, to better answer your question. But to also maybe shed a light on the effect of asking a marginalized person to perform their marginalization for you. For me, that question is fraught, and I imagine it is for a lot of other Asian writers as well. When I hear that question, all I hear is You are not enough. You are not Asian enough. You didn’t even write something Asian. You are not enough, you are not enough, you are not enough.
AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST 