The Making of a Writer - Novelist Jimin Han

A Soy/Somos conversation

This interview continues my Soy/Somos conversation with Latinos in the US and other Americans living with their feet planted in two or more cultures. Soy/Somos. This is who I am. This is who we are.

         Jimin Han is author of The Apology and A Small Revolution. She is Korean American and a beloved writing mentor to many.

Welcome, Jimin. As you know, my main thesis in these interviews is that we live in a multicultural nation, and this is what makes us strong. Every wave of immigrants arrives in the United States with hopes, sense of hard work, with different ways of looking at the world—and the country is enriched. Generation after generation.

Can we begin with your parents—and you as a young girl in this country?

I think of my father as a risk taker. When we lived in South Korea, he volunteered as a medic alongside American troops in Vietnam. His connections with doctors there are what brought him to the United States. My mother, too, was a physician and believed she would continue her career, but she didn’t have the family support that she had in Korea.

When we arrived, my older brother was eight; I was four; my younger brother, one.

We lived in Providence, Rhode Island; then Dayton, Ohio. Finally, in Jamestown, New York.

Jamestown had very few Asian Americans. We were isolated in that way. I learned what being “Korean” was from what my parents said. It was lonely, but I also learned that differences can bring people together. My friends were children of teachers and professors and welcomed us into the neighborhood in a Jamestown that was full of Swedish and Italian immigrants. After I graduated from college, I moved to New York City, and the world opened up.

The world of Korean people with experiences similar to yours?  

Not only Korean people, but seeing communities of color. My college boyfriend and future husband was born in Harlem. He lived in three different New York City boroughs growing up, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. His grandparents were immigrants from South Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. In New York City, there were so many choices. It felt like there were no set expectations—even for being Korean.

I’d had glimpses before. I’d gone to South Korea in college for a summer, and as I was growing up my parents took us to New York City on short trips. I was in awe of the daughters of my parents’ friends in the city. Those girls were worldly, so confident. They could be what they wanted. They were getting a feeling of what Korean-ness could be from a lot of sources. 

In a magazine interview where you talk about finding community, you mention the Asian American Writers Workshop. I wonder how this relates to what you are saying. 

Even though I knew—I’d read Maxine Hong Kingston—being an Asian American writer seemed an impossible dream. When I came to New York, the Asian American Writers Workshop was just forming. I saw a flyer at a reading inviting people to join. I didn't go to a Korean church. I didn't believe I could fit in with other Korean Americans who grew up in these communities. I was shy, really shy. So, when I saw that flyer, I was curious but still didn't feel I could claim it as something I wanted.

I admire Marie Myung-Ok Lee and Curtis Chin, two of the founders, who built this incredible writers' organization.

A little later, I noticed a flyer again and submitted a story to the Asian American Pacific Journal. They accepted it! It was astonishing and such a relief. I felt it was dangerous to write that piece—it was fiction but didn’t portray the parents in a good light. I felt this was a place where readers wouldn’t judge my characters without understanding.

You were writing since early in your life then.

My mother said I was always filling notebooks with scribbles. In sixth grade our teacher announced: I am giving everyone a sheet of paper and you are going to write, and no one is going to say anything—and after that we can play dodge ball on our desks. I loved those fifteen minutes. I don't even remember what I wrote. The teacher would collect our papers and pass them back at the end of class with a note of encouragement. This is what writing is. I'm amazed he did this way back then.

At Cornell the deal with my father was that if I went there, I would be pre-law. Even then, my father would send me flyers for medical school.

This is what happened: I took a bunch of classes I was terrible at—philosophy, history, logic—I did horribly in all of them. In the spring of my sophomore year, because I was at risk of flunking out, I began taking English classes. I took Intro to Creative Writing—Marlena—pass/fail! That’s how nervous I was. My prof asked me twice after I handed in my first story if I really wanted to keep my grade like that.

When did you know, Jimin? 

I always knew, but I kept backsliding. How do you make a living as a writer when you’re young? I worked in a variety of jobs and was lucky to have people around me who were creative and encouraging. I was twenty-seven when I applied to Community of Writers in California. I was shocked they gave me a grant. This gave me a boost, a real boost. It's so important to be acknowledged by other writers. I knew then that I wanted to be doing what they were doing. I came back and applied to graduate programs.

So that was the big breakthrough. Did you get your MFA from Sarah Lawrence College?

Sarah Lawrence was perfect for me. They had all these electives. I got to take Improv. It made me courageous. I learned to be in my body in a public way. To be looked at and not be uncomfortable by that.

It seems that you came to a full sense of your Korean background a little later in your life, seeking it out.

My sense of being Korean continued to change, and I wanted to write about it. My cousin married a wonderful woman in South Korea, and she came to the United States, looked at all of us and said, "You all got stuck in time in the Korea that you left." She meant that their generation—meaning my parents and her in laws—were frozen in the 1970s that they emigrated.

Was she saying that what was really happening in South Korea was more worldly?

That things had changed, that South Korea had become more progressive, like here. If someone had left the US in 1970 and then had little exposure to the culture, they wouldn’t have grown with the times.

What community sustains you today?

I gravitate to people who value people's right to be themselves, writers and artists, adding to the conversation of who we are as humans on this planet. I'm worried about rights being taken away from women, Asian Americans, BIPOC, LGBTQA. Antisemitism is increasing. This makes me angry and sad. It keeps me up at night.

About your books, Jimin, A Small Revolution, a lyrical thriller, explores the impact of some Korean events inside a small American college. You have a new book coming out this year—The Apology—It's set in Korea, no?

Only the first few chapters. The main character, Jeonga, she and her aide travel to the United States by chapter eight.

An exercise I do with my students is to write about a time when they felt powerless. They can write about a dentist office. They can write about anything. Then we go back and change it to fiction. I ask them to change the outcome. If they were afraid, I ask them to make themselves suddenly able to overcome that fear and take action.

The Apology comes out of that feeling. I had written parts of the story before, but I didn’t have the overall idea for it. Then in 2020, like everyone, I was worried about Covid, afraid of death, still mourning my mother who died in 2016. So I wrote about a woman who died.

What's the worst thing that could happen? That she died and her story continued in the afterlife, still trying, not limited by death. I think how much my mother would want to be here to look after the ones she loved.  So I pushed it. I allowed the character to do these things.

I made the protagonist one hundred and five years old. You’re allowed to be larger than life if you live that long.

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Dear reader, Jimin’s novel, The Apology, will be released by Little Brown and Company on Aug 1 and is available for pre-order. It’s already received gorgeous reviews.

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As always, I’d love your thoughts on Jimin’s story. As always, this is a conversation.