Straight Outta Houston
The following is a conversation between Hyeseung Song, whose Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, comes out July 16 from Simon & Schuster, and Margaret Juhae Lee, author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, which was published by Melville House in March.
An Interview with Hyeseung Song and Margaret Juhae Lee
MARGARET JUHAE LEE
I loved reading your book Docile. There's just so many parallels in our experiences: not only growing up in Houston, but having Korean parents who want certain things for you that you don't necessarily want and having to find your voice. For both of our books, I wish we had had them when we were growing up. That was my feeling the whole time I was reading your book. I wish I had a book like this, just to know that I wasn't so alone. And that's another thing that really resonated with me—the loneliness of growing up Korean American in Houston in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
HYESEUNG SONG
And even when you end up in a group of Korean Americans, you can still feel alone because of all the baggage you're bringing.
MARGARET
I know, for me, I never felt close to other Korean Americans. Because my family was on the liberal side, their values were very different from the majority of Korean families we knew. And because I didn't speak much Korean, I didn't feel like part of that community, which I didn't see that often. Maybe once a month when my parents would drag me to their Korean fellowship group meetings.
HYESEUNG
I grew up attending a Korean Catholic Church in Houston, so every week there was an opportunity to see other Koreans. Later on in life, my brother and I had a conversation about our Catholicism and how it was based on also being Korean. He and I felt very spiritual and close to God growing up, but there was this dissonant experience of how we practiced our faith in a Korean Catholic Church where we simply didn’t have any friends. The other kids were always hanging out together and playing basketball after mass, but both my brother and I felt very isolated. I don't know if it was because we were so religious, but we experienced another layer of feeling isolated from the Koreans because somehow, ironically, our intense faith set us apart from the rest of the community.
MARGARET
Right, Korean church was more of a social outlet than anything.
HYESEUNG
I read Starry Field in a fever dream in one sitting, and my main takeaway was just your incredible perseverance. The book is obviously your journey to piece together the lost history of your family and uncover its meaning but also, so much of your life is happening in tandem with the family story, and I love how you weave in culture and what is happening in contemporary life, which reminded me of Hua Hsu’s Stay True. In some ways, your professor father embodied the ideal of the “model minority,” unlike mine who was eccentric and always involved in get-rich-quick schemes. But even with your father being so outwardly successful, in the background was this incredible pain, the pain of his family’s history. It was so interesting to see, the details being so different in our respective families, but the pain being similar.
MARGARET
That pain of history, and how that's passed on to us, the next generation. For me, I think I always felt it, but I never knew what it was. And maybe that's part of that loneliness and what they call “intergenerational trauma” now. When I started this book, nobody knew what intergenerational trauma was. But yes, that pain of history, that pain of being an immigrant—it is very similar.
HYESEUNG
Looking back at the journey of your book, there are so many fascinating and difficult twists and turns, like figuring out how to access and translate the history and documentation, but can talk about some of the more internal challenges? What was hard for you?
MARGARET
Both internally and externally, it was so hard for me to write about myself. It was easy for me to do research on the grandfather I never knew, to be a journalist and look at it like a research project. But putting the lens on myself was the hardest thing. In journalism, you're not supposed to write about yourself—you're supposed to be objective, or semi-objective, which is really a fallacy. Turning the lens on myself and feeling comfortable writing about myself—that was the hardest part.
We both write about therapy and therapists.… I had to go to therapy and really dig into why I was doing this and why I was unhappy. So that was definitely the biggest struggle for me and one of the reasons why it took me so long to write the book.
HYESEUNG
It was the emotional work that you had to do to get the book done.
MARGARET
Definitely, because the journalism part was done twenty-five years ago. What resonated with me about your book, too, was pin-pointing that putting-others-first mentality that we were taught to do as nice Korean girls. Getting out of that mindset was so much a part of my journey as well. That's exactly what I was grappling with—I'm doing this for my father, I'm doing this for my family. I thought I was uncovering history as a gift to my father, but then I had to come to terms with the realization that it was about me.
You articulate going on this journey to yourself so well in your book.
HYESEUNG
You come full circle because you ultimately wrote the book for your children, too. It is for you and then through that, circling back to this next generation, to your children, so that they have a clearer, more fulsome picture of your family.
MARGARET
On almost every page of your book, I thought, yes, that's totally what I went through—finding freedom in New York City, finding freedom through art.
My mother was a painter, so whenever you write about art, it really sang to me. I love all the passages where you use your painterly eye to describe things—that really touched me. What makes your voice really unique is that painterly eye, because you don't often find that in memoir.
HYESEUNG
What was so activating for me in Starry Field was, as I said, the story of your contemporary life and your journey to selfhood. But it was also the way you wrote—it felt like you weren’t trying to make so many connections for the reader; you let the sentences breathe on their own. And to me, that felt journalistic in a sense. You’re presenting what is happening with your life and your perspective, and letting the reader fill in the spaces where you could have given more exegesis if you’d been a different writer.
I am thinking about how you and I both had long timelines from genesis to publication of our books. I am thinking about the first iteration of my book back when I was 35. Back then my mother, while she was sick, she was still very much alive. I don't know if I could have written the book that's going to be published now if my mother were still around.
I had to go through a lot of things to write this book; I had to experience her death and mourn her. I remember in Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner says that so many good things happened to her after her mother died, suggesting that her mother was looking out for her from the afterlife. I’m wondering if you have any similar feelings about your book journey since neither of your parents were able to see your book published.
MARGARET
I think so. I do feel [my parents’] presence sometimes. I know my father would have been very proud and would have been sharing the reviews with all his friends. But I know them passing on freed the book in a way. I don’t have the pressure of having them read it and wondering what they would think. There are some parts where I tell secrets about the family and portray my father perhaps not in the best light, and I wonder how he would have reacted to that. When I started this project, he read everything. And that was more the reportage—writing about my great uncle and my grandfather.
But I realized that I had to cut him off because him reading my draft so early was stifling my own voice. I was thinking about what my father would want to read and not what I wanted to say. My father was a mathematician, so he was focused on facts and thought my book should be a history, a history of my grandfather. It was very hard to explain to him what it actually was, because I don’t think he really understood what memoir was—my book was either a historical book or biography. In his head, he had very fixed ideas of what the book should be.
HYESEUNG
That’s so interesting.
MARGARET
And he ended up writing his own autobiography before he died, because I was taking so long. After he retired, he wanted some record of his life. He basically wrote it for his grandchildren. I’m glad he wrote it. I was not involved in the writing, though he wanted me to be. I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea because we’re both writing books, and I didn’t want his point of view to affect my writing.
HYESEUNG
One of the issues with Asian American memoir is the pressure from our families not to offend or tell the truth about our dynamics because saving face is still somewhat important. My dad’s still alive, and he will not read Docile. I know he loves me, and I know he thinks something great is happening—that is, the publication of the memoir—but I do believe he thinks that it’s at his expense, because Docile is not a press release about our family, but a memoir.
I don’t know much about Korean literature, and I don’t think my father really follows Korean literature at all. But like you, I wonder how my father’s generation of the Korean diaspora understands memoir. Maybe the idea of memoir is slower to penetrate this generation. But then again, my brother, who’s younger than I, has also had a really hard time with my memoir. My guess is he thinks it should be the greatest hits of our family.
You and I are writing in a memoir tradition that is now quite strong. And the particular narrative and emotional arc I wanted to capture in the book, that I felt was truest, was one of highs and lows and people who were simultaneously devils and angels. I love my father, but I wasn’t ever not going to say what I needed to say. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not sad that one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me professionally and personally, is something that my dad cannot be incontrovertibly happy about.
MARGARET
Maybe it's beyond his understanding of what it is. Because I think that's what I felt with my father. As if what I was trying to do was a little bit beyond his understanding. And when I tried to explain it to him, it wasn't computing in his very mathematical mind.
I wanted to talk about how you were so open about your mental health struggles in your book. It made me think about my father at the end of his life when he was having such a hard time with my mother's dementia. He would get very angry and couldn’t deal with it emotionally. He would yell at the nurses, and so his doctor and I suggested to him that maybe he should see a therapist.
He got so, so angry with me. He yelled, “I don’t believe in mental health struggles, I don’t believe in any of that.” And my dad was a professor at a school of public health. He did studies for the National Institute of Mental Health, but when it came to himself, it was not [possible]. When I read your book, it struck me that some things are beyond comprehension to our parents—because they have been in survival mode and had to hold onto that supreme belief. Thinking that you are fallible breaks that whole ethos that has been paramount in their lives.
HYESEUNG
That's a great way of putting it. In the vein of taboo and untalked-of things.… When I was growing up in Texas, which was so hot, I was not allowed to wear shorts that came above my knee or sleeveless tops. When I was older, I realized that this prohibition had to do with sex, the body, pleasure—and all that was bad.
I also had a cousin in Korea a little older than I who ended up marrying someone with the same last name but from a different family line. That was a big deal in Korea, and I remember my mother making a remark about how their future children were going to be mentally ill because they were too close in the bloodline. When I lived in Korea during the Asian Financial Crisis, I wanted to see where the gay clubs were because that was where a single female could go dance and have fun in safety. I asked my boss at my firm in Korea where the gays hung out, and he shut it down right then and there. “Gays don’t exist in Korea. They go underground, but they don’t really exist,” I remember him saying.
There were so many taboos and energy expended towards pretending things didn’t exist so long as you didn’t talk about them. I’m part of the diaspora, so I don’t know what it’s really like in Korea now, but I hope that the culture at ground zero changes much faster; I hope it’s improved in the 25 years since I lived there.
MARGARET
My mom always said, “Oh, all the gay people are at Itaewon.” As if implying that the Americans brought the gays [since Itaewon was close to the military base].
HYESEUNG
Oh my god.
“There were so many taboos and energy expended towards pretending things didn’t exist so long as you didn’t talk about them.”
MARGARET
I love that we were both born in the Year of the Horse, so we’re 12 years apart. And I love that comment from your parents that it’s not auspicious for a girl to be born in the Year of the Horse.
HYESEUNG
You and I come from rebellious blood.
MARGARET
I was really struck that even though we're 12 years apart, our experiences growing up in Houston were so similar. Maybe Houston has changed now. You and I were so part of the white culture, the dominant culture—it was so dominant that we didn’t even know that it was dominant. I wonder when questioning that culture came to people like us in the area. Perhaps at the end of the 90s or early 2000s?
HYESEUNG
The neighborhood I grew up in, Memorial, has become more mixed and a lot more Asian, too. My sister who is sixteen-and-a-half years younger than I am, went to all the same schools, and she has many more Asian American friends than I ever did. But when I was going to those schools in the 80s and 90s, I definitely felt there were few of us Asians, so I built my identity on tokenism. As I said before, even when I was surrounded by other Korean Americans like at my Korean Catholic Church, the difference in the environments still didn’t penetrate.
It’s been the most fascinating thing as an adult to step into my Korean American identity--that there is this third way, not Korean, maybe not completely American, but definitely Korean American. It’s been a journey coming to that understanding and filling it out later in life.
And it’s still happening. I find myself confronted with it all the time in New York in different ways. For example, the other day I was having lunch in a restaurant and my server was Asian American, and I had a hard time looking him in the eyes because with him there, I didn’t feel so alone and it almost made me shy. Small interactions like this with other AAPIs register more, but it’s still not completely comfortable. It’s exciting, it’s interesting, but it still feels new to me.
MARGARET
I feel the same way.
HYESEUNG
I teach a lot. And my art students are obviously much younger than I am, but yet I think they deal with a lot of the same issues. I’m always thinking that things would have changed so much in twenty years, but it’s simply not true—everybody’s still dealing with the same stuff.
MARGARET
When did you feel Korean American? In your twenties or thirties?
HYESEUNG
Back when I was at college at Princeton and having such a hard time, the administration encouraged me to take a year off. I thought, this is my chance to have a rumspringa, get a job, leave my parents’ home, have a great experience in some city where I could look at ton of art, read books.
And then, you know of course from reading Docile that my parents sent me to Korea as a bootstrapping measure, and it was not the best place for me because my mental health wasn’t addressed. I went to work at a corporation that was conservative even by Korean standards at the time and very hierarchical. This was a particularly difficult time in Korea for the country because of the Asian Financial Crisis which was blowing up just as I arrived. I was sexually assaulted while living in Seoul, and so it took a long time to want to turn to Korea and see in it pieces of my identity.
But there is a silver lining to all of this. When I got back to America and returned to Princeton, I had this new understanding that I wasn’t a Korean person in America, as my parents had always maintained; rather, I was Korean American, this other thing. And it was up to me to come up with what that meant, because no one was going to tell me how to figure it out for myself. So, the fleshing out of that identity was exciting, and not unlike painting on canvas. No one was going to tell me what to do or how to do it, I was just going to figure it out.
MARGARET
I don't think I felt Korean American until I moved to California in my mid-twenties. I didn't even realize Asian American was an identity until I moved here. When I went to University of Texas in the 80s, there was no Asian American Studies department. There were so few Asians, it wasn't an identity yet there. Coming to California and meeting people who grew up in predominantly Asian neighborhoods, and also seeing an Asian American hipster persona I didn’t even know existed, I kept thinking, if I had grown up in California, I would have been very, very different.
HYESEUNG
Yes, Asian Americans from the West Coast don’t deal with quite the same existential concerns as the East Coast Asian Americans. The West Coast AAPIs always seem so comfortable.
MARGARET
You write so poignantly about the other Korean American person in your high school. There is that sense of competition, that feeling that there’s not room for both of us. That mentality pervaded my life too. Other Asians looking at you with suspicion. We’re not one big happy family, and it’s isolating to feel that.
HYESEUNG
Yes, this idea of scarcity. “We all need white resources and white attention, so step off, this is my territory.” It just struck me how nice, how powerful, it is to have this conversation right now. Because May is AAPI Heritage Month, and sometimes people find these heritage months problematic, but it is just awesome to see more examples of Asian American joy.
We all know the model minority myth is about isolating ourselves from each other and limiting our collective power, which is immense. So, it's wonderful to see instances of Asian Americans standing together. And of course, I’ve been feeling it acutely this month in New York where there are just so many cool spaces, like Yu and Me Books where I was a few days ago for my friend’s launch, just spaces where it’s very comfortable. Like I said before, that’s still a relatively new experience for me to step into those spaces.
MARGARET
I feel the same way. Even this publication journey is like finding that safe group and understanding there's room for all of our stories. There’s not just one Korean American narrative, there’s a multitude, and honoring that, and also escaping the dog-eat-dog, super-capitalist mentality that there can only be one. Who’s going to rise to the top? The model minority myth tells us that you must be at Harvard and carries with it all these expectations, rather than gathering everyone together and not having it be a competition all the time. I feel very held now.
I started Starry Field in the late 1990s and found an agent soon after. If I had published my book back then, it would have been a totally different experience. I’m pretty sure I would have been encouraged to explain Korean history. I remember one of my early readers, who was a professor at Brown, telling me, “You need to explain what kimchi is.” And I replied, “no.” That was the point of view back then—you need to explain your culture to a white audience. I think now we have the freedom to inhabit our culture and not be forced to make it digestible. There’s still some of that out there, but I think the tide is turning.
HYESEUNG
The advantage of such a long publication journey is that when we finally came out, our books enjoyed a more amenable environment, one that was more open and did not orient solely around white readers. I wrote the first chapters of what would become Docile when I was 20 in college. Back then in the Creative Writing Workshops of Princeton, you could be a fiction writer or a poet. But there wasn’t anything for writers working in Creative Non-Fiction, memoir or essays. And what’s so interesting is that yes, we wrote these Asian American memoirs but our trajectory has been in concert with the deepening and sophistication of the memoir tradition.
I am thinking about my students, and I wonder if you have any advice for someone who wants to write a memoir and delve into family history.
MARGARET
I get this question a lot from younger people, because they're very interested in oral histories. I talked to a friend of mine who works at Cal Arts, and she just says, there's a lot more interest in capturing stories, especially immigrant stories, and that oral history is included in the curriculum of more writing programs. So, yes, I get that question a lot: how do I get my elders to speak to me, without them feeling defensive? I think you just have to start somewhere where you can meet comfortably. Like food. Which I think explains why the basis of so many Asian American memoirs is food. Because you can turn on your phone and ask your auntie while you’re together in the kitchen, “What did you eat when you were little?” Or “where did this elder come from?” The entry point where everyone feels comfortable is often food or some ritual.
HYESEUNG
And it can be casual.
MARGARET
Yes, super casual. It doesn’t have to be a sit-down interview where you are doing this performative thing. Since we have technology now, you can just turn on the phone, and start. With my father, I had him draw his childhood home for me. Because he was so precise, it was an architectural drawing with a floor plan. He drew a traditional Korean house with ondol floors. And he showed me how the kitchen fire would warm the floors, how the heating system worked. And just having him do that told me so much about how he grew up.
Other questions you can ask are: Did you have pets? Did you hang out with your cousins? Or just asking about childhood stories is a great place to start. What did you like to do when you were a kid? To me, that question was the most illuminating, because when I was growing up, I never thought of my father as a kid. And he never talked about his childhood during colonialism. Having him open up about his childhood made me see him as the person he used to be, which was very different than the father I grew up with.
I think the younger generations of immigrant parents want to know about the past because they’re removed from the country their elders left behind. And I know with my own grandmother, she didn’t want to talk to me at first. But you have to figure out how to. For me, I had to say interviewing her was for my career. It was only then that she agreed to talk to me.
HYESEUNG
I laughed when I read that, because it was obvious then she was definitely going to open up then!
“There’s not just one Korean American narrative, there’s a multitude—escaping the dog-eat-dog, super-capitalist mentality that there can only be one.”
MARGARET
I love that younger people are reading my book, people just a little bit older than my kids, who are teenagers. Starry Field is for the next generation. Hopefully, they can normalize this process of delving into the past…
I'm coming out of the first month after publication, and you're delving in, but I’ve asked this question of myself: Why did you chose to write these stories? I ask that question because publication is a lot of work, it’s a hustle. I’m asking myself, am I reaching the people that need to hear this? And even if I reach one young person, one family, maybe it’s worth it. And I can focus on that [connection], instead of publications and sales. It’s all about who is reading the book and how it touches them. That’s the one great thing about going on tour: to see the real people who are interested and reading the book.…
At my last reading, there was a young person, probably in their 20s, who came with their parents, who looked a little bit lost. But this person said that I want them to read your book to normalize the process of digging into the past for them. That interaction made the whole tour. If I can touch someone like that, then it’s all worth it.… And watching faces as I read, I find that fascinating.
HYESEUNG
It must be so nice, and different than Instagram, to be in the same room with someone who is listening to your story and see their reaction on their face in real time.
MARGARET
It makes it all worth it. And I’m glad that you are part of my journey and I’m part of yours. It’s been really great.
HYESEUNG
I couldn't have gotten this far without our group text thread [of four AAPI debut authors, including Annabelle Tometich and Talia Tucker]. A couple of months ago the three of you were starting to launch, and I’m still waiting to launch, but your trajectories have been amazing to see.
We’ve talked about this before, how every publication journey is like a child. Everybody’s is different. Everybody’s is beautiful and interesting and amazing to observe. And of course that makes me continue to think of this next generation. I don’t have children, but I have my students I am close to, and this month being both AAPI Heritage Month like we said, but also Mental Health Awareness Month, I reflect on how much young Asian Americans have suffered in the last few years and are continuing to suffer, even with the same issues I was confronted with when I was a college student. I’m referring in part to Asian Americans struggling with their mental health and being reluctant to utilize college counseling services, and when they finally do, how far gone they are in their symptoms.
I hope that with Docile I’ve shown that I lived under a lucky star. I was always surrounded by people who wanted to help me, like my college roommate who knew something was wrong and picked me up and took me to the counseling center. There are students who don’t have someone like that in near proximity. One of my greatest hopes is that Docile steps in with its message that what Asian American young adults are dealing with is something complicated at the intersection of race and mental health. These students are stepping into environments that pose inherently complex issues for them, and their institutions must acknowledge that and try to reshape themselves in the face of that. And these students are not going to college just for themselves. Sometimes they feel like they’re going to college for their entire community.
MARGARET
That’s a lot for an eighteen-year-old. A lot of pressure.
It’s interesting having kids of my own and remembering how resistant I was to my own parents pushing me, and how that past comes out with my own children. I remember asking my son about colleges and which ones he wanted to apply to and me offering suggestions like “what about University of Chicago? Dartmouth? Cornell?” even though I knew he preferred a large state school. And having to force myself back off. That push is so ingrained in me. I can still hear my parents’ voices urging me: “You need to apply to the Ivy League.” I pushed back saying, “I don’t want to, I want to go to the University of Texas.” And I did, but because my parents were still pushing me, I acquiesced to their wishes and studied pre-med for almost three years before switching to art history. So, yes, I had to step back and stop myself with my own kids and tell myself that they have their own path.
HYESEUNG
How masterfully you just illustrated that: how the past rises and starts to build in the present, and then how you have to stop yourself so you can do something different from your parents. No disrespect to the previous generation, but you’re not trying to do the exact same to your own kids.
MARGARET
Yes, but it’s hard. Sometimes things come out of my mouth that I regret. And I just hate myself for channeling that past, for having digested some of it even though I was rebelling against it. Part of me thought it was the truth, and I am coming to terms with it later in life with my own kids—the fact that I did believe in it a little. So, it’s still part of the binary. I’m trying to get out of the binary thinking, but the learning? The learning still happens, even when you’re almost 60.
Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (7/16/24, Simon & Schuster). She lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Learn more about her at hyeseungsong.com.
Margaret Juhae Lee is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her book. Previously, she was an editor for the Books and the Arts section at The Nation magazine. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog. She was a contributing writer at Oakland Magazine, where she covered the local maker community. Her article, “Seoul’s Celluloid Soul,” originally published in The Nation, was anthologized in Readings in Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture. Find more at https://www.margaretjuhaelee.com/
Banner image courtesy of Crystal Jo.
