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Literary Vagabond Suki Kim Makes Her Debut

Suki Kim.

By Terry Hong | Special to AsianWeek

Suki Kim and I have so many similarities in our respective pasts that we most certainly have crossed paths before. We were both in London at the same time, studying in the same department at London University (she in Korean literature, I in Japanese), hanging out at the same small specialized library there and going to the same fabulous fringe theater (where she bartended and I subscribed) on a regular basis.

When we finally meet officially to discuss the publication of her first novel, The Interpreter — about a young Korean American woman, Suzy Park, living in New York City and searching for answers as to why her shopkeeper parents were murdered — we quickly move from small talk to real conversation.

Born in Seoul, Korea and raised in New York City, Kim majored in English and minored in East Asian Literature at Barnard College. She headed to London immediately after graduation but after a year-and-a-half of graduate study in Korean literature, Kim decided to forego the Ph.D. route. “There was just too much politics involved with getting into that field. While great Japanese and Chinese literature in translation was and is being taught, the literature being translated from Korean was and continues to be really lacking.” Fully bilingual, Kim herself began translating a novel as part of her degree, but in the process discovered she “enjoyed writing [her] own stuff more.”

Kim returned to New York City — “it’s definitely home for me” — and tried a series of odd jobs, including editing, while taking various writing classes at places like the famed 92nd Street Y. She tried teaching, but “enjoyed it too much so that [she] had to quit,” she laughs.

She wanted finally to give full-time writing a serious try and got herself into a writers colony at Ragdale Foundation near Chicago. “They gave me a fellowship to just write, which seemed remarkable to me. They even provided me with a plane ticket! It was a validation that someone thought my writing was actually good enough,” Kim says.

From Ragdale, Kim chose the life of the itinerant writer, a two-year journey of traveling from colony to colony which included such prestigious pit stops as MacDowell in New Hampshire, Millay in upstate New York, Ucross in Wyoming and the Edward Albee Foundation on Long Island. Her one and only job was to write, write, write.

AsianWeek: So why writing?

Suki Kim: I really don’t know. But I always wrote, even as a child. There has never been anything else but writing for me.

AW: How did The Interpreter come to be?

Kim: During those years of traveling through writers’ colonies — although I was working on something else then — I kept thinking about a character who was always crossing boundaries, and, at some point, I realized that she could only be an interpreter. So you could say that writing The Interpreter was like a metaphor for my journeys. When I finally returned to New York, I looked into working as an interpreter; I became Suzy Park in some ways. I went to each interpreting assignment with pen and paper, as research for the book. It was a fascinating experience. The more I worked as an interpreter, the quicker the novel formed in my head. Once I got the character together, the plot came really fast and the book just poured out.

AW: How much of the story is autobiographical?

Kim: There must be some of me in Suzy Park, for sure, as well as in some other characters. You do have to start from somewhere. For example, the beginning scene where Suzy is standing in line at McDonald’s in the Bronx, it did come from one morning when I stood in the same McDonald’s. But then what happens in that McDonald’s in the novel, the characters who enter, the scene that ensues are all fiction. I guess what I am trying to say is that novel writing, for me, is like a collage. You take a thread of something you might have seen or experienced, and start weaving.

AW: Would you say you have a writing process?

Kim: I wake up early and write as much as I can — usually into the early afternoon. Then I take a break and if I have it in me, I’ll continue. When the writing is going well, I don’t go out, I don’t socialize, I just keep working. Luckily, I am good at staying at home.

AW: The legendary Virginia Woolf insisted that we women all need a room of our own in which to write. What’s your writing space like?

Kim: I write best at home, which is funny because I wandered around the country continuously looking for that room of my own. Now I have this huge, fantastic desk with a very comfortable chair. I live in a small place, so I’m sacrificing the living space for this perfect writing set up. But this is what works for me.

AW: What’s the last great book you read?

Kim: Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. It was incredibly fun and a very smart book.

But I don’t tend to read other people’s books when I’m in the midst of my own writing. When I’m having a really hard time, I might pick something up, but in general, it’s hard to write and read someone else at same time.

AW: What do you do for writer’s block?

Kim: I do what everyone else does — I pace back and forth and sometimes I cry. That’s when I start to go to movies a lot. I go to matinees, I go alone in the middle of the afternoon and see whatever is playing. One blessing about New York is that if you suddenly decide you want to see this specific film by that specific director, you’ll probably find it playing somewhere in the city. I tend to choose the more artful films; the blockbusters I wait for to come out on video.

AW: What’s your wildest literary fantasy?

Kim: I’m afraid to have fantasies. But I guess one wish I have now that the book is coming out is that it reaches a lot of people. I somehow think that this book might do really well with college students — it has that edge to it. One little fantasy is to go out there and meet all the many Asian Americans across America. Maybe it’s the travel bug still.

I’m really an urban girl — and every other person on my block is probably Asian American. It’s the white girls who look exotic on my block. So it’s difficult for me to imagine all those Asian Americans living across rural America. I think it would be really fascinating to go to those places and have dialogues. I hear that they’re everywhere.

For more information on Suki Kim, including her upcoming book tour schedule, visit www.sukikim.com.