Boston Globe Interview: Story Behind the Book

Kate Tuttle and I had a fun chat about my book. There’s a paywall if you’re not a Globe subscriber. You can read the full interview on her website, and check out her other reviews, essays, and interviews too!

Fantasy Cafe essay

A favorite and only essay I wrote for FOLKLORN: How I incorporated an actual family legend of my clan’s founder and namesake ancestress Queen Heo Hwang Ok, who sailed the seas because of a prophetic dream and became Queen of her new people and passed on her surname to her descendants …

Lit Hub Asks

Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Angela Mi Young Hur: Living in Sweden as expat/immigrant, marriage, return to California while pregnant. Motherhood. Quitting writing for a couple of years. Failure. Reclamation. Revision. Joy. Second baby. Father’s death. During revision process with editor: global pandemic, zoom-school, two kids at home, moving back to Sweden, Stockholm real-estate hustle, new schools, nobody wearing masks, still not enough childcare.

How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Angela Mi Young Hur: For my entire writing life, I’ve had writers and so-called friends speak dismissively about my subject matter because I write about Korean American characters. Sometimes they think they have good intentions, guiding me away from a “limited subject” with “limited readership.” Often, it’s diminishing, insulting. Sometimes, it comes from fellow Asian Americans, and I wonder about internalized racism. I don’t contend with my own hubris so much as the hubris of others who presume to know what a book centering on Korean Americans is all about or who believe it’s a subject worthy of only one book per Korean American author.

(Click on the link for other questions and answers, other authors too … )

Dear Reader piece for Librarians

My kid’s only precocious before bedtime. Stalling, she’ll ask, “When people invented clocks, how’d they know what time it was?” and “Are zebras white or black?” Another night: “Hundred years ago, when girls couldn’t be scientists or wear pants, how’d things change?” She pays attention when it’s a personal injustice, hypothetical or historical, so this was her takeaway when I’d explained how people can be wrong now or in the past, how things can become fairer now and in the future.

 “Tell me again, Mama”—I’m already tense—“how Harabeoji didn’t want you to marry Papa.”

 Glossing over the details, I tell her how her harabeoji (grandfather, in Korean) had initially wanted me to marry a Korean American, like myself, who understood both cultures. At least, a fellow American, but definitely not a European from the other side of the world. I don’t tell her how Harabeoji got his friend to explain in more fluent English how he feared I’d be far away in a foreign country, never come home again, just as he’d never returned to Korea. My mother had her doubts too, reminding me how difficult it was to be an immigrant. I already understood because I was living in Stockholm at the time, feeling alien to myself, lost and diminished.

Instead, I say: “Harabeoji thought it’d be easier to marry someone from the same country. But he met Papa and knew he was the best person ever. Then you came into our lives and Harabeoji couldn’t imagine a world without you.” This is all true. “So even stubborn people can change their minds, be happier afterward. If enough people change their minds together—”

 “Then girls can become scientists and wear pants.”

 I never expected that my daughter would want to hear this story multiple times and hoped she hadn’t told my mother-in-law. But recently I realized, it’s her Origin Myth—how she entered the world, how she’s the explanation for why things are and should be.

Another oft-requested story: When she was a few days old, I’d cried on the phone because I was afraid my old car, after stalling a few times, wouldn’t be safe for my new baby. My father told me not to cry, don’t worry. Next day, he pooled money with my brother and bought a new Hyundai, driving it from L.A. to San Francisco. “Harabeoji put the keys in your baby hand.”

My father died a couple of years ago in his office chair, with fresh print-out photos of his one-month-old grandson on his desk. I live in Stockholm again, as wife and mother. I tell my daughter that someday she can also tell stories of Harabeoji to her baby brother.