My forthcoming novel, Exhibit, follows a trio of Korean women rioting with desire. It’s shot through with physical longing, queer lust and kink. The characters find joy and delight in trying to fulfill their bodies’ cravings.
I’m also a Korean woman. I was raised Catholic. For a while, until I lost the faith, I turned into an evangelical Protestant so fervid that my life’s hope was to be a pastor – an ardent, single-minded servant of the Lord.
The first time I read from Exhibit, at a literary festival, my parents sat in the front of a large crowd, shining with pride.
“Trust me, Umma, Abba,” I said, after noting they’d come to hear me read. “You don’t want to read the rest of this novel.”
People laughed, parents included, and so did I, as though I spoke in jest. But I didn’t, or if I did, I joked as one might when telling the most urgent kind of truth.
To so much as talk in public about a sex life, let alone to publish an entire novel about it, is a pursuit seething with such potent, anxiety-stirring shame that even now, as I write these words, my pulse is rising.
Be quiet, the shame begs. Go back in hiding.
If I could, I’d keep my novel away from all kin, along with the host of Korean Americans who go to church with my parents, plus the friends they’ve known since back when they all lived in Seoul. Perhaps, then, to be safe, I’d hold it back from any Koreans with even trifling links to my parents.
And while it’s insulting each time a non-Korean assumes I might know a person just because we both happen to be Korean, it’s also true the Korean American diaspora can be so tight-knit I often do kind of know that person, and, well, it’s possible our parents attend the same church, and our fathers might be high school alumni, and oh, right, that person’s wife is also a sibling’s closest friend.
I’m joking, this time, but only a little. But as Toni Morrison said about Black women, the first audience I have in mind while I’m writing begins with Korean people; and then I’m back where I started, hoping to both address and bypass my people, tottering at the top of this old, exigent logic spiral, about to slip down again.
I had to lie to myself, writing this novel, often out loud. “No one will see this,” I said. “It’s just for you.”
During the nine years I worked on it, my previously tolerable anxiety hit baffling new heights. I had panic attacks lasting, at times, for hours. Fits that could turn almost comically violent, absurd. I wept. I gasped for breath. I told friends, laughing at the histrionics, that I felt as though a giant had me by my hair, flinging me back and forth. In the grip of a panic attack, I can’t help half-believing the maudlin idea that I’m about to die. Once, after a physician said most people’s bodies can’t handle panic attacks that go on past 15 minutes, I noticed a slight, ludicrous pride: I had outlier panic attacks. Look how tough I could be!
But the flash of pride faded into its obverse, a shame intensified by the fact that this fright sprang from of, all things, a novel, a book with people I’d made up. I had not a single person to blame but myself.
I’m hardly alone in writing what I can barely tell. It’s part of what I love about reading: literature, art, can let slip the private truths, things otherwise left veiled. With all I am, I trust in fear as a guiding sign. It’s essential to what I feel called to do, as a novelist: I have to put in words that which I’m afraid of saying.
I can’t quite talk myself out of the panic, though, and with a few months to go before Exhibit publishes, the lie I had recited is falling apart. I often, still, have trouble breathing. The frantic, rebuking voice in my head has been persistent: by making public this work of fiction, do I risk bringing terrible shame to my family, ancestors – and perhaps even to all Koreans?
It’s a risible thought. I can’t shame us all; we’re no monolith. But I’m also used to hearing Koreans saying that, by acting badly or well, a Korean person brought us either shame or pride.
Hoping to quell the panic, I asked others for insights.
“Shame culture is very prominent among Koreans,” says Katherine Yeom, executive director of Korean American Family Services, a non-profit providing mental health support in LA. She speaks of a term new to me: “saving grace”. It’s related to the notion of saving face, but not identical: being Korean, or so the idea goes, I’m obliged to protect the reputation of the family name. Not just the present-day Kwon name, but the familial line, my exploits affecting all preceding relatives, as well as all the people to come.
I think of the Korean idea that I existed in my ancestors, as they do in me, each of us living as long as one still walks the earth. I also think of my brother’s stories of dating in LA: every time he met a Korean girlfriend’s parents, they’d ask which line, or clan, of Kwons he’d claim as his, there being, in terms of established reputation, class and history, “right” and “wrong” replies.
“These are things that have been passed down for thousands of years,” says Shinhee Han, a Korean American psychotherapist and co-author, with David Eng, of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. The book, which brings together case studies, psychoanalytic theory, and exegeses of Asian American literature, argues that part of what diasporic Asians might lack is a wide-ranging vocabulary, a plenitude of stories, offering imagined paths for who we are and who we hope to be, living in lands foreign to our ancestors.
I tell Han that, though I’ve made a life of trying to add to these stories, I still can’t quite believe I’m doing right by issuing the sexually exuberant novel I wrote. Illogical as it might sound, I’m afraid I’ll hurt my people.
But this makes sense, Han says. Korea is often cited as having one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world, and for millennia, that culture was shaped by firmly Confucian, collectivist principles. If I’m thought to err, the first thing Korean people will ask is what my parents did wrong.
And queerness, kink, really anything having to do with sexuality – these aren’t topics Koreans tend to discuss. “Korean people aren’t queer,” Han says, joking, and we both laugh. But it’s what I heard, growing up. It’s still not unusual for first-generation immigrants, along with elders living in Korea, to think being queer to be a strange illness, a blight afflicting other people, but not us. And it’s difficult to be told one doesn’t exist, or that one’s desires necessarily constitute an illness.
In a 2022 South Korean study, four in 10 queer and trans people between the ages of 19 and 35 said they’d seriously considered dying by suicide in the past year, a number much higher than among the general population. The numbers aren’t better in the US: according to a 2022 Trevor Project study, 47% of Korean queer and trans people under the age of 25 in America had also, in the past year, considered dying by suicide. In the US, we live in a time of alarming book bans targeting, in part, queer and trans writers; bad, old ideas suspecting queer and trans people of posing a threat to children, labelling us as predators, are thriving.
Meanwhile, in both Korea and the diaspora, it can be hard to get help with one’s mental health. “The second you ask for help, you admit that you’re failing,” says Yeom. Which, again, can bring shame to one’s family name. The stigma is slowly abating, but as recently as 15 years ago, “no Korean had mental-health problems,” Yeom says. Once again, we laugh.
“I see a lot of loneliness,” says Ellen Ahn, executive director of Korean Community Services in Orange county, California. Our culture, Ahn adds, is all about grit. “It’s all about silence and hiding things.” Plus, Han points out, this imposed silence is highly gendered. If I were male, I’d be less expected to hide. “You’re a girl before you’re queer,” Han says, the prevailing idea being that no good Korean girl talks about sex.
Heezy Yang, a queer artist and activist living in Seoul who performs drag as Hurricane Kimchi, notes that South Korea still has no anti-discrimination laws for queer and trans people. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll be safe once we’re outed,” they say. During Seoul Pride, protesting Christians have a history of crawling beneath moving floats, hoping to stop the parade by dying for God.
I tell Yang that, though I’ve talked in public about being queer since 2018, my parents didn’t bring it up until 2023, after my first novel was published in South Korea. I’d spoken with Korean media – and said I was queer – and my parents’ initial reaction, aside from taking pride in the novel’s translation, was to plead that I refrain from alluding to queerness with Korean publications and radio.
“It’s too dangerous, in Korea, being queer,” my parents said. I ran too big of a risk. Elders, relatives, had spoken to them of being upset, fretting about my safety. Which, Han reminds me, was also a way of telling me I might imperil my elders’ safety: before I can think of being me, period, I have to first represent the family.
But I’m not in Seoul; I live in San Francisco, and most of my family lives in California. And Korea’s rapidly changing, as is diasporic Koreans’ understanding of Korea. Each person I talk to posits that, the more people are vocal about queerness and sexuality, the more it’s made public in the media, in K-pop idols’ lives, in movies, dramas and books, we’ll collectively be able to change rigid ideas of what’s thought to be acceptable.
“I’ve always believed that writers should speak out when they can,” says Anton Hur, a prominent and queer translator and writer living in Seoul. “Otherwise, what’s the point of being a writer?”
It’s part of why I felt I had to write the queer, kinky, lust-fired, sexually celebratory novel I did: to try to help others feel more at home with their desires, thus less alone. And so, of course, to help myself feel less alone. One day, the shame and panic might also believe this is what I’m doing, or so a girl can dream. Even this Korean woman.
