This blog post is authored by Niki G. a member of the Biblio Lotus Team.
Niki G. had an opportunity to talk with author Crystal Hana Kim, who will be at the Tucson Festival of Books:
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Saturday, March 15 from 11:30 am to 12:25 pm
Contentious Politics and Social Change
Panelists: Crystal Hana Kim, Marjan Kamali, David Wright Falade
Modern Languages, Room 350 -
Sunday, March 16 from 1 to 1:55 pm
Love, Loss, and Second Chances
Panelists: Crystal Hana Kim, Nanda Reddy, Marcela Fuentes
Student Union, Tucson Room
Crystal is the author of the critically acclaimed novels, If You Leave Me and The Stone Home.
The Stone Home was a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and is currently long listed for The Joyce Carol Oates award. If You Leave Me was named a Best Book of 2018 by over a dozen publications including The Washington Post, Lit Hub and more. She is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award and the winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for emerging writers. Kim currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her family.
Niki
Both of your novels were set in Korea and take the points of view of characters who are affected by historically significant events. You have female protagonists who play a powerful role in each of the stories. I found it interesting to read The Stone Home and learn that reformatory schools were intended to clear vagrants off the street, especially in advance of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, which wasn't that long ago. What was the research process like for your novels and how did you decide which points of view to include?
Crystal
The Stone Home was based on real life institutions that were in place in the 1980s. At that time, the South Korean government was really a dictatorship, and had secretly sanctioned the police to “clean up the streets”, because they were trying to win the bid for the 1988 Olympics. I first learned about this in 2016 through an Associated Press exposé. Before then, there had been murmurings, but no full news coverage because of denial on the government's part. I could not get images from the Associated Press article out of my head. I kept thinking about the children who had been taken off the streets. Some of them had been houseless, but some of them had just been separated from their families. I kept wondering what happened to the children and how could the Korean government have done this to their own citizens, when only 40 years prior similar institutions had been created by the Japanese colonizers? I started from a place of questioning.
In 2018, when I was in Korea visiting family, I was able to connect with a survivor, Han Jong-sun, who survived one of the largest reformatory schools called the Brothers Home and who is now one of the loudest political activists. That school was in the news a lot, and I met with him. He was living outside of the Seoul National Assembly and had created a makeshift hut out of plank wood and tarp. He had these very big posters with images of the newspaper showing accolades that Brothers Home had gotten and then another poster with photos from behind the scenes of what was actually happening. I spoke to him and after that I did a lot of research.
I read about other institutions in other countries and time periods like Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence written by Doris Pilkington Garimara who had been taken into a reformatory center for Indigenous Australians years ago, and I read Man’s Search for Meaning by the Austrian Psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps. I tried to get into the mind and physical body of others who had written memoirs of their time in similar institutions.
Niki
You mentioned in an interview with The Observer that there are political aspects of the novel and that, as you just referenced, this isn't a singular event but that it has happened to Indigenous children and to Black Americans. It does seem like we are starting to hear more about these hidden aspects of history through fictionalized accounts, like Stealing by Margaret Verble about the boarding schools in the 1950s for Indigenous children and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead that was about a fictionalized school based on the reform school in Florida that was abusive and I think in the last decade it was discovered to be a place where there were mass graves. I wonder how many children have disappeared. Have they been able to do any kind of study to know how many missing children have never been recovered in Korea?
Crystal
I don't think they know the answer because for decades when someone began investigating these reformatory institutions, the government shut it down. It was really only after the exposé in 2016 that the government was forced to reckon with it. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission did acknowledge, finally, that the government was culpable or involved, but I don't think that there have been investigations into how many graves there were. There were a lot of abuses, and the surviving members are still asking for reparations. I don't think there's been a collective effort, as far as I know, to figure out how many people were impacted. That was one of the other reasons why I wanted to write this book, because I knew that these reform schools were not exclusive to Korea. There were these centers for Indigenous Australians and First Nations children in Canada, and for single pregnant women in Ireland, and for Black Americans in the South, here in our country. Something that I kept thinking about was: why does this keep happening again and again? How do we not learn from our history, and what is the human impulse to try to reform or oppress innocents, especially children? When writing, I start with a question that is specific to Korea but also can be part of a wider, more universal lens.
Niki
Have any of the Korean press ever reached out to you to talk about your book?
Crystal
Yonhap News reached out and we did an interview. It hasn't gotten a lot of press over there, but I'm happy to say that both novels are going to be translated into Korean. The Stone Home will be translated first and then If You Leave Me after. I hope when that happens, perhaps there'll be more coverage.
Niki
Have you been contacted by additional former reformatory survivors or their family?
Crystal
No, it was hard for me to even find contact information for Mr. Han Jong-sun, perhaps because of the language barrier. I have kept in touch with him and I sent him a copy of the book, but until it's translated, I don't think he can read it. I've been reading and keeping up with the news from afar.
Niki
Were your characters in The Stone Home based on specific people or were they an amalgam of different folks put together?
Crystal
They were more of an amalgam. I'm a fiction writer, not a journalist, and I knew that I wanted to fictionalize the story. I wanted to create a reformatory of my own. I thought that was the most respectful way to do it because I didn't want to take away the voices of the activists in Korea who are still fighting for acknowledgment and reparations. Initially, I started the novel with these two brothers and the story of how they were taken because that was inspired by my conversation with the activist Han Jong Sun and the research I had done. In the final version, there are two main narrators: Eunju, a 15-year-old girl and Sangchul, a 16-year-old boy. I really love writing about women and the struggles and oppression that women face in Korea and in the world. I think fiction is the most interesting when we are rooting for characters, when we care about them and when they feel real to us. It's always important to me to make characters that are very lively on the page.
Niki
In both books, especially The Stone Home, you have different generations of women, and you can feel how each is trying to survive and protect themselves, and they approach survival differently, where the youngest female character seems to be the most rebellious. Can you comment on that?
Crystal
With my first novel, If You Leave Me, there was a tighter cast of characters that revolved around this young woman, Haemi, and these two men that she's interested in. With my second novel, I wanted to flex different creative muscles, and I wanted to capture what it would feel like to create community even within a difficult, oppressive situation. It was very important to me to have a collective of women who are not all going to get along all the time, but they must rely on each other. I wanted to explore the different ways that women seek safety and how that can differ across the generations. Like you're saying, I think the younger generations in The Stone Home are perhaps braver because they're more naïve and impulsive. I also wanted a mother and daughter story.
Niki
In The Stone Home there were vivid descriptions of their meals and mentions of chamoe melon and Apollo candy. How did food and meals play a part in the writing of that book?
Crystal
People always remark on the food in both of my novels! I don't think I purposely wanted to devote a lot of pages to food, but it is naturally or instinctively the way I show care. Growing up in a Korean family, hunger was a mainstay in my elders’ lives, so now the way they show their care is always asking, “Have you eaten?” Food is another mode of communication in my life, which translates to the food in the novels. For the characters in The Stone Home where they are deprived of so much, the moments where they can relish food is really kind of revelatory for them. It can feel luxurious to have a bowl of miyeokguk or some meat, so I wanted to really linger on those moments.
I always say it's through art that we can make people care about history. That means that I need to do my job of storytelling, creating memorable moments and connections from the characters to the readers. Food is such a great way to do that because everybody loves to eat. That feeling of nourishment that we get, if I can put that on the page, I can make that connection with the reader. I didn't realize how fully food was a love language for me until I put it into my novels, but that's a way that I show care, and I’m trying to show love for the characters and the reader.
Niki
How did you decide on the name of your fictional reformatory school? Did you grapple with what you wanted to call it?
Crystal
I knew that I wanted it to be a place with this juxtaposition of the word “home” with something a little “colder.” What I thought was really striking when I read about the real-life institutions was that it was called Brothers “Home” when it was really such an abusive place. I thought The Stone Home struck that balance of something cold and imposing with something that sounds deceptively warm. But titles are so hard, I find them difficult.
Niki
I noticed that the writing style in The Stone Home is much rawer than in If You Leave Me. In The Stone Home, sentences have a little more “punchiness” to them and that feel emotionally raw, and some painful scenes. Did you decide to change the tone or the writing style?
Crystal
I love talking about language! I wrote If You Leave Me in grad school. It was inspired by family stories of surviving the Korean War, but the center of the story was a love triangle, so I felt that I could lean into sensory descriptions. It didn't have to be raw, necessarily, because it was really about love, motherhood, and the choices that people are forced to make because of circumstance. With The Stone Home, from book to book, I knew that I wanted a different tone. I wanted to make the language really poetic and raw to capture what it would feel like to be in one of these institutions, and to replicate what it would feel like to try to escape and find a way to survive. I also knew that I wanted to do short chapters because I wanted to keep the reader engaged and turning the pages.
Niki
I have heard that second books can also be uniquely challenging because the publisher has certain expectations. Did that change your writing process?
Crystal
I think second books are hard, independent of the publisher, just because the first book is so special. At least for me, because I was writing my first novel in grad school, I had no idea if anyone beyond my classmates would ever read it. I didn't have an agent or a contract or anything, I was kind of protected from the business side of publishing.
Then, with the second book, I didn't sell it beforehand, but I knew more about the world of publishing. Sometimes those voices can get into your head. Also, COVID happened, and I had two babies. I was very lucky that my publisher did not pressure me in the shape of the book though. I was also particular about not selling the book until I was done with it because I am the kind of writer who likes to have control over the whole process. This story was really important to me, and I didn't want it to be changed by others.
Niki
Do you structure your day to write, or do you have a routine to your writing?
Crystal
I'm often teaching, but where and what I'm teaching often changes, so my day-to-day frequently looks different. My goal is to try to write every day for at least a little bit because I like to stay immersed in the world. Even when I have my teaching duties—reading for coursework and reading my students’ work—I like to open the manuscript every day to keep a level of my consciousness alive in it.
Niki
Because your characters in both books have really been trauma affected, how do you practice self-care, or do you have put a mental barrier in between writing through their lens and doing something else?
Crystal
This is a really good question that I've gotten a couple of times after writing this book, and I never have a good answer for it! Writing The Stone Home took a long time, and I think that's because it was based on a traumatic event in Korean history. During that time, I had two children, so becoming a mother was one way I was forced to slow down. I think having children made me very wondrous about the world. It is an eye-opening experience to see the world through this little infant's eyes as he is trying to figure out how to be a person. That made me focus on the little moments. Now that I'm working on something new that is not set in a traumatic period of history, I do feel lighter when I'm writing, like a weight has lifted. I wasn't fully conscious of it while writing The Stone Home, but I do think the difficult subject matter did impact me.
Niki
Since motherhood factors in both novels, did you change how you wrote from that perspective?
Crystal
I've always been interested in mother daughter stories. When I was writing If You Leave Me, I hadn't yet become a mother. With The Stone Home, there is a very key birth scene, and I will say that was directly influenced by my experience. I think birth and labor is really cool. I think it's fascinating, so powerful, and not really written about that in that lens. We're often told that it's painful and medical and something to just get through. I thought the act of labor and delivery was empowering and scary and transformative. I wanted to capture all of that in the book. Once I became a mother, I was even more interested in exploring a daughter who doesn't fully understand her mother's motivations, while also showing the reader how the mother is trying to protect her child.
Niki
Do you think you'll continue to write historical perspectives?
Crystal
I've always thought that I have been writing my way to the present. If You Leave Me was in 1950s in the Korean War, and then in The Stone Home is in the 1980s in Korea. The third book that I'm working on currently is set in the 2000s here in New York, and it is set around Korean Americans. I will now be writing about Korean Americans because that is closer to my experience, and there are so many different themes to explore there about this hyphenated identity. I felt that I needed to create a foundation for myself. I needed to write through history to get myself to a more contemporary American setting.
Niki
I appreciate the historical context because I was born in Seoul, but I was brought to America when I was a baby, so I don't know a lot about my own history. I wanted to touch upon “Korean American-ness” and what does it mean to be Asian-American? I had read your article in Harper's Bazaar about your freckles, and I know that Korean women have high standards of beauty, which I observed when I lived in Gwangju, Korea and I was shocked at how many whitening lotions there were in the stores, and I didn't know that was the thing for Koreans. There's a book by Elise Hu called Flawless that's about the South Korean beauty industry, including plastic surgeries. And I think Frances Cha wrote If I Had Your Face, a fictional story about the women who have crazy amounts of plastic surgery. I'm curious what your thoughts were about South Korean impossible standards of beauty.
Crystal
I was born in the United States, but I would go to Korea a lot because my mother's side of the family all lives there. The contrast between the beauty standards here and the beauty standards in Korea were so different. Those are the kinds of questions that I want to be writing about in future books because I think there's such a richness to trying to figure out: What is Korean American identity? What is Asian American identity? How is it separate from those who are not of the diaspora? When growing up in New York, people would remark, “Oh, I love your freckles.” It would be a point of cuteness. When I went to Korea, everyone would be aghast and worried about my face. As a young girl learning about beauty and how to fit in, these messages were confusing. I think it's interesting how much pressure there is in America and Korea, but in quite different ways. I would hate to be growing up now with the exposure of social media and all those impossible standards. I don't think it's gotten easier at all, but I am reflecting on my experience, how confusing it was just to have different expectations—being made to feel foreign here because I'm Asian but then when I was in Korea, made to feel foreign because I was too American.
Niki
Are you looking forward to anything in particular at the Tucson Festival of Books?
Crystal
Oh, I'm really excited! I went to Tucson once before for the Festival of Books in 2019 so I'm just excited to return. I remember having so much fun meeting book club readers and just really enjoying the landscape because it's so different to me than Brooklyn, where I am, where it's very, very cold right now. I love dry heat, so I'm excited for that and I'm excited to meet readers and people who love books.
Niki
Maybe you've been too busy being a mom and working on your next book, but have you had time to read or are you into any authors at the moment?
Crystal
Oh, I would love to plug a book that's coming out in 2026. Her name is Cay Kim, and I don't know her, but her editor sent me her debut novel. It's called The Future Perfect, and it's a beautiful, poetic novel about being Korean and American and straddling both cultures with a very intense mother-daughter narrative. I also loved I Leave It Up to You, Jinwoo Chong’s new novel coming out soon. It's a gay romantic comedy that is beautiful and heartwarming.
Niki
I really appreciate your spending time to share about yourself, your writing process and what went into producing the books and look forward to seeing you at the Tucson Festival of Books!
