April Feature: Interview with Emily Yoon
- blueshiftjournal
- Apr 8, 2016
- 10 min read
We are proud to present Emily Yoon as our featured artist of April!
Emily Jungmin Yoon was born in Busan, Republic of Korea. Since the age of 10, she has lived in Victoria (BC, Canada), Philadelphia, New York City, and currently lives in Chicago. Her poems and translations have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, POETRY, The Collagist, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the 2015 winner of Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest, AWP's WC&C Scholarship Competition, and the AAWW Fellowship to The Home School in Miami. She received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and MFA at New York University, where she served as an Award Editor for the Washington Square Review and as a Starworks Fellow. She serves the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, literature, and forms of resistance in colonial-era Korea.
Q: First off, I’m so happy to be interviewing you for our April feature! Can you start with a bit about yourself, and how you started writing?
I'm honored to be featured. Thank you again for inviting me! Let's see. I was born in Busan, Korea, and moved to Victoria, BC, Canada a few months before I turned eleven. My family went back to Busan and are all there now. I came to the US in 2009 to attend the University of Pennsylvania, and am still here, all by my lonesome. I received my MFA in poetry at NYU last May, am now a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago. I love the people in the department and have already learned a lot about gender, sexuality, and literature in colonial-era Korean, the knowledge that I hope to inject into my poetry. I also have to say though, I always want to be a poet first and foremost, but it's proving hard to feel like one in a non-writing PhD program in a city I only moved to last September. I'm trying to be patient with myself.
The first creative writing project that I was very excited by was from when I was around 7 or 8. I typed up and printed a story about a girl who lives in the magic world. Now that I look back, it was obviously inspired by Harry Potter, since the protagonist had a bird, a grown man as the arch nemesis, and two best friends who fought all the time. The story was completely different, though, and I showed it to my mom when she came back from work. I got excited because she was really excited and encouraged me to keep writing it, so I wrote a single-spaced page every day. She put all of them in a folder, made copies, and gave them to my teacher, her friends, our relatives, etc., all of which made me feel like my writing was really good and important. I never finished the story, but I still have it, the 30 pages or so of it.
After I moved to Canada, and came to understand its culture and the culture behind the English language, I began writing in English. All my characters were white for a while because most books I read in English had white characters (then I read Marie Myong-ok Lee and Chang-rae Lee, which changed the way I approached literature, but that's another story). I gave characters names like Winnifred and Hagar because I didn't know at that time that they're unusual names for contemporary standards. I continued to write from time to time, but I became truly "serious" about writing in 11th grade, when I took a creative writing class in high school. The teacher was Terence Young, who is a poet. He was brilliant, funny, and supportive, and like my mother had done when I was little, he made me feel like my writing was valuable, like I was valuable as a writer. Also, at the time, I was more interested in writing poetry than fiction because I wanted to write about me and make my experiences into art. This is definitely NOT to say that poetry is always more truthful and personal and fiction is distant from the writer. But that's how I felt then. Until graduation, I wrote poems almost every day, thinking, this is what I want to to all day, every day, FOREVER! It proved more difficult to keep up after high school, though.
Q: Were you raised bilingual, and/or did you start writing in Korean? Just wondering, since you said you were living in Korea when you wrote your first story.
I am bilingual, and I did start writing in Korean--I only learned English after I moved to Canada. Since my family is in Korea, I go back there every summer and winter, and have Korean friends from college, from whom I pick up the newest slang and online jargon (haha). A couple of the many reasons I enjoy translating Korean poetry into English are that translation sharpens my sense of language and is a way of uniting my enthusiasm for Korean poetry and my love for craft.
Q: Do you prefer writing in one language or the other? What do you gain and lose from each?
I usually write poems in English. I came into the creative community in North America, I've read more English-language literature than Korean, and my writing was shaped by the voices in my reading. Also, or consequently, my vocabulary is wider in English. I can "speak poetry" better in English, if that makes sense. I'm not sure what I gain or lose when I write or speak either language--they both have their separate charms or limitations, and the culture behind each language is so different. There are always things that don't transfer when translated directly, but I think that's another opportunity to exercise poetic freedom. That's actually what I love the most, and find the hardest, about translating: you have to build a house with different material but keep the same spirit inside. And even trite idiomatic phrases sound cool when translated into another language, so I sometimes use them as starting points for writing.
Q: In reference to your work "An Ordinary Misfortune" and other works, can you speak on the body's violence and the ways it intersects with identity? Is loving your body possible, impossible, dangerous, empowering, etc?
The actor of violence is often seen as the possessor of power while the body that the power is enacted upon is rendered powerless, and violence works to impose upon the body some type of identity. Sometimes there are layers of violence--for instance, when a victim of sexual assault is accused of lying, demanded personal information, and then told to accept the circumstances because they are a [insert socially perceived identity of said person]. In a case like this, some aspects of one's identity are questioned and some are enforced. All of this, all this confusion, is to maintain a certain power structure while keeping the sufferer in a weak position, confusing justice and what is "just is." What is just is is painted as a normal, okay, an ordinary experience. The "power" of violence comes from fear and attempts to create a cycle of fear.
I've been speaking pretty vaguely; to relate the question more to my work, some of the poems from the series "An Ordinary Misfortune" and "Testimonies" aim to participate in or create more discourse on "comfort women" (euphemistic term of the sex slaves) of the Japanese Empire from the late 1930's to the end of the Second World War (something that is astounding to me is that the collective memory in the US often does not extend to what was happening in Asia of that time. But that's another conversation). The rhetoric of the Japanese Empire of that time was that your body is not yours, but the Empire's, one that should be sacrificed to the Emperor. So, it's not even the erasure of parts of your body--your body itself is taken away, literally and figuratively. Many Korean girls and women were kidnapped or tricked into becoming comfort women, giving their bodies to the soldiers and the nation. Many of the women then lost their uteruses or fertility, if not their lives, due to the unsanitary and devastating conditions, losses that for some lead to the feeling of loss of their female identity, or at least the identity that they were socialized into. One of the Misfortunes poems (https://www.pshares.org/issues/winter-2015-16/ordinary-misfortune-emerging-writers-contest-winner-poetry) is about my grandmother's experience as a young woman during the Korean War, and her striking memories of escaping the American soldiers, who were there to fight the North Koreans with South Koreans (a lot of literature from that time differentiates between the N. and S. Koreans, in the way they fight, etc.--another outside enforcement of identity, but... they are literally the same people who became "North Koreans" and "South Koreans" with a demarcation line that the US drew). She remembers parents locking up their daughters to keep them from being raped, the American soldiers leering, dressing up as a boy when going outside, and one soldier still identifying her as a girl and yelling in Japanese to her.
I love my body; I am going to state the obvious and say, I do by trying to embrace the complexities of what makes you you, beneath the empty classifications that I am showered with, by knowing that these classifications come from fear and ignorance. Shallow information about my body (Asian, female, etc.) allows the outside gaze an illusion of power to decide what I am. On top of being a fetishized, sexualized, and racialized body, sometimes once my Korean identity is revealed, I'm supposed to be a grateful body, grateful to the US. There are always dangers being a body that is not one of a cis-het white man in this country, to varying degrees. But I love my body for the cultures and knowledge that my body holds inside, and here I'm regarding my body as not simply a physical vessel but a carrier of things. Sometimes, though, I'm just so grateful and awed by the beauty of the world--amidst all the ugly things--that I love that I have a body occupying space in it.
Q: To steal a question from our interview with I.S. Jones, what is your "American Dream?"
I suppose the Utopian vision would be one in which everyone lives in harmony and enjoys equal rights, opportunities, and freedom regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, able-bodiedness, etc., but to start, I want people of colour to exist in the US without constant fear of deportation, rape, and police violence, and I want reparation and recognition for Native Americans. I want Americans to engage in critical discourse about the nation's issues without this "America is the greatest country in the world" attitude that occludes self-analysis.
Q: How have you felt your writing has grown over time? Are there certain themes or phrases you feel more drawn to nowadays?
I was very influenced by my experiences during the 2 years I spent in New York. I had the benefit of attending so many literary events at and outside of NYU, and the privilege of reading my classmates' work every week. The conversations and poems from this time helped me feel more comfortable braiding history with my writing. I have many friends I owe my gratitude to. I often turned to my friend Monica Sok and our advisor Kimiko Hahn to talk about my position as a contemporary Asian woman poet writing about history, war, trauma, gender, sexuality, etc.
Here's a longer answer with more background. When I moved to Canada, I didn't question my existence there or the reasons I was there. I didn't know what it would be like to be a Korean outside of Korea. I think it's the frustrated energy dug out from repeated humiliation over the years that helped my writing grow. The humiliation I felt having my identity erased or challenged by people who didn't care about my identity. I would think, I'm not here to be told that all Asians are the same. I'm not here so that kids can ask me to teach them Japanese. I'm not here to hear jokes about North Korea.
Then why am I still in the US? What do my experiences, those of my parents, my grandparents, and my ancestors have to do with my life here?
The humiliation from realizing that so much of what I know about myself comes from painful Korean collective memories and my family's memories, but most Americans know very little about the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War (or anything outside of the US, for that matter). Do people in the US talk about the Asian context of the Second World War? Or the Cold War, how the Soviet Union and the United States tried to take control of Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam--countries invaded and occupied by the Japanese Empire--to become the new hegemonic power over Asia? The Korean War is sometimes dubbed a "forgotten war" in the US. Even during the war, there were hardly any protests against the Korean War in the US like there were for Vietnam; any protests would have been accused of being Communist. The US was extremely heavily involved in the civil war, the US itself has been transformed by it (McCarthyism, restructuring of defense policies, etc.), yet not many people seem to know anything about the War. The War didn't solve anything so the country is still divided and officially at war, but, like I said earlier, people will spew jokes about North Korea instead.
Q: What advice would you give your younger self?
Find more books by writers of colour; you won't be offered nearly enough in English classes. Also, I know you're angsty, but be kinder to your parents. They will always be your biggest cheerleaders.
Q: Who inspires you? Both in writing and in general.
My parents. My mom is a woman of unflinching resolve. She left behind her husband, her friends, her job, everything she grew up with in Korea to come to Canada with me and my sister. She was a popular dentist in Korea and suddenly she was, in her words, a helpless and stupid person in Canada due to her limited English. But she has always been the strongest, the most fearless, and the most positive person I know. She is now back in Korea and is an animal rights activist. My dad has a deep appreciation in and knowledge of art and music and has a great sense of social justice. Neither of my parents is directly involved in my writing life, but they inspire me to pursue what I believe in and love.
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