Michelle Kim becomes triple threat
Surrey-born actor and filmmaker pens young adult novel about the importance of friendship
Do you remember your first best friend? You’re hopefully smiling right now thinking about that person.
It’s that relationship at the heart of Michelle Kim’s new debut middle-school novel, Running Through Sprinklers.
"Your relationships are your world when you are a kid. I just wanted to write something about the first best friend you ever had and how that is almost like your first love,” said Surrey’s Kim, who works as a director and actor.
A thoughtful, sweet and funny antidote to today’s social-media malaise, the story is told through tween Sara’s eyes. She and her besty, Nadine, met when they were one-year-olds in North Surrey. They became inseparable until they finished Grade 7 and Nadine skipped a grade, leaving a devastated and suddenly untethered Sara trying everything she could to hold onto Nadine and their ice-cream-eating, sprinkler-running, hamster-holding times together.
Sara even uses the search for a missing boy they kind of knew as a ploy to keep Nadine near.
“I’m using the disappearance of that poor kid as a ploy to keep my best friend around, but I never said I was a great person,” says Sara.
The idea to write about the power and depth of friendship first came to Kim while she was a University of B.C. student, sad after a breakup.
“I was heartbroken and my mom took me to some deli on 10th and there was a table of four women next to me who were elderly and they were all thanking each other for helping each other when their husbands passed away and I just realized, ‘Wow.’ In the end your girlfriends are there for you," said Kim, who wrote her first draft 12 years ago at age 26.
A quintessential coming-ofage story, Running Through Sprinklers is also a kind of love letter to the still-wood-covered Surrey of the early 1990s.
“I wrote it for the joy of almost remembering how amazing it was to be a kid. To bring myself down memory lane and, yeah, life was simpler. Growing up in the suburbs was a pretty good time.”
Both Sara and Nadine are biracial, with one Asian parent each. Kim herself, like Sara, is half-Korean.
“I thought the way we and our siblings looked was totally normal. I truly believed everyone everywhere had one Asian parent and one white parent,” says Sara.
Kim’s road to published author is an interesting one. After UBC she worked as a journalist in London for BBC Radio.
She then decided that acting was something she wanted to
do. That morphed into filmmaking. She most notably wrote, co-directed and starred in the feature film, The Tree Inside. In 2015 the film played at film festivals around the world and won an audience-choice award at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival.
But the novel always lingered in her mind waiting for her to pull it all together. There were fits and starts however her novel never got the final treatment until Kim came upon the idea to apply the traditional structure of a film to her literary idea. Once she did that, Kim said the story had a shape and pace.
“I imagined kids reading it like they were watching it on film. It took a shape. I think that is how the experience is going to be for kids as kid-lit progresses. You would just sit down and be done in like three hours," said Kim, who also has sights on turning the novel into an actual film.
“I would love to make this into something. Use some of my film skills,” said Kim, who is working on a film about a female Korean taxi driver in Seoul in the 1990s during the Asian economic crisis.
Published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Running Through Sprinklers has many positive reviews and is on library bookshelves but what Kim enjoys are some of the anecdotal stories she is hearing.
“I actually know a couple of women who sent this to their childhood friends from that age who they haven’t talked to in years. I thought, 'Wow, that was a good way to connect with them,' " said Kim.