Thinning the Line
ON MULTILINGUAL LITERATURE, CULTURAL MEMORY, AND WRITING AS TRANSLATION
웅녀, 가위눌림, 태몽.
THESE are a few of the words written in Hangul in my novel The Stone Home, published by William Morrow in April. They appear midsentence, a sprig of Korean characters in a landscape of English. Though my book has been completed for some time, I still feel a surge of delight when I flip through the pages and stumble upon a word written in Hangul, nested within the text like a prize. You see, the decision to add Hangul wasn’t an intuitive one. Take a look here:
Umma bore down, a bear woman, all flesh and body, our hearts connected, an 웅녀, the origin of our world.
When I read the line above, the words flow through me, a mix of the English and Korean I heard and spoke growing up. For many children of immigrants, we live in this in-between space, a thin seam uniting our personal and public tongues. But I wonder: How does seeing Hangul make you feel, reader? If you don’t know Hangul, do you skip the word altogether or linger, searching for meaning in the curves and sharp angles?
As a writer I want to expand the boundaries of possibility, to create layers, multifold and complex, for readers to sift through. One way, I’ve come to realize, is to blend languages—to write in English as well as transliterated Korean and even Hangul. By doing so the story births new registers and questions, with one being: How does this melded landscape invite, clarify, and obscure meaning, and for whom?
While growing up I read novels with explanatory commas and italics for any word deemed foreign, unfamiliar. A Korean character in a story couldn’t just eat kimchi with their dinner. Instead they would eat kimchi, a side dish made of salted and fermented cabbage slathered in red pepper paste. By requiring such guidance and definition, the publishing landscape implicitly centered a Western, white audience, forcing characters (and writers) to exoticize themselves. These moments always irked me. Why did authors have to explain what dal meant, but not a croissant?
Publishing has changed since my childhood, incrementally shifting from a singular reading experience to a wider, deeper, more inclusive one. More needs to be done, but now it is common to find novels written with transliteration, without explanation, where the implicit audience may not include you or me. My first novel, If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018), is told from multiple first-person perspectives; it wouldn’t make sense for the narrators to exoticize the foods and concepts familiar to them, to add a definition to what is inherently understood. When writing, it is important to hew close to the emotional truth of the story. This refusal to handhold is ultimately a way of valuing the reader’s intelligence, knowing that whoever they are, regardless of background, they have the ability to consider ambiguity and be moved.
Still, semester after semester, I encounter students who are surprised they don’t have to explain themselves, who automatically italicize and define out of conditioning. I ask them why a first-person character who has eaten kimchi, kabsa, or kare-kare all their life would define that word for themselves. How does that interrupt the narrative, creating a fault line between the character and their world? I watch the realization dawn on my students’ faces—the freedom in not having to shift their work toward the unfamiliar reader.
WHEN I began writing my second novel, The Stone Home, I found myself returning to this idea of audience and to the power of language—not only to communicate, but to evoke cultural memory. As I reached pivotal scenes in my manuscript, I considered how I could convey abstract Korean concepts in English. First I tried transliteration. But transliteration is imperfect, laying another language’s alphabet over the original. Nuances can be lost, weakening the strength of the line. Take a look again at this childbirth scene:
Umma bore down, a bear woman, all flesh and body, our hearts connected, an ungnyeo, the origin of our world.
I fiddled with ungnyeo. It didn’t capture the languid roundedness of웅녀—the brio of the lips circling to push out sound, mimicking the way Umma was pushing with all her force in the act of labor, the finality of the soft second syllable, a rest.
I realized then that there were some words that were so essentially Korean the only path forward would be to preserve their form in Hangul:
Umma bore down, a bear woman, all flesh and body, our hearts connected, an
웅녀, the origin of our world.
웅녀 is a concept, a mythology, difficult to pin down. 웅녀 is a bear that becomes a woman who becomes the
mythical mother of the founder of Joseon, Korea’s first dynasty. 웅녀is a symbol, a totem, a tribe, a god.
웅녀 is a notion that requires both a knowledge of Hangul and the culture and lineage of Korea, all the way back to its creation. Once I saw 웅녀 in the line, it rang true and clear to me—here was a word that refused to alter itself. The writing then would have to make space.
With my newfound realization, the freedom to include Hangul coursed through me. I felt a tingling as I thought of all the possibilities, portals opening to a new avenue of story-making. Would I write every single Korean word in Hangul now? Why was I even writing in English to begin with?
But, no, I am a Korean American, and though Hangul is in my blood, it is the blended form, in all its thorny and layered complexity, in which I feel most myself. I needed parameters before I got too carried away. I created a set of rules. Transliteration would be my go-to, the process I would turn to for most of the Korean words, of which there were many, including words related to daily life and cuisine. A woman’s unforgiving face is described as “tart and hard as an unpickled maesil,” while another’s nipples are as “round and light as dalgona ppopgi candy,” and a boy is found drunk, “reeking of soju.” But for those words that were Korean in essence, ancestral, I would leave the Hangul untouched.
However, there was one word that I could have transliterated or even translated: 개나리. Gaenari. Forsythia. A native Korean flower that blooms bright yellow in the early spring, that my mother delights in spotting here in the United States, as it reminds her of her youth. Though the word could easily be translated, I found myself clinging to the Hangul. 개나리, those golden-belled buds, continued to appear as I wrote, as if of their own volition, weaving together their own symbolic resonance. Multiple times I returned to those moments of Hangul, determined to transliterate so as to follow the rules I had set up for myself, but I couldn’t. Staring at 개나리, I learned that sometimes the writing takes over, and as writers we must honor the art above all.
The story we write is never wholly our own—in fact, by the time a book reaches a reader, it has undergone multiple transformations. First is the act of writing: The writer translates what they envision in their mind, which is a blend of image, sense, research, memory, history, onto the page. Along the way the power of the story can exert itself, insisting upon new plots, characters, moments of clarity. This is a secondary transformation, during which the writer channels a creative energy not wholly belonging to themselves. When a writer straddles two or more cultures, countries, or languages, another act of translation occurs as the writer decides what to transliterate and, perhaps, when to introduce a new alphabet into the text altogether. Lastly, when the story is published, the writer must relinquish control. It is only then that the final conversion occurs, a closing alchemy. When a reader picks up a book, they bring their own knowledge, wonders, secrets, biases, and hopes with them.
How terrifying and wondrous then is every single book ever written? Consider the geographic, emotional, linguistic, cultural, and temporal distances that have been bridged. How many worlds a story has had to wander in order to find their way to your bookshelf.
ON THE last pages of The Stone Home, I wanted to create space for the Korean American reader, a secret whisper and acknowledgement, a chance to unlock a final portal into the story.
In the concluding encounter between two main characters, I insert a line of Hangul that alters the narrative, bringing a new voice into the room. This line acts as dialogue, as spirit channeling, as hope. But what does it mean to have such a pivotal moment written in a second language, which may not be accessible to all?
To me this is a risk worth taking. The line of Hangul opens a new door of seeing. Not everyone may understand, but there have always been hierarchies of readability in a text. In my childhood, the white, Western reader was the apex, regardless of the novel’s author, content, or characters. It feels delicious to seize some control, to write a multilingual novel in which the narrative points at those who know Korean and says, Hey, you, come in.
To capture what it means to be human—including the blurry, unexplainable moments without easy translation—is the task of the writer, and to reach for understanding is the task of the reader. Blended forms are one way to thin the line between us all.