This part is silent A life between cultures

In this trenchant and inventive debut essay collection, Kim, a creative writing professor at the University of Warwick, reflects on her family's immigrant experience. The pieces focus on the hardships Kim faced moving with her mother and father from Seoul to rural North Carolina at age seven, and then as an adult to England, where she earned a PhD in literature from the University of Manchester before securing a professorship at Warwick. Kim reflects on feeling othered throughout her life, such as when she was the only person in her high school English class forced to take a standardized test, presumably meant to prove fluency. Experiments with form keep the proceedings fresh. For instance, Kim writes one piece as a free associative "play" showing how she relied on Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry for comfort while dealing with familial and academic stressors in graduate school. Another, "Dear Manchester Chinatown," is delivered in the second person as a love letter to the eponymous neighborhood: "You were the pocket of a foreign city where I could breathe easier among faces that looked more like mine." Throughout, Kim's astute observations reveal the varied meanings of silence, whether she's discussing her struggle to connect with her parents or holding her tongue after a white interlocutor's racially insensitive comment. Probing and deeply felt, this entrances. (Apr.)

An academic wrestles with truths of family, immigration, and her profession. Kim immigrated from Seoul to rural North Carolina as a young child, then moved to the U.K. as a young adult. In this piercing collection of essays, she folds her experiences as an "immigrant twice over" into her academic research on the Southern Gothic and a professional memoir of sorts. The author describes exchanges between her and her Korean cousins as well as those between her and her employers and mentors in British academia, many of which offer a haunting exemplification of embedded power dynamics and racial condescension. Kim creatively and effectively experiments with format through pointed page breaks, plot points and insights hidden in footnotes, varied use of the second person, and one essay structured almost like a screenwriter's sketch. However, the true force of the text rests in the way the author uses silence--e.g., Korean characters inserted without translation, unadorned quotes from her research subjects (especially Pulitzer Prize--winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa), and shadowy personal details. Rather than drawing readers into the discrete and measured intimacy of many memoirs, Kim leans into the inaccessibility of one's full experience as interpreted by another. The author's quiet absences sharpen the edges of her inspection of entrenched, implied superiority and easy erasure in discussions of race and in the expectations of immigrants. They heighten her meditations on the historical, contemporary, and potential future harm caused by insensitive classroom discourse, failure to administer either credit or blame, and the temptation to avoid "the urgency of harder, harsher truths." Resisting academia's rigidity, Kim materializes as a teacher who takes her role seriously as she calls herself and her readers to action: "Ask why. Ask why without a question mark at the end. Say all the silent parts out loud. Thrive in discomfort." A radically brilliant work. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.