The good folks at Backstory have posted my, you guessed it, back story. How did Everything Asian become a book? Like this.
Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work.
In 2007, my wife and I spent our honeymoon in Paris (with a brief stint in London as well). I’m not much for traveling, but I loved just about everything about Paris: the Seine, the food, the museums, the people. I didn’t think we’d be going back for years, but as it turned out, in eight days, we’ll be back in the City of Lights, because right now, we’re in Rome (and loving it!).
In any case, ever since I left Paris two years ago, I tried to write a story that took place there. After two stalled attempts, this one just sort of happened, in almost a single sitting. Which is always a good thing, because it doesn’t happen often for me.
So far, I’ve received three reviews — Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. And I’m happy (relieved?) to say that I’m batting a thousand — in non-baseball terms, all three of them are positive (Kirkus most of all, as it is a starred review).
Kirkus Reviews: “Cleverly concatenated stories about the experience of Korean immigrants make up Woo’s loosely structured novel…that both delights and instructs.”
Booklist: “Told in sharp, immediate vignettes, mostly from the boy’s viewpoint, this debut novel captures the contemporary immigration struggle, but it is also an elemental family drama of fury and tenderness, affecting all the characters.”
Publisher’s Weekly: “Woo eschews immigrant clichés to focus on complicated familial relationships and surprising, sympathetic characters; alternating between humor and melancholy, Woo’s text strikes a true chord while drawing readers into its strange, strip-mall world.”
You can read the full text of these reviews here.
W. Earl Snyder, courtesy of John Updike (circa 1960)
The New Yorker has been putting up reactions by various writers about Updike’s passing, and this one by George Saunders caught my eye:
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by The New Yorker. It was going to run in Tina Brown’s first issue. I soon learned that, in honor of the occasion, the magazine was going to run two short stories, and that the idea was to contrast the new (me) with the established.
I remember this very well, because I was a sophomore in college and was writing for the Cornell Daily Sun. In order to become a Sunnie, you had to go through what they called a “compet program,” meaning you had to write some news stories to get your feet wet. I had no intention of writing news stories, but you gotta do what you gotta do. So I wrote a couple of pieces, one of which involved attending a lecture about black holes. At the end of the interview, I walked up to the scientist to get some quotes, but I was thwarted when Carl Sagan threw a couple of sharp elbows into my ribs and pushed me out of the way.
But I’m losing my focus here. I’m not here to talk poorly of the dead (sorry, Carl), but rather about one of the first pieces I wrote for the Arts & Entertainment section of the Daily Sun. For that column, I reviewed this very first Tina Brown issue of The New Yorker, and I still vividly recall this story by Saunders because it was bona fide science fiction, and not only that, it had a killer ending.
As for the Updike story in the issue, I’m afraid I don’t remember it, which probably means it was as sparkling as all of his stuff has ever been. I do remember the very last short story he had in the magazine, “The Full Glass” quite clearly: like most of his stuff written in the later years, he displays a masterful retrospective voice. It didn’t occur to me for a second that this might be his final non-posthumous (humous?) work in The New Yorker, but that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Here today, gone tomorrow.
Four years ago, my girlfriend and I were living in The Hills, in one among the thousands of identical townhouses in Bedminster, N.J. To give you an idea of how cookie-cutter this development is, the recent remake of The Stepford Wives was shot there.
We told people that we were moving half an hour northwest to rural Washington for practical reasons — it’s a seller’s market, I can telecommute, cheaper housing — but in actuality, it was because we wanted to nudge our relationship to the next level. Back then, I was living with Dawn in her house, which was fine with me and OK with her — until it wasn’t OK with her. One of her biggest pet peeves was that she didn’t know how to introduce me to new people. “Boyfriend” sounded like we were a pair of teenagers going steady, and “partner” was no better option, as if we were a same-sex couple or about to embark on a business venture. So who was I, exactly, if not a husband?
An article I wrote for the December 2008 issue of KoreAm Journal.
Listen to the great Richard Yates reading his short story, “The Best of Everything.” The quality is excellent.
It must be obvious to anyone who has been following this series that I have an unabashed affection for the old guard of book publishing—and an endless appetite for their insights, their war stories, and their wisdom. But after a year in which “change” of one kind or another was never far from anybody’s thoughts, it occurred to me that the series could use a shake-up. Why not give the graybeards a breather and talk with some younger agents and editors? And while I was at it, wouldn’t it be more valuable to writers if I could get a few drinks in them first?
That’s my agent on the far right, Renee Zuckerbrot! The illuminating article is from Poets & Writers Magazine, the January/Februrary 2009 issue.
BJ Ward, 41, is the author of “Gravedigger’s Birthday,” “17 Love Poems With No Despair” and “Landing in New Jersey With Soft Hands,” from North Atlantic Books. He grew up in Warren County and lives there in Changewater, which straddles the Musconetcong River. His poems don’t tell us about where we live so much as they create places that are even more compelling.
“For me it’s a question of does the place help define your poetry, or can your poems help redefine the place you live in? Would Rutherford be the same if William Carlos Williams hadn’t lived there?” he said during an interview at the Dodge Poetry Festival.
As luck would have it, a poet who teaches in my home town of Washington (Warren County, NJ) is also featured in the same issue of the Times. Must be kismet!
I’VE been pushing the cart for 28 years now. It started in 1981, when grocery shopping was a family affair: father, mother, two older sisters and me.My father had been living in the States for a number of years by himself, trying to establish a business and a home, so trips to the supermarket were old hat to him. But for the rest of us newcomers, it was quite the opposite. In Seoul, I was used to small corner shops and the outdoor farmers’ market, where earthy bok choy and sea-fresh squid were sold on the street, so to walk into a brightly lighted warehouse in Ocean, N.J., offering an unending variety of goods was at once exciting and daunting. [read more]
An essay I wrote for the New York Times, about grocery shopping with my family.
Originally published in The Nervous Breakdown
Fourteen years ago, I started an online magazine. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal now, since anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can create an online presence, but back in March of 1994, it wasn’t so easy. Because Netscape Navigator wasn’t even at 1.0 — it was in beta. And Internet Explorer didn’t exist. Email ran on mainframes and VAX machines, and Gopher was the protocol of choice when it came to delivery of information in a menu-like interface.
Anyway, I had to come up with a name for the magazine, and I chose Whirlwind. I’m trying to remember why I picked that name, but honestly, I can’t recall, though I would like to say now that I regret choosing it. I mean it’s not a terrible name, but couldn’t I pick something cooler, like Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head? I mean I was in college, for God’s sake. It’s just sad.
