Check out these nice pictures from the NYU Alumni Reading. I read with three poets, and it’s always a humbling experience. They do so much with so few words! I read an excerpt from the chapter “Jhee Hong.”
 Ishion Hutchinson |
 John Murillo |
 January Gill O’Neil |
 Me |
All the Writers
All you need is love, sang a certain famous quartet. They’re right, of course.
1) The lovely folks at Fiction Writers Review chose my book in their “A Valentine: Books We Loved in 2009” feature. The love is mutual!
2) At I Am Korean American, where Korean Americans from all over the country give themselves a little bit of personal love. From the site’s About page:
Our goal is to compile a collection of profiles that showcase the diversity and many interesting personalities of the Korean American population. We hope that our collective efforts will provide a snapshot of the Korean American community at this point in our history.
Yesterday was my day, so check it out.
3) Significant Objects, which I partook in last year, is like the Energizer Bunny — it keeps going and going. The first one was an experiment, but the subsequent ones have been for charity. They raised $2244.11 for 826 National with SOv2. Love it! They wished they had a giant check, so I made one for them.
4) A typo — the APALA award I won wasn’t for 2009, it was 2010! I still get confused about doing my 2009 taxes in 2010, so this is not surprising. In any case, the APALA had the following to say about my book.
Youth Literature Winner
Woo, Sung. Everything Asian. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009.Set in early-1980s suburban New Jersey, David Kim is a 12 year old who just moved from Korea to America with his older sister Susan and mother to reunite with his father who moved years earlier. The journey only begins once the family reunites and face many obstacles to bond and adjust living together in a new country. Without any memory of his father or knowing any English, David spends most of his free time helping out at East Meets West, his father’s gift shop in a strip mall where the family really gets to know each other and their mall neighbors. Everything Asian presents a well-rounded portrayal of the joys and troubles of the immigrant experience told mostly from the perspective of David, as well as the Kims and other mall merchants to get a full, inside-out understanding of the family and the community that surrounds them. Through David and Susan, this novel articulately details the experience of 1.5 generation Asian Americans, a perspective not commonly found in youth literature. From lighthearted comedy to very serious issues, Everything Asian covers a wide range of experiences and emotions that many Asian immigrants can relate to, but not always communicate. From choosing American names, taking English night classes and cooking turkey for Thanksgiving for the very first time, Everything Asian also portrays everything Asian Pacific American. (Jeffrey Sichaleune)
They were entirely too kind, but of course, I’ll take the love. Read about the rest of the winners.
I’m not sure if there’s a better gift than winning something you had no idea about. There’s no expectation, no pressure, nothing of the sort that’s going on with the athletes of the Olympics right now. Yesterday, I found out that Everything Asian won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Youth category. Apparently the press release came out more than three weeks ago! This is an award given by the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), which is an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA). The winners are as follows:
Picture Book Winner
Cora Cooks Pancit
Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore (illustrated by Kristi Valiant)
Picture Book Honor
Tan to Tamarind
Malathi Michelle Iyengar (illustrated by Jamel Akib)
Youth Literature Winner
Everything Asian
Sung Woo (that’s me!)
Youth Literature Honor
Tofu Quilt
Ching Yeung Russell
Adult Fiction Winner
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford
Adult Fiction Honor
Shanghai Girls
Lisa See
Adult Non-Fiction Winner
American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods
Bonnie Tsui
Adult Non-Fiction Honor
Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens
Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
Previous authors who have received awards from the APALA include Jhumpa Lahiri and Chang-rae Lee, so to say that I’m honored is an understatement.
We’re sorry to inform you…there were many strong entries…we wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.
You’d think that after twenty years of writing, revising, and submitting, these responses of thankful apology, these kind-hearted notes of rejection, would be easier to take. But they hurt, every time.
An essay I wrote on rejection, at The Nervous Breakdown.
Some great news and a great deal from Fiction Writers Review:
As you know, we’re big fans of Poets & Writers Magazine around here. So we’re excited to announce that Poets & Writers has generously agreed to offer our readers a special subscription rate of only $12. The reason for this offer is to help build support for a new series in the magazine called “Inside Indie Bookstores,” written by our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin. Each issue will feature an important independent bookstore around the country. The first to be profiled will be Square Books, of Oxford, Mississippi.
For those unfamiliar with Poets & Writers, it’s probably the most useful magazine for writers. It’s always chock full of real-world information and practical advice.
There’s an essay on the flaccidity of the new crop of male fiction writers in the current issue of the Book Review. Basically, Katie Roiphe is saying the oldies (Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, etc.) wrote about sex and the getting of sex and the having of sex while the newies (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, etc.) are neutered. The exact quote:
The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex.
Is this true? To some degree, but I’m not sure if it’s liberal education that’s at fault. Instead, I think Roiphe forgot about four very huge letters that loomed as large as anything in the fear cache of my childhood: AIDS. I can still remember seeing a man on TV with open sores all over his body, and the TV announcer more or less saying, “Have sex, and this will happen to you.” That’s something you just don’t ever forget.
Secondly, I can think of two contemporary male authors off the top of my head who have no problems whatsoever writing about sex: Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) and Chuck Palahniuk (Choke). The sex may have become more violent, but it’s still quite prevalent.
The software I use to run this website is the very popular WordPress, which includes an excellent stats package. Web stats reveal a number of things like total visitors, pages accessed, and incoming links, but the one I find most interesting is Search Engine Terms. What this does is capture the search phrase used to arrive at the site, and as expected, my name is at the top of this list, but a large number of those hits aren’t just my name alone:
“sung j woo paris at night summary”
Paris, at Night is a short story that came out earlier this year, and on that site, readers can leave comments. One of them caught my attention:
Posted 2009-06-25 09:45:23
I used this story in a Freshman English class as part of their final exam. the kids loved the story, but were disappointed in the end. They wanted there to be more. i am so happy I chose this story. It is rare to find a story the kids actually enjoy reading and want more.
So my guess is that certain students, possibly constrained by time or initiative, are searching the good old Internet to see if a summary of my story is available. So kids, if you are seeking a CliffsNotes version of my story, here it is, written for you by Gary Jackson:
In World War II Casablanca, Rick Blaine, exiled American and former freedom fighter, runs the most popular nightspot in town. The cynical lone wolf Blaine comes into the possession of two valuable letters of transit. When Nazi Major Strasser arrives in Casablanca, the sycophantic police Captain Renault does what he can to please him, including detaining Czech underground leader Victor Laszlo. Much to Rick’s surprise, Lazslo arrives with Ilsa, Rick’s one time love. Rick is very bitter towards Ilsa, who ran out on him in Paris, but when he learns she had good reason to, they plan to run off together again using the letters of transit. Well, that was their original plan…
If your professor tells you this sounds a lot like a movie, stand up, declare “Au contraire, mon frère (or ma soeur)!” and leave the classroom in a huff.
Sung J. Woo, a dude, starts reading Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed in July. Five months later, he tries to figure out why it took him so long to get through a book that is a veritable page turner. Is it a simple case of men are from Mars, women are from Venus? Or is there something else at work?
A book review/reaction piece I wrote for The Nervous Breakdown.
A few months back, I was approached by the The Feminist Press to check out a book, From Wonso Pond, “A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English.” So after reading it, I emailed them the following:
How refreshing it is to have a good old-fashioned story, told without narrative tricks or artifice. Kang Kyong-ae’s From Wonso Pond is a powerful novel that charts the struggles of three impassioned characters as they learn to live, work, and love. The questions she poses and the issues she tackles are as universal as they are enduring. This essential work should be required reading for anyone interested in Korean culture.
– Sung J. Woo, author of Everything Asian: A Novel
And just like that, I went from being a blurbee to a blurber. The story is a throwback, and it has the same sort of passion Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle does.
And on the subject of working hard for a living, tomorrow, I’ll be at Chicklet Book’s Author! Author! Book Festival in Princeton, signing books from 1pm to 3pm at the Signing Tent with fellow authors Victoria Adler, Jean Hollander, DeBerry & Grant, Meg Cox, Elizabeth Joy Arnold, and Lara M. Zeises. The festival is on from 10am until 4pm, so come on by and say hello if you are in the area.
A couple of weeks ago, I read at The Raconteur, one of the coolest used bookstores in Jersey.
I have no idea who that guy is, but he’s in the next picture, too.
I read from the chapter “Jhee Hong,” which I thought was appropriate since it takes place in a used bookstore. It was a great event, lots of interested readers and Q&A afterwards.
And since I can’t leave a bookstore without buying some books, these are the titles I left with.
That’s Matrimony by Joshua Henkin (who was at the BooksNJ festival earlier in the year and I should’ve gotten the book then, but we were pressed for time – but no matter, I got a signed copy!), Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder, and Richard Price‘s Freedomland. Haven’t read any of them, but that’ll soon change.
And this past week, the Hunterdon County Library invited me for a reading.
A little while ago, the director who put together BooksNJ asked the participating authors if they could say something about libraries, and here’s what I wrote.
Without libraries, I never would’ve discovered books on tape. I’m still surprised that so many people haven’t experienced the joy of listening to a book narrated by a professional — they are, without question, missing out in a big way. What hooked me was Frank Muller‘s narration of Chris Crutcher‘s collection Athletic Shorts, and since then, I must’ve gone through the majority of Muller’s performances (The Prince of Tides, 1984, The Great Gatsby — you can’t go wrong with anything he reads). It’s unfortunate that he’s no longer with us, but his work will live on, thanks to all the great libraries.
If you have a road trip coming up or would like a change of pace for the daily commute, go to your local library and get yourself a Muller.