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5 Contemporary Authors Writing the Korean American Experience

On Monday, January 13, we celebrate Korean American Day. The national holiday commemorates the arrival of the first Korean immigrants to the United States in 1903. The day also honors the Korean American’s immense contributions to every aspect of society. We invite you to discover selected works from five contemporary Penguin Random House authors writing the Korean American experience. From memoirs to short stories to graphic stories, and even a romantic drama, these works demonstrate the myriad experiences of the Korean American community.

ADVOCATE: A Graphic Memoir of Family, Community, and the Fight for Environmental Justice by Eddie Ahn (Ten Speed Press)

Born in Texas to Korean immigrants, Eddie grew up working at his family’s store with the weighty expectations that their sacrifices would be paid off when he achieved the “American Dream.” Years later after moving to San Francisco and earning a coveted law degree, he then does the unthinkable: he rejects a lucrative legal career to enter the nonprofit world.

In carving his own path, Eddie defies his family’s notions of economic success, igniting a struggle between family expectations, professional goals, and dreams of community. As an environmental justice attorney, he confronts the most immediate issues the country is facing today, from the devastating effects of Californian wildfires to economic inequality, all while combatting burnout and racial prejudice. In coming fully into his own, Eddie also reaches a hand back to his parents, showing them the value of a life of service rather than one spent only seeking monetary wealth. 

SKINSHIP: Stories by Yoon Choi (Vintage) 

The breathtaking debut of an important new voice—centered on a constellation of Korean American families, Skinship storie’s include those of a long-married couple forced to confront their friend’s painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town … A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years … A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims.
 
Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak. Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are. 

SEOULMATES by Jen Frederick (Berkley) 

When Hara Wilson lands in Seoul to find her birth mother, she doesn’t plan on falling in love with the first man she lays eyes on, but Choi Yujun is irresistible. If his broad shoulders and dimples weren’t
enough, Choi Yujun is the most genuine, decent, gorgeous guy to exist. Too bad he’s also her stepbrother.

Fate brought her to the Choi doorstep but the gift of family comes with burdens. A job in her mother’s company has perks of endless company dinners and super resentful coworkers. A new country means
learning a new language which twenty-five year old Hara is finding to be a Herculean task. A forbidden love means having to choose between her birth family or Choi Yujun.
All Hara wanted was to find a place to belong in this world—but in order to have it all, she’ll have to risk it all. 

MINOR FEELINGS: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World) 

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

CRYING IN H MART: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner (Knopf) 

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.