LN: Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation Of The Self
DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE READ THE STORY HERE.
People assume that Homecoming is autobiographical or reflects my emotions in that the main character’s perspective is my own. I think this happens a lot when someone writes Immigrant Narratives, and I have a hard time saying “hey people shouldn’t do that” because I also think that a lot of time the application of the self into the story is true. But when people have talked to me about Homecoming, they’ve assumed a specific background/state of mind for me which isn’t necessarily accurate.
It’s a pretty personal story for me in that I dropped a lot of cosmetic details about my history into the story, but not a personal story for me in that I don’t think it reflects any sort of immigrant angst that I feel, only sort of a clean desire to explain to those who have non-diaspora lives that diaspora is complicated and people don’t always feel the way you think they should feel about it. My goal with the story was to really just drive home the thesis that diaspora is messy, you don’t get to choose who you become, the line between foreigner and homeland is thin, America is like a worm that gets into your brain, please experience being uncomfortable for 6000 words, I am not here to play.
I feel a weird need to disclose that I’m not technically an immigrant. Everyone who reads this assumes I am, but I was born in NJ, and my parents lived in the states for 20 years before they had me…but I spent a lot of my childhood in Korea because my dad got a job in Korea right before I was born. I spent the first ten years of my life shuttling between California and Korea because he was a professor at universities in both countries, though I went to school in Korea. I call myself 1.5 gen, haha. I’m an edge case.
This story was one of those cases where I wrote something kind of sad and I thought “this isn’t that sad” and everyone I showed it to was like “dude this is sad as shit” and I was like “oh is it sad?” because I considered the story more about the tension between the decisions about your life that you get to choose, versus the ones that are chosen for you, and I didn’t feel that was particularly sad as much as it is one of the clean realities of life: a lot of the choices that create who you are get made for you.
I wrote this story because I felt that I hadn’t read any immigrant/second generation narratives that talked about the tension between the fact that we live in a global world and it’s not hard anymore to return places, held against the fact that you can never actually return to somewhere you last left, and the compounding fact the person you are has changed in the intervening time so that they would be unrecognizable to the self you left behind.
I felt that there wasn’t a story for Guys Like Me, who went to Korea most summers after moving to the states until they stopped and then eventually realized that they had turned into someone who can confidently say “I’m from New Jersey” rather than tentatively say “I’m from New Jersey?” and what that means about loss and change.
I also wrote this story because I thought “haha wouldn’t it be fucked up if immigration worked like github instancing?”
I don’t know if I’m going to write more things about Korea Stuff. This is my first bigboy publication (but check out my game at Sub-Q!! It’s good!!) and I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a diaspora writer/asian things specifically by the market. I am just some guy who likes wizards and lasers. I am kind of an ambivalent asian. i just go here. You just think I go here because I’ve got the eyes and hair and skin tone.
The folktale about the knife, fisherman, is a bastardized version of a folktale I heard in elementary school, which I couldn’t find online even though I searched for it quite a bit. There’s a lot of stories about “guy goes to the fae court under the sea, comes back, oh shit, time has passed,” but I made up all the stuff about the knife, the killing of the self, etc. Based on a real story though! That’s real!
I named Soyoung after my childhood best friend, who I’ve lost touch with for the last decade on account of her living in Korea and me moving permanently to the states. Don’t read too much into that. Claire Soyoung Ko if you’re out there…..
I accidentally named Jungwon after one of my cousins because I forgot it was his name because I always call him by his American name and now I can’t show him the story because it has his name in it. I swear this wasn’t on purpose.
In the first draft, Soyoung was bisexual, but I couldn’t fit that fact in the final draft. Know in your heart that this is true and canon, though.
The grandfather’s apartment, the Shinsegae department store basement, and the grandfather’s gravesite are all based on my actual human grandpa’s apartment/grave/places near it, and it was really just an exercise in nostalgic laziness that I described places I was pretty intimately familiar with. (If you want to know something meta that’s a little sad and strange related to the story: my family is talking about what to do with my grandfather’s grave now, because it’s too far from most of the family for them to visit. We’re trying to figure out where to take my grandparent’s ashes. I learned about this a month after my story was published and felt some kind of way).
Homecoming really is the best example I’ve written of how a story is sad or happy depending on where you end it. I ended it at the saddest moment. Soyoung’s life ends up pretty good! Soyoung ends up happy mostly, in the way that happiness is a mutable state for most people.
I cannot stress enough that Dr. Crouton, best cat, does get sent for and Soyoung DOES get her cat back. This is fucking crucial.
I always think about doing more with this story, because I think it’s an interesting concept that says a lot about migration/diaspora/immigration stuff, but I hesitate because I don’t know if I’m the best writer to write a story about this.
