Today I’ve invited Helena Rho to Bookish Brews to talk to us about her experience with English literature. Helena has a beautiful perspective of being a Korean American writer who is heavily influenced by English literature, just like so many other writers of color and writers around the world. She’s with us today to chat about what English literature means to her and who gets to claim English literature. If you talk, write, and dream in English, is that enough?
Bookish Brews Snapshot
American Seoul by Helena Rho
Helena Rho left Seoul for America at age six and amidst American expectations, along the way, she lost so much of her Korean-ness. In this powerful memoir, Helena tells us of her courage to find herself again.
🌳 Family Focused 😭 Emotional 🇰🇷 Korean Culture 🧭 Immigrant Experience
- Genre: Memoir
Is English Literature Only for White People
The month of May is #AAPIHeritageMonth, and I’ve used that as an excuse to recommend to anyone who would listen that they should read Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong. Of course, I’m doing it for selfish reasons: Hong is a Korean American writer like me. And one of the essays in her book “United” delivered such a blow that it felt physical. I let the book fall out of my hands and looked down at my chest to see if it had caved in.
Hong was writing about “the slow drip of racism” she experienced as an MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop. One of her classmates made fun of her work and posted it on a blog: “He ripped on my first collection by describing it as hack identity politics poems. Then he compared me to Li-Young Lee (not only do we look alike, we write alike!) and declared that the poetry world would be better off if all mediocre minority poets, like myself, were exterminated.” I think I stopped breathing when I read this by Hong: “I remember the wall of condescension whenever I brought up racial politics in workshop. Eventually, I internalized their condescension, mocked other ethnic poetry as too ethnicky. It was made clear to me that the subject of Asian identity itself was insufficient and inadequate…”
I knew exactly what Hong was talking about. I’d been that writer in the MFA workshop who’d also been told that I was inadequate. That I wasn’t writing like they expected me to: Like Amy Tan. Don’t get me wrong, I love Amy Tan. I’m just not Amy Tan. I was also told that I wasn’t a real writer because I was a doctor. I couldn’t possibly be serious about my writing and I should just go back to practicing medicine (I was somewhat consoled by the fact that these young people compared me to Atul Gawande who, they seemed to have forgotten, had been nominated for a National Book Award). Every writing workshop felt excruciating as my much younger classmates “tore apart” my writing. A former classmate, who recently posted a terrible review of my memoir American Seoul, on Amazon and Goodreads, actually wrote those terrible words: tore apart.
After I earned my MFA in creative nonfiction, I didn’t participate in writing workshops for years, too scarred by what was then called critique, but I now realize was essentially bullying. So perhaps I should have known when I took a “manuscript bootcamp” by a famous white writer that it was a terrible idea. But then, I’m “the idiot who listened” (as I wrote in my memoir) to my parents, who wanted a doctor in the family, and went to medical school.
Clearly my willingness to accommodate and listen has gotten me in trouble before. But blithely I believed that a white woman writer would understand my Korean American memoir. She did not. And the most hurtful thing she said was: “You can’t compare your mother to King Lear!” Basically, how dare I use the madness of a great and noble Western king as a metaphor for the mental decline of my Eastern mother. “King Lear” was written by Shakespeare, the icon of English literature, and I was some unknown writer of Asian descent. Never mind that my mother had read Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Hemingway in translation. Never mind that I loved Shakespeare so much that when I was seventeen, I wanted to get my PhD in English Literature. I’ve read most of his plays, and I’ve seen many performances, including those by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and Stratford-upon-Avon. I still love Shakespeare.
Sadly, “In Search of a Korean Cordelia” was cut from my memoir because it was deemed too literary. What reader wants to be look up references to “King Lear” while reading a woman’s memoir? I was told. I thought it was nonsense. Until a couple of writer friends said some version of this: “You know, I had trouble with your Cordelia chapter. It was too dense for me, but then I don’t like Shakespeare.” Even though it seemed inconceivable to me that people didn’t like Shakespeare (I love that guy!), I let Cordelia go. I’m happy to report my chapter was published as an essay in Cherry Tree Journal this March.
And I got to keep “In Havana with Hemingway” as Chapter 19 of my memoir. I’d fought for this chapter to be included, despite my editor insisting it was also “too literary.” I agreed to cut the parts about Hemingway that were “too distracting,” according my editor. I have a complicated relationship to Hemingway, a white man who was also a misogynist and a racist. I am conflicted about my fondness for him—I went to Havana because of Hemingway. I love his concise and heartbreaking novel, The Old Man and the Sea. This novel has shaped me as a writer more than any other book because I read it when I was malleable, when I was seventeen years old. And, with my chapter about Hemingway, I wanted to show that he didn’t just influence white writers—many white male writers have cited him as an influence. Joan Didion famously wrote about how she sat at a typewriter and clacked out every word of one of his novels to figure out how to write well.
I wanted readers to know that Hemingway’s words had touched a different kind of American writer. Because even though I was born in Korea, I came to the US as a child and I want to claim Ernest Hemingway as a forefather in writing. I write in English, I think in English, I dream in English. And it is my dream to be a writer worthy of notice, to have my work considered a contribution to English literature.
What is English literature? Who gets to claim it? Is there a privileged group that owns it? Can I, an Asian American writer, claim Shakespeare and Hemingway as my influences because it is the truth? Can I write responses to the work of white writers without accusations of being inappropriate? Why can’t I compare my Korean mother to King Lear? Is that the purview of only white writers? Is there a section of English literature I’m not allowed in? Should I compare my Korean mother to only other Asian women, say, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Chinese aunt in Woman Warrior?
The truth is that the demographics of the United States will permanently evolve from majority white to majority non-white by the year 2044—the current population under the age of sixteen is already non-white, according to the Brookings Institute. And all Americans must struggle with what is defined as “American.” In 2044, will books written by Asian American or other immigrant writers automatically be considered American literature? Or will those books still be ghettoized as the literature of the “Other”? I want to ask the exact same question Cathy Park Hong so poignantly asks in Minor Feelings: “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?”
Discussion & Further Reading
Please thank Helena Rho for joining us today! This piece is absolutely brilliant and I’m so honored that she chose to let me share it with all of you.
We’ve previously discussed publishing in English from Bolivia in my post on Bolivian Literature with Carla Doria. We’ve also discussed Why is Literature so Important? I think Helena hits the nail right on the head here with her experience. Why do we hold up English language to be claimed by only the few when there are people who are writing in English from all different backgrounds and from all around the world. What is stopping us from accepting writers with different backgrounds into the English literature space? Don’t be afraid to stop and think about why this might be. Think. Listen. Grow.
What do you think? Who is allowed to claim English literature? Who is allowed to be influenced by English literature?
