Why I Tell My Students I Hated High School

Nabokov mentions that the lowest form of art is a sort of literary tourism, leaning the value of art on exoticizing categories, including culture, turning a novel into a double-decker bus tour, with the writer holding a bull horn saying, “Look!  Characters wearing smocks!”  What if the writer exoticizing the culture is from both cultures of the foreign characters and the “western” readers?  Like me!   I somehow feel expectations from all sides, mainly because I’m writing in English.  I have a feeling this could be a 1,100 page thesis on translation studies, so I’ll keep it to my own, biased struggles with my writing.

I’ll give you an example. What novels or stories can you think of that start with a lush description of a spicy dish, loading up the scene with rich sensory details a-la-Flannery O’ Connor’s 3/5 senses rule?  Just think coriander.  There are already 3 well known books with this opening move from the past 5 years, and many of these books also have some sort of sister story involved that span across a couple of generations (thanks, Mark Sarvas for showing me an entire genre of this). 

The folks who have known me since high school think I’m just embittered because I was never fully accepted by the Korean Pride Kids and not fully by the Surfer Kids, and now that I’m 35 I’m playing out this schism in my writing.  I played ice hockey and was on the surf team.  I defy stereotypes, and that defiance is in a way a stereotype, as the 86 Asian American clubs from college can say about my banal cries of individuality.  So why do I feel a bit seditious as I refuse the convention of italicizing foreign words?  Is this the older Tommy Kim going back to High School after training with Royce Gracie for 20 years in an MMA compound, ready to crack some craniums? 

My writing project (I dare not call it anything else for the sake of my fragile confidence) tries to depict two very foreign worlds, to me at least.  Boyle Height and Korea during the early 1950’s. I know this creation of another world (or defamiliarization of the familiar world) is a prerequisite in any art, but I’m running into the problem of feeling like a sell-out, or an inaccurate guide that will feel the wrath of my people, or worst, from the “other” people that buy it as the authentic version of reality when maybe I'm just a fraud.  Wait, putting it this way, I'm just getting harangued from all sides, so I might as well just write the thing and hope my vision is worthy of being shared.  Josh: I feel a type of paralysis here that I’m trying to fix with my typical methods in dealing with any delicate situation in life.  Just yank the tablecloth and if the pitchers and glasses tumble to the ground, at least I have a clear table.  

PS: Why do I say "exploitive" as if I have a neurological malfunction?