Two Memoirs by Yongsoo Park
i’ve been meaning to post about these books for a few months — but they’ve been weird and busy months. but just before the quarantine, i received an email from yongsoo park — an author i have admired but never met. he’d written two memoirs, had self-published the first and was about to self-publish the second.
i’d loved and was truly inspired by his earlier novel, BOY GENIUS published by Akashic in 2002. (i remember stumbling upon it probably at one of those pre-AWP small press book fairs they had i believe in what was the old mercantile library. i forget the name of the organization that ran these book fairs and wonder what happened to it. was it run by CLMP? this was before Center for Fiction was there. or was it a different subscription library?) … i can’t remember exactly how i found it, but BOY GENIUS was a revelation. it was asian-american literature far beyond anything i’d read before, importantly different from the (also important) foundational assimilation theme that predominated, and came from a familiar but surreal perspective. i’ve written briefly before about what it meant to me, but its very existence was crucial for me. it inspired me to keep writing, frankly, and to think there were other perspectives (somewhat like mine, near mine) that were possible in a literary world that seemed at the time beyond entrance.
the two new memoirs are very nyc books. one is about his raising his kids in harlem. and the other is about his childhood in the neighborhood where i now live: the area in queens made up of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst.
his queens is no longer there but it was here just a moment ago. he took me to where his dad’s shoe repair store used to be located, in a small stall in the Jackson Heights subway station that i used to pass every day and is now occupied by a barber shop and a cell phone accessory store. i think i moved here just as the old neighborhood was evaporating; in fact no doubt my gentrifying move was part of the titrating force that changed the formula of its place.
i love both these books. the parenting memoir reflected conflicts i’d had (and continue to have) as a korean american father, and his urban childhood — entirely different from my midwestern one — resonated more than harmonically. here’s the overly long blurb i wrote for the more recent one:
The beautifully remembered details of a Queens boyhood circa 1980s is so colored with a particular light of Korean-American immigrant experience that the reader, who could be forgiven for thinking they are reading a folksy document of yesteryear, is so bedazzled that their mesmerized state occurs before they are even aware, and achieved perhaps so subtly that the hypnotized might even deny the trick — except for a lingering and transformative mist…
Frankly, it is difficult for me to convey how gratifying and exciting it is to see such an experience articulated in print. The current argot talks about “feeling seen,” and we are in a season of new (and winning) demands for better diversity of representation in our national media. And yet how can I speak of my wonder for the writings of Yongsoo Park — whose affable and low-key style belies not only an incredible courage but weaves a steady-tempoed music that insidiously, sentence by sentence, recapitulates a past so that one is in tears at the recovery of what one was certain was lost forever. For me, from the beginning of his career with the outrageous Boy Genius to these latest memoirs, Yongsoo Park’s books are the mirror and lens I have been seeking my whole reading life — and ones I have not yet encountered elsewhere.
i’d add that if you have any interest in korean-american literature, they are a must. these are self-published books, which i wish they weren’t. i respect his decision to do so, the fulfillment of an urgency, and its maintaining of certain control — but i wish it was a different world, one that was better prepared to recognize Yongsoo Park’s adult genius. maybe it soon will.
Links to buy the books:
