Her American Upbringing

As the publication date approaches for Joan Sung’s debut memoir, “Kinda Korean: Stories from an American Life,” the WWU alum admits she sometimes fights the urge to “hide under a rock.” 

In the spirit of Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H-Mart,” Sung, ’09, B.A., English – creative writing, chronicles with brutal honesty her coming-of-age as the daughter of immigrants—including a fierce “tiger mom”--and discovering her own first-generation Korean American identity. 

“I spilled my guts across those pages,” Sung recently wrote in Author Magazine. “I poured my heart out so no Asian American woman would ever feel alone in her experiences again.”

Writing the memoir helped Sung understand her own upbringing, and she hopes it will help others learn more about what it means to be Asian American. 

“Kinda Korean: Stories from an American Life” will be published Feb. 25 by She Writes Press, and Sung will appear at Village Books in Bellingham March 1. 

We recently checked in with her about the book:

I think a lot of Asian Americans will be able to relate to some of the stories of awkwardness and adolescence, but also that additional layer of trying to navigate what it means to be Asian American. 

There were a lot of things that I experienced as an adolescent that I really couldn’t make sense of because I didn’t have the context since my parents didn’t grow up here. A lot of these stories were my opportunity to kind of look back and reflect -- I was able to apply significance to little moments that I dismissed at the time that were actually pretty heavy. 

The way I designed the book was to assign an anecdote or a story to a resonating moment of discrimination or otherness that I experienced, being a daughter of immigrants. I think that books such as “Crazy Rich Asians” are incredibly meaningful, but I think without the representation of counter narratives, it often leads to erasure because readers sometimes might be eager to embrace a singular narrative and apply it to entire communities.

There are stories in my book about my first time being called a “chink,” my first time being fetishized, my first time with a micro aggression… I think that we talk about these things a lot of the time from a bird’s eye view, but rarely through storytelling, so I’m hoping that readers outside of my community can read these stories and have a deeper understanding of what it means to be Asian American.

I’m not even sure if I understood our relationship until I was done writing the story. I think the art and process of writing was incredibly cathartic and healing, and I was granted the rare gift of returning to these moments where I thought she was this harsh, stoic, tiger mom--and she kind of is--but I was able to revisit our relationship with a different lens, and I was really able to forgive her.

She really taught me what it meant to resist parts of assimilation that she had no tolerance for. You don’t realize that the art of resistance can look quite different outside of politics. It can be an internal protest, and my mother is a living example of that. 

For example, she never took a Western name when she immigrated to this country, and she decided to embrace her Korean community within the church rather than try to reject a lot of the things that she thought white Americans wouldn’t accept about her. And instead of feeling bad about not fitting in, she was quite indignant, and she embraced that with such grace. 

She expected me to do the same, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I was really able to master the idea that you don’t have to internalize every single rejection from racist Americans for not fitting in.

I think at first I had no idea what that even meant. I thought it was a very normal experience to be low income, to be treated terribly in public for not speaking the language, for having an accent, for having a minimum wage blue-collar job. It was something to be ashamed of, I thought for sure, but I really didn’t understand how much of these identifiers were actually intrinsically tied to being First Gen. To me, when I was young, it was a separate experience, and as I grew older, I understood how it’s just a multilayered identity. It’s really the understanding of intersectionality, which, as a country, we weren’t really openly talking about until around the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Oh boy, I love that you asked this question. I have such fond memories at Western. I loved how granola it was, how weird it was, how artsy it was, and how that was so normalized. I remember that while other colleges were talking about typical fraternity parties, the typical type of party that I would be at would involve pot and reading poetry. 

I had the best time at Western. Western was home. I’d honestly return and retire there if I could. 

Also, shout out to Senior Instructor Michael Bell; he was my literature teacher, and when I think about Western, I always think about him. I remember him reading his short pieces in class. I also remember I went to his office hours, and he told me I had a voice for radio … Which I think is hilarious. I suppose podcasts are the New Age radio for today, but it’s always something I think about. 

Oh, and this is really random, but I always remember the seagulls who would steal our lunches when we would eat outside on a sunny day.