"I read your book." | Sung J. Woo

The good folks at Backstory have posted my, you guessed it, back story.  How did Everything Asian become a book?  Like this.

Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work.

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Four years ago, my girlfriend and I were living in The Hills, in one among the thousands of identical townhouses in Bedminster, N.J. To give you an idea of how cookie-cutter this development is, the recent remake of The Stepford Wives was shot there.

We told people that we were moving half an hour northwest to rural Washington for practical reasons — it’s a seller’s market, I can telecommute, cheaper housing — but in actuality, it was because we wanted to nudge our relationship to the next level. Back then, I was living with Dawn in her house, which was fine with me and OK with her — until it wasn’t OK with her. One of her biggest pet peeves was that she didn’t know how to introduce me to new people. “Boyfriend” sounded like we were a pair of teenagers going steady, and “partner” was no better option, as if we were a same-sex couple or about to embark on a business venture. So who was I, exactly, if not a husband?

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An article I wrote for the December 2008 issue of KoreAm Journal.

I’VE been pushing the cart for 28 years now. It started in 1981, when grocery shopping was a family affair: father, mother, two older sisters and me.

My father had been living in the States for a number of years by himself, trying to establish a business and a home, so trips to the supermarket were old hat to him. But for the rest of us newcomers, it was quite the opposite. In Seoul, I was used to small corner shops and the outdoor farmers’ market, where earthy bok choy and sea-fresh squid were sold on the street, so to walk into a brightly lighted warehouse in Ocean, N.J., offering an unending variety of goods was at once exciting and daunting. [read more]

An essay I wrote for the New York Times, about grocery shopping with my family.

Originally published in The Nervous Breakdown

Fourteen years ago, I started an online magazine.  Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal now, since anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can create an online presence, but back in March of 1994, it wasn’t so easy.  Because Netscape Navigator wasn’t even at 1.0 — it was in beta.  And Internet Explorer didn’t exist.  Email ran on mainframes and VAX machines, and Gopher was the protocol of choice when it came to delivery of information in a menu-like interface.

Anyway, I had to come up with a name for the magazine, and I chose Whirlwind.  I’m trying to remember why I picked that name, but honestly, I can’t recall, though I would like to say now that I regret choosing it.  I mean it’s not a terrible name, but couldn’t I pick something cooler, like Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head?  I mean I was in college, for God’s sake.  It’s just sad.

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