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

LitCrawl 2011/Dirty Laundry!  The Launderette on Second Avenue was packed, as you can see from the photo below:

credit: nytimes/Jake Sugarman

We got some love from the local arm of the New York Times, too.  I read a flash piece titled Sacrifices, which appears below.  But before that, some more pictures.  Big thanks to my wife for taking these great photos and also editing my story.

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Johnny Angel of Suyung

2:30pm

It feels as if Johnny has died about thirty times in the last week.  Lying on his side with his eyes half open, I lift up the covers to see that he’s still breathing.  And he is, so he’s still here.  Johnny’s our cat, and he’s dying from renal failure.  Tomorrow morning, he’ll be gone for sure, because our vet will drive over here to our home to put him down.  It’s a decision that makes me sick and grateful at the same time.

But for now, Johnny’s alive.  His process of dying has been a gradual lowering of location, from the high perch of the table to the middle of the armchair and now on the floor, with towels and heating pads to keep him warm.

Today is a good day, because last night, we watched Super Bowl 2011.  Instead of seeing it downstairs in the living room like my wife and I normally would, we cheered on the Cheese Heads upstairs so we could be nearer our cat.  This involved a bunch of high-tech trickery, converting the unencrypted cable signal through Ethernet and streaming the feed wirelessly to my netbook and out to my widescreen computer monitor.  Johnny wouldn’t have been completely alone had we decided to stay downstairs, as we have another cat, one who is not exactly healthy, either, but at least one who isn’t dying.  Her name is Kyra, and they’re both Siamese, if you please.

I don’t think the football game, as exciting as it was, is the reason why Johnny’s looking better today.  It’s because for the first time in a long time, he slept in our bed, and for a good hour last night, we slept together.  He hasn’t been able to walk for about a week, and all of his movements are limited, and yet last night, he found a way to crawl up next to me and stretch his uncertain limbs over my chest.

2:46pm

Johnny is my first cat, my first pet, one I didn’t live with until well into my twenties.  (This is actually a fairly serious secret I just revealed, because now you could probably break into my online bank with the answer to one of my security questions.)  When I met Johnny, he was two years old, and he’d been a stud cat for a cattery, meaning he was smooth and sweet with the ladies.  He has one of the most relaxed personalities of any cat I know, of any creatures I know, animal or human.  This is probably why he and I get along so well, because no matter how crappy things are going, Johnny is always just hanging out.  If he were human, he’d be the guy buying the extra rounds at the bar, the one who may have plenty of problems of his own but is blissfully oblivious to every one of them.

For a while, our household had numerical gender equality: my wife Dawn, her daughter Jessica, and Kyra versus myself, Johnny, and Larry, our German shepherd dog.  Jessica left for England in 2004, Larry passed away in 2005, and we got a new girl dog, Ginny, in 2006.  So tomorrow, I’ll literally be the last man standing in a household of three females.  Outnumbered!  I wish Johnny weren’t going, but it is time.  He’s done more than enough at this point, having survived two weeks of our absence in January, when we traveled to the Middle East and Europe, and when I left two weekends ago to see my college friend before he becomes a father (his wife is due in a week or so).  An impending birth, an impending death.  Never have I been more aware of the cyclical nature of life.

Seeing Johnny’s decline, I can’t help but to think of my own.  What’s going to happen to me?  Will I also lose the use of my legs, will my bladder empty without fair warning, will I become a living skeleton who watches his life slowly but surely ebb away?  We all hope that our end will be painless and swift, but we can’t all be so lucky.

5pm

I’ve been checking on Johnny on the hour throughout the day, replacing the piece of tissue underneath his lips because he’s been drooling more heavily.  At 3pm, he seemed tired but fine.  At 4pm, his breathing became more shallow, but he still recognized me and seemed like he might pull through to see tomorrow.  At 5pm, he was gone.  He took himself out.  We told ourselves, convinced ourselves, that putting him down would be our final act of kindness toward our boy cat, but it turns out that he’s the one who gifted us by giving up his life all on his own.

I wish I had been there with him as he exhaled his last breath, but I wasn’t there, because I had to be at work, in front of the computer, as my cat lie dying.  Not that it would’ve made any difference, because he was going whether or not I was present.  Still, it hurts that I missed his passing, and I know I’ll always regret it.

9:20pm

Dawn came back from work at seven, and we flooded the house with our collective tears.  My eyes actually hurt from all the crying.  Johnny’s where we left him, and I can almost make myself believe that he’s sleeping, that he’ll wake and tip his head up and look at me with those blue eyes of his.  But he’s gone.  As someone who has a tough time believing in the afterlife, I can’t say that he’s up there or slipped into another dimension or what have you, but I do know what this cat has meant to me for the fifteen years I knew him.  He was a good boy.  He was my friend.  He was my first bromance.  And I’ll miss him for the rest of my life.

There’s someone on the Internet that I must thank, and that’s Tanya (http://www.felinecrf.org/).  We relied on her extensive website of feline chronic renal failure information, and because of her hard work, Johnny was able to get the best possible care.  On her site, Tanya has the following quote that I think aptly closes out this post.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

• an essay I wrote about Johnny in KoreAm Magazine a few years back.

Photo by Terry-Ann Zander; Woo was given Korean cookbooks created by High Point Regional students. Each cookbook contained recipes prepared by students in honor of his visit. From left, Megan Van Glahn, Sung J. Woo, Brittany Anello and Derek Vanalthuis.

On December 9, I visited High Point Regional High School at Sussex, NJ. There were about a hundred students in the auditorium, and after I gave a reading and answered questions from the audience, we headed over to the cafeteria. And you know what was there? Korean food!

In addition to reading my book, their teacher (Ms. Reedy — thank you, Laraine!) suggested that they delve a bit deeper into Korean culture, so they found recipes on the Internet and cooked up a storm.  Check out the gallery below to see some photos I took with my phone of their impressive spread, plus closeups of the cookbooks they made for me.  I especially appreciated these, as I’m an excellent eater of Korean food but unfortunately a nonexistent cook.

Also, the local newspaper ran a story about my visit.  And with this event, I’m done for 2010.  The totals: 17 locations, 1868 miles driven.

On November 7, I participated in the Page Turner Festival in DUMBO, reading with the poet Luis Francia and the stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu (middle initial K.).  It was a wonderful event in every way except for one — Richard Price never showed up.  A shame, as I had a number of books and DVDs for him to sign!  In any case, check out the photos below.

On October 25, I went back to my old high school, which of course meant I traveled back in time.  I hadn’t set foot in the building in almost twenty years, and I’d forgotten that the auditorium was right by the entrance.   What did feel familiar were the lockers, rows and rows of lockers, banks of them painted in red and blue and orange.

Every year, Ocean Township High School recognizes academic achievement at the Spartan Scholar ceremony, and this year, they were kind enough to invite me as a guest speaker.  Appearing below are some pictures and the speech I delivered.  The latter portion of the speech includes my “Backstory” piece.

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Over at KoreanAmericanStory.org, there’s a nice recap and also a link to my Backstory essay that I read at the event held on 9/15.  I’ve hijacked their pictures here!  Many thanks to the wonderful audience that came out for our little reading.

The Brooklyn Bookfest has come and gone, and what a fun-filled couple of days it was.  I took part in the Bookend event on Friday night at powerHouse Arena, then returned on Sunday to take in the literary scenery.  Some of the folks I got to hear: Brooke Berman, Daphne Beal, Matt Stewart, Aryn Kyle, Dennis Lehane, Steven Millhauser, Peter Straub, Stewart O’Nan, Sigrid Nunez, Benjamin Percy.  That might be about 1% of the authors who were at the event, so I’ll have to do better next time.  In any case, here are some pictures in case you weren’t able to make it.

This past Sunday in Arlington, Virginia (which is a stone’s throw away from DC), I attended APALA‘s 30th Anniversary Gala dinner, where I received the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award For Literature in the Youth Category.  It was a fantastic event, filled with singing, dancing, and killer, authentic Chinese food (you know it’s authentic when there’s a whole fish, from head to tail,  involved). I was asked to write a short speech, and the following is what I delivered.

There are a lot of needy people in this world, but I’m not sure if there’s anyone needier than writers.  As you probably already know, most of us do our work in a vacuum, so there’s nobody else to blame if we fail at our job (though if you ask my patient and loving wife, she may tell you differently – so do me a favor and don’t ask her).  And conversely, when things are going well, we don’t hear about that, either.  Unless we get, say, some sort of an award for some sort of a literary achievement.  This is where you come in, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association.  You have chosen to honor my book for your award, and I couldn’t be happier.  To have an organization like this, an organization that promotes Asian/Pacific American culture and heritage to pick my book – it means the world to me.

The APALA was established a year earlier than my arrival to the States.  Back in the winter of 1981, I was a ten-year old boy, and the only English I knew were the alphabet and counting from one to ten.  And now here I am, a novelist.  I have many people to thank for this transformation, first and foremost my two ESL teachers, Suzan Cole and Susan Jarosiewicz.  With their dedication, perseverance, and enormous stack of flash cards, they taught me the nuts and bolts of the English language.  I also need to pay tribute to Stephen King, because it was his novel The Dead Zone that made me realize the power of fiction, its ability to submerge a reader entirely into another world.  It goes without saying that I owe my family in a big way, since those weekends and summer vacations I spent at our gift shop in Manasquan, New Jersey formed the basis for my novel.  I still marvel at my parents, not only for making a life for us in a foreign country, but for their collective calm when their son called them in the second semester of his freshman year at college to inform them that he was switching out of his safe engineering major and into the uncertain jaws of English Literature.

At Cornell University, I became a writer, thanks to teachers like Stewart O’Nan and Michael Koch.  They introduced me to the works of Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Susan Minot, Richard Yates – the list goes on.  And at NYU’s MFA program, a fellow Korean-American writer urged me to read the works of Don Lee, whose story collection Yellow still startles me with the beauty of its language.

The greatest gift of having published a novel is that I get to partake in the current burgeoning of Asian-American literature.  For the longest time, it seemed as if Amy Tan was the only game in town, but now look at us.  From Anchee Min to Min Jin Lee to Li Young-Lee to Yiyun Li and everyone in between, I feel incredibly blessed and privileged to be a little sapling in this growing forest of our literature.  Without you, the librarians who bring our books to the public, we would have a much more difficult time reaching our readers.  You’re doing your job, which makes it that much more rewarding to do mine.  The best way for me to demonstrate my appreciation for this wonderful award is to finish the first draft of my second novel.  Which is coming, slowly but surely, one word at a time.  I don’t have a title for it yet, but once I do, you’ll all be one of the first to know.  Thank you.

And to top it off, when I returned from the event, the trade paperback edition of Everything Asian was waiting for me!  It doesn’t get any better than that.