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

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.

1) The latest issue of Kartika Review features a special section called “Meditations of Home,” and you can read my own personal view on this subject.  Fine writers such as Alexander Chee, Don Lee, Min Jin Lee, Yiyun Li, and Ed Lin also participated in the project, so it’s really an issue worth reading.  You can get the journal  in PDF, or better yet, you can have Lulu crank out a paper copy.

2) Speaking of Ed, I had an absolute blast at the The Sulu Series last night!  We were there to celebrate his latest novel Snakes Can’t Run, and there was poetry and fiction and songs, too, and even a short film at the end.  I’m not used to being out in the city so late on a school night, but wow, was it ever worth it.

Matt Blesse

Cynthia Lin

Catzie Vilayphonh

Ed Lin

Ed Lin

Many more pictures here.  I read from a short story titled “Faith,” something I had completed a week ago.  I’m not entirely happy with the story as it stands, so most likely it’ll change, but for those who want to know how it ends (at least for now), you can read it here; search for “END OF SULU READING” to find the exact spot where I stopped reading.

By the way, I should mention that I was inspired to write this story after reading Rhian Ellis‘ novel After Life; in fact, the premise is identical.  I can only dream of writing with Ellis’ prosaic precision, so there is no comparison — everyone should read her fabulous novel.

Check out these nice pictures from the NYU Alumni Reading.  I read with three poets, and it’s always a humbling experience.  They do so much with so few words!  I read an excerpt from the chapter “Jhee Hong.”

Ishion Hutchinson	John Murillo
January Gill O’Neil	Me

All the Writers

For the last two days, I had the opportunity to visit Wells College for a reading and also to sit in some of the creative writing classes.  It was wonderful in every way — I’d forgotten how gorgeous the campus is, and also what a great time I had taking the poetry writing class in the spring of 1993.  Back then, Wells had been a women’s college, and now it’s fully co-educational, but the spirit of learning hasn’t changed a bit.

A couple of weeks ago, I read at The Raconteur, one of the coolest used bookstores in Jersey.

I have no idea who that guy is, but he’s in the next picture, too.

I read from the chapter “Jhee Hong,” which I thought was appropriate since it takes place in a used bookstore.  It was a great event, lots of interested readers and Q&A afterwards.

And since I can’t leave a bookstore without buying some books, these are the titles I left with.

That’s Matrimony by Joshua Henkin (who was at the BooksNJ festival earlier in the year and I should’ve gotten the book then, but we were pressed for time – but no matter, I got a signed copy!), Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder, and Richard Price‘s Freedomland.  Haven’t read any of them, but that’ll soon change.

And this past week, the Hunterdon County Library invited me for a reading.

A little while ago, the director who put together BooksNJ asked the participating authors if they could say something about libraries, and here’s what I wrote.

Without libraries, I never would’ve discovered books on tape.  I’m still surprised that so many people haven’t experienced the joy of listening to a book narrated by a professional — they are, without question, missing out in a big way.  What hooked me was Frank Muller‘s narration of Chris Crutcher‘s collection Athletic Shorts, and since then, I must’ve gone through the majority of Muller’s performances (The Prince of Tides, 1984, The Great Gatsby — you can’t go wrong with anything he reads).  It’s unfortunate that he’s no longer with us, but his work will live on, thanks to all the great libraries.

If you have a road trip coming up or would like a change of pace for the daily commute, go to your local library and get yourself a Muller.

Last night, I drove to the Brielle Public Library to do a reading/signing.  When I walked up to the front doors, I saw the poster they’d created for me.

You might notice a slight problem with the poster.  I walked through the doors laughing my head off — I don’t know why, but I just found the badly pixelated photo of J. Robert Lennon and his expression hilarious.  One of the librarians explained they don’t do the posters themselves, headquarters does, and for some reason, they used the photo I’d taken at Cornell, and for some even more inexplicable reason, they used Lennon’s picture instead of mine.  I don’t know…maybe he looks more like me than I do.

In any case, I got there and set up in their magazine room.

That’s what the room looked like at 6:15pm.  We’d get started at 6:30pm.  This is what the room looked like at 6:45pm.

I spent the time reading Ladies Home Journal, an interview featuring Nora Ephron, Meryl Streep, and Amy Adams, about their new film Julie & Julia (it was basically a fluff piece, but great photos).  At five to seven, I realized that I was going to experience my first bagel.  Not bad, I suppose; I’d done over twenty events before this one and had avoided it thus far.

As I was just about to pack up, an old friend showed up.  Saved!  And in a big way, because we ended up talking for a good hour about books and movies and everything else we used to talk about when we worked together many years ago.  I had an audience of one, but it turned out just fine in the end.

On Thursday, I spent the evening with the Korean Community Center of Greater Princeton’s Women’s Club, where we had a lively discussion of my novel.  What an honor it is to have this many people interested in my book — it’s all an author can hope for.  The event was also mentioned in the Korea Times!

The panel (New Currents in Korean American Literature: The Origin and the Distance) at the Korea Society on Wednesday night was wonderful in every way.  Not only did I get to meet and talk with a pair of fantastic writers (Ed Park and Janice Y.K. Lee), we had a great time discussing books and language in front of a captive audience.

About the only thing that wasn’t perfect about the Generation X reading at Happy Ending was the microphone,  which kept cutting in and out.  But the five readers persevered and a great time was had by all.

Halley Feiffer was the first one up, and she performed a poet monologue — meaning she was acting as if she were a poet.  It was funny all the way until the end, when it became quite startlingly sad.  Which I’m fairly certain is exactly how it was suppose to go.  It always amazes me how much physical poise actors have.

Up next was Justin Taylor, who read a great piece from his upcoming collection.

And then it was my turn, and I read an essay that I wrote for the occasion, some Gen-X bits from my novel (the TV shows Three’s Company and Diff’rent Strokes were both in the mix), and finally, a flash fiction piece I wrote for Pindeldyboz.

After a short intermission…

Bianca Stone was up, and although she was frustrated with the projector (it washed out the lighter lines of her comics), it didn’t matter a bit to me, as I was able to see and laugh and appreciate every single one of her poems.  She can draw and she can write — as far as I’m concerned, she’s superwoman.

Here’s a picture of April Naoko Heck, who put this entire event together.  Another superwoman.

The final reader of the night was Nick Flynn, and boy, he was just dynamite.  He read from a variety of works, including a poem that he wrote while listening to Bianca, about the passing of Michael Jackson.

That was the evening, one I won’t soon forget.  Before we descended the staircase of the subway station at Delancey and Essex, we heard the song “The WayYou Make Me Feel” being blasted from the open windows of a car.  A part of me wished we could stay instead of driving back to Jersey, maybe head over to Times Square, since the news of his death was still breaking and if anything significant were to happen, it would be nowhere else but here, the city of cities.

But unlike the King of Pop, we still had things to do and worry about the next day, so we went home.  In the car, we hopped from radio station to radio station, listening to Michael Jackson’s music: “Billie Jean,” “Thriller,” “Black or White,” “Human Nature,” and about thousand other songs.  The man had more hits than Tony Soprano.

A quick update through photos.  At the Slipper Room, I read with Judy Blundell, Matthew Aaron Goodman, and Theresa Rebeck:

Blundell

Goodman

Rebeck

I guess that’s the last time I try to take indoor shots in a burlesque house with my cameraphone.  You’ll just have to take my word for it that those people in the pictures are who I say they are.

On Saturday, I did a quick interview with Jeff Rivera for Bootleg Books at Book Court in Brooklyn:

Me and Jeff Rivera

At the end of the interview, I think Jeff and I came to the mutual conclusion that my novel is a Korean Harry Potter, but without magic.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

And today was BooksNJ, where Wendy Lee and Ed Lin and I did a panel on immigrant literature:

Wendy, Me, and Ed

It was a great time — our panel was packed, we got to sign books for eager readers, and the weather was New Jersey gorgeous.