being chosen

dreams of korean cinderellas

Somewhere in America, at some point in time, a child gets up at a community Korean folktale recitation contest and tells the story of Kongjwi, a young girl whose mother dies and father remarries, only to also pass away and leave her in the hands of a cruel stepmother and ugly stepsister, Patjwi. Kongjwi is abused, dressed in rags, and treated like the lowliest kind of servant. As romance stories go, there are instances when Kongjwi, given impossible tasks by her evil stepmother, receives the help of kindly animals and celestial beings. With their help, she goes, disguised, to a dance where the magistrate is looking for a wife.

During library hour in a suburb outside Washington, D.C., the school librarian told my class she was going to read to us from a picture book called The Korean Cinderella. “I know this!” I declared excitedly to my classmates around me. “I have this at home. Her name is Kongjwi.” The librarian proceeded to read a story by an author named Shirley Climo about a girl named Pear Blossom, and I quickly found myself bewildered, and a little embarrassed, for having spoken so confidently to my classmates who might now be wondering if I had made that story up.

Pear Blossom sounds prettier than Kongjwi, more delicate. Pear Blossom is what people think Asian names mean and sound like. Kongjwi, to me, still sounds very Korean. If I were to visualize what Korean sounds like to me, I would tell you to imagine stacking wooden blocks into a Jenga tower. One by one, square and sturdy. Kong and jwi. Kong, bean.

The folks working on Bridgerton over at Shondaland have probably never heard of Kongjwi Patjwi. Same, probably, for Julia Quinn. There is no Sophie Baek in her books, nor would the people of England have, largely, known of a people, who would eventually come to be known to the world as Korean, during the time of literary imaginings of Austenian marriage plots. Koreans have been known by many names, spoken and spit out by themselves and others, you must remember. There’s an assumption that Koreans have been frozen in a cryogenic chamber until they were found, over and over again, each discovery bigger than the last. (Right now, we’re at Kpop Demon Hunters winning a Grammy. I still remember my first time seeing a spread of the Wonder Girls in a tween magazine inside a Limited Too.) The same can be said for the flitting in and out of many ethno-nationalized commodities in the (public/global/US-media-dominated) eye, each time a newfangled thing that was just waiting to be discovered.

Sophie Baek is anachronistic, idealized, projected, and underexplained. Yet she stirs such tenderness in me, in my sister, in my friends who watch the show. She is, put another way, as utterly unsurprising as she is unexpected. My mother read nineteenth-century English literature to earn the first Seoul-based college degree in her family from Ewha Womans University. Over twenty years later in Providence, Rhode Island, I stayed up reading Persuasion through bleary eyes before my class on the nineteenth-century British novel met the next morning. (The class after which I did not declare a concentration in English, moving to History instead after taking a course on the Ottoman Empire that same spring. A few years after college, I watched the 1995 film adaptation of Persuasion and found myself, in a delayed response, emotionally devastated. I guess I got it.) We might not have been there. We were as good as there. Who hasn’t dreamed of being loved?

#1: stroke of midnight, stroke of luck

I have started submitting my writing again, by which I mean, I submitted one poem and one essay to litmags during the past month, and a couple writing fellowship and residency applications with them. I’m writing this shortly after reading the rejection email for the poem (which came shortly after the rejection email for the essay).

This past week, I got lunch with someone new, who remarked that I wasn’t merely lucky that I got into this PhD. Yes, it’s an incredibly uncontrollable and unpredictable process, with so many qualified people who don’t get selected, but you were selected because you’re brilliant and curious, and have interesting ideas and a provoking project. It wasn’t random, and you weren’t just lucky.

Since leaving the church, I have caught myself a few times explaining the things I once called miracles through the language of luck. I don’t think this necessarily indicates a reversal or contradiction. It doesn’t bother me very much that both things could be true, though it’s easier to talk through the approach of one rather than the other. At times, I suppose, it is easier to shield oneself behind the latter, because while both phenomena are uncontrollable, one is harder to believe in.

One random night this winter, I was thinking about death. It occurred to me viscerally that I was going to die someday, and I would have to reckon with whatever did or did not await me, and ah, this is why religion matters, which is pretty obvious, but it was one of those human moments that struck me as a reminder that I am one in a constellation of many beings having sentient moments of awareness and wondering. That I am a part of what I study. And in that moment, I realized I felt pretty alright.

#2: on being chosen

“If one spends time with the scholarship that could be called “political” or “ideological”,” says Rachel Jane Carroll, “…I believe that one finds not a censorious dismissal of beauty and pleasure but a yearning for it and a belief in its importance” (For Pleasure, 18-19).

In other words, those who dismiss pleasure as unimportant, childish, or cliche are, in fact, expressing, or repressing, a deep longing for that very thing to come and find them.

#3: they can’t order me to stop dreaming

Kongjwi dies when Patjwi drowns her out of jealousy. After Kongjwi has married the magistrate, Patjwi refuses to end the story. So Patjwi drowns Kongjwi, and disguises herself to take Kongjwi’s place. But Kongjwi’s ghost haunts the river, and her husband goes there to find her. When she comes back, she comes back for good this time. Patjwi dies and is cooked into sauce. Her mother accidentally ingests the sauce, then dies from the shock. Happily ever after. Or whatever it’s called.

In high school, among many stories, I dreamed a Cinderella story, an AU (alternate universe) concept that built and built itself through hours and hours of daydreaming. I kept it in my thoughts and under my pillow. I created graphics, wrote backstories, the way teen online roleplayers did during those years, but this story never made its way to the forums I played on. In a way, I preemptively placed it in the back of my mind, on the shelf of childish fancy. I worried it was a ridiculous idea, a cliche notion from noticing elements of Cinderella and related tropes appear and reappear in the media I consumed across my Korean American purview, the songs I listened to for fuzzy feelings, the images that formed my vision. That I was foolish for noticing, and holding on. In later years, I privately delegated the idea as evidence of my imagination as a teenager, but certainly not something I would ever seriously write. It wasn’t subversive. It wasn’t critical. It felt so, well, romantic.

A few nights ago, I opened a word processor determined to write something, anything, creative, to relax my mind. The first thing that flowed out was a scene from her, my Cinderella. Hello, there.