“You concede you can’t change the system from within, but you propose you can change relative positions,” writes SJ Kim in This Part Is Silent. “You propose you can make the important parts of yourself indelible.”
This essay collection explores displacement and loss (it rips your heart out and stomps on it), creativity and change (it puts your heart back together), and institutional power and progress (your heart is stronger for the experience). Born in Korea and raised in North Carolina, Kim grew up around her parents’ ice cream shop. Her mother was frugal about everything save for books, and this had a lasting effect on Kim—as an adult, the author works at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and holds the equivalent of a tenured position. She writes in both Korean and English, an elevation of language that allows her to better explore her point of view as a writer, academic, and daughter. Brief but deep, her prose is poetic, and her use of second person is innovative. Particularly in her meditations on antiracism and the generation gap, her words are indeed indelible.
Top Image Via: W.W. Norton
