My relationship with writing about my Korean identity is fraught and tangled due to my tenuous relationship with my parents’ past and their willingness to speak about it. The ambivalence I feel about sitting in my experience as a Korean woman fully owning that description extends to creating work that excavates Korean diasporic trauma.
What a paragraph!
I’m not Korean, but, as an aspiring writer, I feel a strong connection to this voice and this problem. With just a few tweaks, I take it and make it my own: “My relationship with writing about my identity as a gay man is fraught and tangled due to my tenuous relationship with pretty much every human being I have ever known and my inability to ascertain the extent to which they may or may not be willing to know about this one, super-personal aspect of my life. The ambivalence I feel about sitting in my experience as gay man fully owning that description extends to creating work that speaks to the history of trauma and violence that gay people have been forced to endure for generations. And this huge pile of shit in my brain often makes writing, about anything, feel impossible.
An absolute 10! This is a subject that I know nothing about but want to learn. As an energy worker, we are deep into ancestral healing, as so many generations before us were silent. And I feel we do carry that energy forward unless given a voice and healed. I so agree with this authors’ perspective: “ I don’t want to write to fill an expectant frame of yellow suffering, but the ghosts of intergenerational trauma grow from silence. They live in between words not said, stories not told, and pain not processed.”
Beautiful.
What a paragraph!
I’m not Korean, but, as an aspiring writer, I feel a strong connection to this voice and this problem. With just a few tweaks, I take it and make it my own: “My relationship with writing about my identity as a gay man is fraught and tangled due to my tenuous relationship with pretty much every human being I have ever known and my inability to ascertain the extent to which they may or may not be willing to know about this one, super-personal aspect of my life. The ambivalence I feel about sitting in my experience as gay man fully owning that description extends to creating work that speaks to the history of trauma and violence that gay people have been forced to endure for generations. And this huge pile of shit in my brain often makes writing, about anything, feel impossible.
I loved this essay. Love reading about ghosts, family, ancestral lineages, Korea. It actually sparked an idea for the novel I'm working on!
Thank you so much for posting this important story, beautifully written and powerful.
An absolute 10! This is a subject that I know nothing about but want to learn. As an energy worker, we are deep into ancestral healing, as so many generations before us were silent. And I feel we do carry that energy forward unless given a voice and healed. I so agree with this authors’ perspective: “ I don’t want to write to fill an expectant frame of yellow suffering, but the ghosts of intergenerational trauma grow from silence. They live in between words not said, stories not told, and pain not processed.”