“It’s time to talk about talking,” Sylvia said.
“So we’re just talking to each other about talking, just talking,” Mindy said.
Sylvia held up the small music box. Mindy caught a flash of the gold sticker on the bottom: MADE IN CHINA. “Yes,” her mother said, “we’re just talking. You’re my daughter and we’re shopping in his little oriental store and it’s the most natural thing to do. So we smile, and we giggle, maybe even bump into each other.”
Yes. I have to tell you, and by you I mean me, that this just feels odd. I’ve read the other ones on the site, and some of them are very serious, while others are very much tongue-firmly-in-cheek. I’m glad to see other writers have come before me, blazed the trail so I can see how it’s done, but I’m sorry (which means I’m apologizing to myself) – I just can’t shake the weirdness of this single point for both question and answer.
Last spring, shortly after my novel, Banned for Life, was published, my actor friend Jeremy Lowe sent me this photo via Facebook.
On June 25, I did a reading in New York City for an event titled “Generation XYZ.” What appears below is the essay that I delivered. You can watch the video of the reading here.
When April asked me to comment on how Generation X culture changed my life, I was sort of stumped. Because it’s not so much how it changed my life, but how it was my life. These TV shows and music and movies that almost seem quaint now – I grew up with them. Generation X is me, and I’m Generation X. How could I possibly delve into something that is so tightly integrated into who I am?
You’re twelve years old. A month has passed since your Korean Air flight landed in lovely Newark Airport. Your sixteen-year-old sister is miserable. Your mother isn’t exactly happy, either. You just met your father for the first time, and although he’s nice enough, he might be, well – how can you put this delicately – a loser.
You can’t speak English, but that doesn’t stop you from working at East Meets West, your father’s gift shop in a strip mall, where there are not only customers to wait on but neighboring stores to visit. Everything is new. Nothing is the same.
Welcome to the wonderful world of David Kim.
That’s the premise of my novel, Everything Asian, which is being published today. I’m looking at the folder that contains the first draft of the first chapter (which turned out to be a much later chapter in revisions), and to give you an idea of the age of this thing, the file is in WordPerfect 5.1 format. It is dated 9/14/1997.
And now, here’s a little excerpt. You can read the first chapter in its entirety on my website.
