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.