Fantasy, Ethnic Identity, and Monsters That Eat People's Livers

I know what you're thinking - "Mike who? Whuzzat? Who are you again?" I'M A FOUNDING INKIE, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, way back when the Inkpot was still on LiveJournal. I just, you know, left for a while. Now I'm back, which is not what you want to read about so yes yes, I'll get to the real point of this post.

Want to read an awesome gumiho story?
Go check out thefoxsister.com.

I'm working on a new book that's very, very different from my debut, Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities - this new book is easier to describe as fantasy (Geeks tends to be described as science fiction), and it also taps into my personal history in a way that I haven't attempted before. I don't want to spill too many beans about the story's details, but the fantasy elements are rooted in Korean mythology, particularly the dastardly gumiho, a nine-tailed fox that gets its kicks out of seducing unsuspecting dudes and chowing down on their livers. Yes, that IS awesome. It's got the full-on Enchanted Inkpot vibe, am I right?

More importantly, the personal element that I'm mining for this book involves ethnic identity, with all of its psychological and cultural complexities. My debut novel isn't devoid of emotional truth or personal meaning (I think, anyway), but the personal issues it focuses on are more about perceptions of self-worth and adapting to new roles. It's been described as "fun" more than anything else. This new novel won't be devoid of fun - that's, um, not what I want - but the emotional truths at its core traffic much more in family history, communication breakdowns between generations, and cultural alienation.

Whoa dude, serious, huh? I don't want to give the impression that I'm attempting to stop being a supposedly humorous and light-hearted author and reinventing myself as a solemn chronicler of identity crises in bloom - at this point in my career I don't know if I'm even capable of doing something that difficult. But I am exploring aspects of my own life that have provoked complicated feelings, including confusion, regret, resentment, loss, and shame.

I really don't know why I keep using this photo.
Seems like unrestrained masochism, doesn't it??

I'm a child of immigrants. My parents were born in Seoul, but they both immigrated to the U.S. in the early 60s for educational purposes, and despite their original plans to return to Korea they were captured by inertia and stayed permanently. As a result I was born and raised here in the States, and when my family moved to New Jersey I ended up spending some of the most formative years of my life in a community dominated by people of white European descent. In a fairly short time I drifted away from my family's ancestral culture, and started down the road to the place I currently occupy, where I call myself "Korean-American," but identify far more as "American" than "Korean."

One of my favorite articles in the realm of Asian-American identity is this piece about current professional basketball player Jeremy "Linsanity" Lin, written by Jay Caspian Kang during Lin's time at Harvard. I'm not approaching the topic with Kang's journalistic intent or depth of intellectual inquiry, and he writes about it on a broad societal level, while I'm writing the story of one character's experiences within a single, specific context. However, Kang touches on many of the internal conflicts that are informing my book. What does it mean to lose contact with one's ancestral roots? How do we perceive, think about, and react to the "race to whiteness"? How much of our racial identities do we define for ourselves, and how much is defined for us? What is the relationship between external and internal perception? Is it possible, necessary, or defensible to weigh the validity of a person's self-defined ethnic identity?

Which brings us to the question of "Okay Mike, that all sounds good, but with all this heavy-duty stuff about culture, ethnicity, and personal history in the mix, why are you writing it as a fantasy novel?" Good question. It might seem reductive and misleading to say "Well, I just WANT to, because I LIKE fantasy fiction, and thousand-year-old foxes who eat people's livers are AWESOME," but that statement (which is admittedly a bit flip) is very true.

The fact that I'm exploring issues with a great deal of emotional relevance to me doesn't change the fact that I also want to write stories that are fun, fast-paced, and humorous. I believe those lighter, less solemn elements are every bit as personally relevant, emotionally meaningful, and psychologically resonant as the heavier, more serious ones. I love reading and writing fantasy - those stories suffuse my being with undeniable plenitude, and the layers of metaphor and symbolism they create in my heart and mind are nearly fathomless.

Sometimes you just have to embrace the megalomania.

I have to confess that there's more than a little creative ambition at work here too. Creating balance is a challenge, whether it's between humor and solemnity, action and reflection, or realism and fantasy. Can a book be serious in an emotionally profound way AND funny in a completely irreverent way? Can it deal with slice-of-life realism AND over-the-top fantasy? Yes, in fact. Why not? It's easy to perceive (rightly or not) certain dichotomies when writing a novel, but in reality there's no cosmically inviolable rule that says any one of those elements automatically takes precedent over the others. I want to write a story that encompasses all of those things. I don't know if I'm enough of a writer to genuinely pull it off, but I'm just egomaniacal enough to want to try.

It's fascinating, gratifying, and thoroughly engaging to be exploring these questions of culture, ethnicity, and identity within the mingled context of traditional Korean mythology AND contemporary North American society. It also feels like I'm clawing open a bunch of scabbed-over, decades-old wounds and pouring big, chunky handfuls of rock salt in them, which is, um, not entirely pleasant. The whole endeavor feels very, very complicated, but that's okay. It doesn't have to feel easy to feel good or worthwhile. I'm ready to put in the work, and hopefully I'll manage to combine those complicated autobiographical ingredients with those cool, scary, fun fantasy ingredients in a way that results in a strong, cohesive serving of emotional truth. Give me a fist bump, yo. *fist bump*

m.

Mike Jung is the author of GEEKS, GIRLS, AND SECRET IDENTITIES (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic 2012). He's also kind of a basket case, but he's able to tap into the basket case thing for the purpose of writing, which may or may not mean anything to you but there it is.