Joseph Han Writes From, and for, Community

In this interview, Joseph Han discusses his debut novel ‘Nuclear Family,’ being in conversation with Korean American literature, and writing from a place of abundance.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Hawai‘i, specifically O‘ahu, rendered as a recognizable place with landmarks and food that aren’t just tropical fantasies of Waikīkī, then Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family is for you. Maybe this is a somewhat-specific desire as someone who grew up there, but for other readers, there are also ghosts, lots of pot, and the echoes and present of the Korean War. Joseph Han gracefully shifts between Hawai‘i and Korea to follow the Cho family, who want to franchise their Korean plate-lunch restaurants but face declining sales after a video of their son attempting to cross the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) goes viral—no one knows that he’s been possessed by his lost grandfather, Tae-Woo. Throughout, Han confronts the realities of global militarization and its impact on individuals and communities with a deft glint of humor.

Joseph Han is a 2022 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and current editor for the West region of Joyland Magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Literary Hub, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A recipient of a Kundiman Fellowship in Fiction, they also received a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and serve as guest fiction faculty at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency Creative Writing MFA program. We spoke at the end of June about place, history, and community. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Alyssa Lo: First, congratulations on the release of Nuclear Family. How does it feel for the book to be out in the world?

Joseph Han: It feels really amazing. It feels like a long time coming that my whole life has kind of culminated into all these questions and thoughts I’ve had about my family’s place in Korean history, but also our place in Hawai‘i, reflected in this novel. It also feels like an occasion to celebrate our stories, and it’s been wonderful communing with other Koreans in the diaspora over our connection to this history. So it’s been a whirl, a really special time.

AL: What have you found most surprising about the writing, editing, and publishing processes?

JH: I wouldn’t say it’s surprising, but something that I really cherish is the support of all of the people around me, especially the team at Counterpoint and my agent all having unwavering belief in the work that I was doing. They gave me [the freedom] to go all in on this novel and to push it in directions that I didn’t even anticipate during the editorial process. A lot of the formal innovations and choices that are now in the book came through my thinking of how to reinforce the vision that I set forth in writing about the Korean DMZ. So I really am grateful that I’ve had such a great team rallying behind the book and that these choices have resonated with audiences so far, and I couldn’t be more happy that I took these risks even though I was afraid to at one point [laughs].

AL: It’s such a rich book. Something that really struck me is how polyphonic it is. When I was reading, I thought, “Wow, this is really great, but from a writing perspective, ‘Oh my god, how did they do that?’” I’d love to hear more about what that plotting process looked like.

JH: It’s something I’ve been talking about with my students a lot recently, and I always come back to the question of “who is needing a little more love?” in regards to how they fall [in] the narrative purview and scope of the novel. Who isn’t being heard, or perhaps understood? I really wanted to be intentional about how much story and how much attention is given to different family members in the novel. The book isn’t just about the singular family unit, but attempts to encompass relations that far exceed the nuclear family to consider relations to nonliving beings, nonhuman lifeforms, and also relations to land and where these families live. In writing about Hawai‘i, I thought it was impossible to just write about one family, but I took it upon myself as a challenge to start with the Korean family and then to think about where they’re situated in relation to Korea and Hawai‘i.

The book isn’t just about the singular family unit, but attempts to encompass relations that far exceed the nuclear family.

AL: Talking about place, I think the rendering of space is just so incredible in the book. When you introduced the restaurant, I knew exactly where on Ke‘eaumoku it was. That was really fun and delightful to me. What was it like rendering place?

JH: Throughout most of the publication process, I was living in LA. So I wrote from a place of nostalgia but also really missing being back in Hawai‘i and struggling to render reality as I felt removed from it, especially in lockdown and in isolation during the pandemic. Likewise, feeling torn or distant from my own immediate family members and where I was born in Korea presented itself as the constant challenge that I face in writing setting—starting from a place of feeling disoriented with regard to my own connections and how I then live in these places again, and find them and return to them in fiction, which has become a home for me, and a constant home as a writer despite feeling in-between or lost. [Fiction is] the way that I return, and so I wanted to keep going back to Ke‘eaumoku as my focal point for how I understand the Korean community’s place in Hawai‘i and how it is often just relegated to this street and the surrounding neighborhood. The question of how there are shared histories of US military occupation is often forgotten and forgone, because what really stands to take the place of Hawai‘i’s understanding of Korea is often the plate lunch. That’s what formulated my thinking of how to start writing about Koreans in Hawai‘i, and I kind of had no choice in that way. I had to start with the Korean plate-lunch restaurant [laughs].

AL: On the topic of the restaurant, I’d love to hear more about what it was like writing about food and what role food played in your process when writing this book.

JH: Well, the plate lunch became a very appropriate metaphor for how I understood what I was writing toward and what I was trying to offer with my novel. The plate lunch itself becomes a metaphor for a liberal, multicultural Hawai‘i, analogous to the melting pot. I thought about what I was offering and what I was gathering all in one place, and that helped me think through the novel structure and also the different shifts and particularities of each character and chapter. I very much saw the book as its own kind of Korean plate lunch. Once I understood that, I felt less intimidated by the prospect of finishing a novel.

Oftentimes in Asian American literature, food becomes a big subject. I felt like there was no way around writing about Koreans in Hawai‘i without writing about food because that is the place from which Korean communities are primarily understood, and that reflected my own experience growing up and people assuming meat jun is a Korean dish when it’s more of a local Korean dish unique to Hawai‘i.

I also thought about the practice of jesa and Korean ancestral rites and how we set out a spread of food for our ancestors and the loved ones that we hope to remember so that we may feed them and so they may feel nourished. Our health, the living’s health, is a reflection of how nourished those who have passed are. So not only did I think of the novel as a plate lunch, but I also considered it structurally as a table, one that could try to hold as much as it could bear with regard to the stories of separated families, of generations removed from the Korean War, and the memories that we hold on to of the dead and their will to reunite with those they could not see. I wanted the novel to hold as much as it could as an offering and in remembrance to these lives and these wills that I hope will not be forgotten. I’ve been really lucky to see how the book has become a point of gathering for us to celebrate the dead and the people that we love who are no longer with us.

AL: Staying with the idea of community, earlier you described the Chos as troubling the idea of the nuclear family and looking at larger communities in terms of the characters within the novel. You said that a lot of the editorial process started alongside the pandemic, so I would love to hear more about your community while writing but also who you see this work in conversation with.

JH: I love that question, and it’s something that I always think about in regard to audience and who I hope will find this book as the communities that are created around books and reading. Though I’ve written and worked on this book in lockdown, in isolation, I’ve always returned to the fact that we are never truly alone as writers—this is something that Matthew Salesses points out in Craft in the Real World. We are always working within the history, we are always connected to an artistic lineage, and so I’ve always seen my book in conversation with the whole of Korean American literature as it preceded me, but I also see myself as writing for the future of Korean American literature and writers who I hope I will join as their stories surface and as our stories find each other. So I always write with a Korean audience in mind.

I also really thought about something Edwidge Danticat says in her book Create Dangerously: that every time she sits down to write, she writes as if she is being chased by a thousand ghosts [laughs]. Or that there are just a large number of ghosts behind her looking over her shoulder asking of her, “What will you make of your life, but ours?” That advice, or call to accountability, which Alexander Chee also echoes in “On Becoming an American Writer,” asks [something like], “Who are you beholden to that you must write not only the dead, but the living, those that will come after your life?”

We are always connected to an artistic lineage, and so I’ve always seen my book in conversation with the whole of Korean American literature.

That formed the ethic and urgency behind how and why I wrote about Tae-Woo, about ghosts, and the countless ghosts who clamored for attention as I wrote. And how I wrote about the spiritual manifestation of the Korean DMZ as this border that reflects the fissure that I think runs through all of our minds and the global imaginary. But these forces and violences are not so fixed and permanent. We must work to undo them in our imagination first so that we can imagine a future where healing and justice is possible.

So I kept returning to the DMZ as a barrier that I had to write against and confront every time I opened my novel document or stared at the blank page. It really felt like I was staring at the heart of the Korean DMZ standing alongside Tae-Woo as his will, and his presence as a character in my life, began to possess me as we both tried to figure out a way that we could breach and conquer this divide.

AL: This is a bit of a spoiler, but I would love to hear more about your thoughts on using the speculative as a way to imagine more liberatory futures.

JH: I’m trying to figure out a way to talk about this without saying too much about the ending. So much of the novel in opening with a ghost story is about how the past is not something far gone and is ever present when you think about war and how the Korean War, in particular, is ongoing and how peace is constantly deferred to our deaths.

I’ll just say, there is a moment that looks beyond the scope of the end of the novel that urges us to think about why it is that we can only feel at peace, or why is it that we and our dead can only feel at peace and rest at the end of our lives and beyond? And in what way can we manifest and create the conditions of peace in the present so that our futures are not more and more foreclosed to these possibilities? I connect that to how a demilitarized Hawai‘i and that future is interlocked with Korea’s future and a reunified peninsula. Thank you for that question.

AL: You’re also a teacher. How does teaching inform your writing and vice versa?

JH: I’ve done most of my learning and creative writing [by] thinking through stories with students in the classroom. Learning how what we read in the class can give us the tools and narrative designs that we need to unlock the question “What is a story that we have yet to tell?” Or “Why is it difficult for us to write this particular story?”

From this I find all the creative nourishment and inspiration that I need to approach writing not from a place of deficit—in the sense that I’m not doing enough here, I haven’t read enough—but from a place of joy and abundance as we experience our rich traditions and place in these lineages that guide us forward and embolden us to make art and be revolutionary, even if that revolution is personal and happens between you and your work alone. I always return [to] the sacredness with which we have to hold what we are doing anytime we commit to making art. Seeing my students engage in that process and find what they hold sacred has only helped me to reinforce my own way of being as an artist in the world.

AL: Who do you hope Nuclear Family reaches?

JH: I hope it reaches someone very much like myself, perhaps ten years ago, before I started writing. Someone like myself who had a lot of questions about belonging and questions about how to reconcile the secrets that my family kept regarding our experiences in the Korean War and regarding our relationship to the country that was responsible for the total obliteration of our people and our peninsula, and why we live in such a country.

Someone who wishes to learn more about the Korean DMZ, as I see this novel as a place from which I did a lot of my learning and I reflected [on] a lot of my learning about war as a constant presence in our lives and how it continues to shape our relations to land and to one another. So, too, do I hope this book finds people in search of a way to heal and to imagine genuine security. Someone searching for a new way to live in the world and to think about family.