A Conversation with PEN America Best Debut Short Story Author Crystal Hana Kim

“Preserving a child’s viewpoint while attending to the adult reader seemed like a fun challenge.”

On August 22, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017, the inaugural edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the weeks leading up to publication, we’ll feature a Q&A with the contributors, whose stories were selected for the anthology by judges Marie-Helene Bertino, Kelly Link, and Nina McConigley, and awarded PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Submissions for the 2018 awards are open now.

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Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is forthcoming from William Morrow in 2018. She has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation. Her novel was chosen as runner-up in the 2015 James Jones First Novel Fellowship Contest. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MS in education from Hunter College. “Solee” is written from the perspective of a young girl in rural Korea, who develops a crush on her parents’ friend when he comes to visit the family.

I count the stray dog’s ribs on my way to school. Five bones protrude, like the rounded claw of a Dokkaebi clutching his club. Last month, there were six showing through the skin of his belly. I am happy. I am fattening him up after all.

He walks alongside me every day, and at the school yard entrance I give him a treat. He is so hungry he leaves a puddle of drool in my palm. But today he is frightened by a thunderclap rumbling through the air.

A man on a motorcycle. Wheels licking up bursts of dust. He waves and smiles. I am the only one on the road.

As he disappears, I wave back.

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I hear laughter before I take off my shoes. Daddy and Mommy in the kitchen, singing with the girls.

“Why is everyone so happy?” I ask.

“Come say hello to your uncle.” Daddy hugs me with his good arm. He is in a rare light mood; alcohol already swims in his mouth. With Jieun and Mila and Mommy is the man from the morning. There is dust on his face and his skin is dark, like the farmers in the fields.

“Kyunghwan, meet Solee. She’s my oldest and smartest, like a boy.”

I tug down my short hair. I hate it when Daddy calls me a boy. “You’re the man on the motorcycle,” I say.

“You’re the girl who feeds the starving dog.” He laughs. Everyone laughs.

Daddy tells me to go bow to him properly, but I stick my head into Mommy’s soft stomach. She holds me, brushing my hair and letting my embarrassment drain out.

“Say hello like this!” Jieun stands on her chair, leans over Mila, and kisses the man on the cheek. Everyone laughs again.

He hugs me as though we know each other. His cheek is softer than Daddy’s, and his breath smells like tea, even though they are all drinking makgeolli. “Hello, Miss Solee,” he says.

They get drunk as if we girls are invisible. It’s nice. Once, on Jieun’s third birthday, Mommy and Daddy drank so much at dinner they stumbled out of the restaurant. They left us at the table, our hands sticky from rice cakes and sugar tea. In the doorway, they kissed. I hope they will do that again.

(“Solee” can be read in full in last week’s issue of Recommended Reading on Electric Literature.)

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Catapult Books: Where did you get the idea for this story?

Crystal Hana Kim: I usually begin writing a story when I have a few ideas that will create interesting tensions together. One of those tensions for “Solee” was to explore that childhood moment when you first experience attraction, when you don’t understand sex and this new feeling isn’t yet sexual, but it is more intense than what you have felt before. When I was very young, I was infatuated with one of my parents’ friends. I was around six years old, and I remember following this man around whenever he came to visit. I felt very consumed by this new feeling, and yet it was very innocent as well.

Why did you choose to tell it from the point of view of a young girl?

A child’s perspective presents inherent obstacles. Do you stay true to the child’s limited understanding of the world? Or do you provide the child with access beyond her capabilities to tell the story that needs to be told? I was interested in these questions, and I wanted to see how I could convey important information that Solee herself doesn’t fully understand while remaining true to her perspective. Preserving her viewpoint while attending to the adult reader seemed like a fun challenge.

Though the young narrator doesn’t sense anything amiss, the reader can tell that there’s something strange about the visit. How did you build this feeling up to her discovery?

Building up the suspense was tricky! I taught young children after college for a few years, and I was always impressed by what they noticed. The smallest details would catch their eye—a band aid on a bruised toe, a change in the color pen I used to mark their homework. So in writing this story, I focused on the telling details Solee would notice, and I considered how those details could act doubly as signs for the reader.

Interestingly, Solee’s love for Kyunghwan isn’t changed when she discovers him with her mother. Why not?

So much of Solee’s understanding of the world around her hinges upon her imagination. She doesn’t fully know what is happening between her mother and Kyunghwan, but she suspects something is amiss, so she colors in her confusions with her imaginations of adulthood. She doesn’t have the vocabulary for love and sex, and so in that tenuous space, there’s room for her infatuation and jealousy and bewilderment to all remain together.

How long did it take you to write the story?

I’m not sure anymore because the story has taken on multiple forms throughout the years! I wrote a first draft at Columbia while I was graduate student. This was when I was writing a collection of interconnected short stories about this family. In my last year of graduate school, that collection evolved into a novel. Somewhere in between that time I sent the story to The Southern Review.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

It was so heartening to receive the prize. To hear that your story has resonated with others is so encouraging. That’s all a writer can really ask for, I think. And to be in an anthology with eleven other emerging writers is very exciting. I can’t wait to read all of their stories.

What are you working on now?

I finished edits for my novel earlier this year, and everyone has advised me to get started on a new project before If You Leave Me comes out next year, so I’m trying to take that advice. I’ve started a second novel, which I’m very excited about but not yet ready to share. I’m also writing some essays and short stories.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

I’ve discovered a lot of wonderful new writing online lately—on Lit Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature. I’m a contributing editor at Apogee Journal, and we publish a lot of underrepresented voices as well. I’m also particularly excited about the slew of debut novels published by women writers of color lately—I recommend Diksha Basu’s The Windfall, Zinzi Clemmons’s What We Lose, and Naima Coster’s forthcoming Halsey Street to all my friends!