Write Around the Corner - Angie Kim

[Announcer] This program is brought to you by the generous support of The Secular Society, advancing the interests of women and the arts in Virginia and beyond.

[♪♪♪] -♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ [♪♪♪] -Welcome, I'm Rose Martin, and we are Write Around The Corner in Great Falls, Virginia, with New York Times and Edgar Award winning author, Angie Kim.

Her book, Happiness Falls , opens with a missing person, the only witness can't speak, and everyone presumes that he doesn't understand.

Is that really the case?

Hmm.

Sometimes, the answers are in what's left unsaid.

Welcome, Angie.

-Thank you so much, Rose.

I love that introduction.

That just like gave me chills.

That's awesome.

-Well, and I love the book.

And this is a fabulous location that ties right into your story.

-Oh, totally.

So, we are right outside Great Falls Park, and this is the trail where I used to come and hike and look at the running river right beside me.

And this is the place that kind of inspired a lot of the scenes in Happiness Falls .

So, I'm really, really glad that we're here, and you were willing to come outside on this kind of chilly day, but pretty day.

-And it just makes total sense for the book.

And before we get to the actual writing and the story, so much of what goes into any writer's story is their past.

-Yeah.

[Rose] And there's some parallels between your life story and some of your work, including Happiness Falls and your earlier book, Miracle Creek.

Share with the viewers a little bit about your past and what brought you to this point.

-Yeah, sure.

So, I am a Korean immigrant.

I came over from Korea to the US as an 11-year-old in middle school, which is such a hard time anyway.

And so, my parents and I, I'm an only child, we lived in one room of another family's house in Korea.

We were very poor.

We had no running water, no electricity, all that kind of stuff.

And so, the idea of getting a visa to come to America, it was this dream.

And people were like, "It's like you won the lottery."

And when we came here, though, I had such issues with the language.

I didn't speak English at all.

So overnight, I went from feeling like, you know, a pretty smart girl who did well in school and, you know, had lots of friends, to someone who just couldn't speak.

And I knew that it would be hard logistically, not speaking the language, but I didn't realize that I would feel so much shame and embarrassment.

And because I didn't realize until then that there's this deep-seated assumption that I had, that I think all of our society has, that equates oral fluency with intelligence.

And so, I felt like a pabo.

I felt like a stupid person.

-And that's a Korean word, right?

Okay.

-Yes, absolutely.

And so, that really formed a lot of sort of, I think I became so insecure by that experience that I went through, and it was traumatic in some ways.

And so, everything that I've done since that time is really about, you know, just trying to prove to myself that I'm okay and that I'm smart, and that I can get by and all of that sort of stuff.

So yeah, so I did a lot of other things, and I became a lawyer, and then I was a management consultant, and then I was a dot-com entrepreneur, and then I was a stay-at-home mom.

And, going back to my roots with my kids, to the family life, that is what inspired me to start writing.

Yeah.

-And you know, I love that story.

And I loved an earlier story when you were a small girl in Korea, and your teacher wanted people to raise their hand to see who was gonna be, you know, the president of the class.

Share that story.

-Yeah, so I wrote about this for the New York Times .

So, what happened was, this teacher in third grade said, "Who wants to run for class president?"

I raised my hand along with a bunch of other kids who were all boys, and he had me come up to the front of the class and hold out my hand.

And then, he hit it with a ruler, which is a very common, you know, thing that you do with kids who are out of line, back in that time.

This was back in the '80s and late '70s in Korea.

And he said, "That's for thinking that a girl can be president of anything."

And that's really what prompted my mom, especially, to be like, she was so mad when she heard that story.

And she was like, she stomped like over to my school and she went into the principal's office, and she had a huge fight with them.

And she came out and she immediately wrote to my aunt who was in the US saying, "We need to try to figure out how to get our family over there."

-Wow, and so that was, again, such an important part of your story because when your parents came over, then even though you had this new life and this winning the lottery for this house, your parents were working so much that that created some resentment for you, didn't it?

-Oh, absolutely.

And not only resentment, but just this like feeling lost.

-Yeah, a feeling of loss.

-Yes, oh, absolutely.

It was a grief.

It was a grief of my relationship with my parents, which was so close because again, we were in one room, you know.

We knew everything about each other.

And I was also a preteen, so I'm sure there was that too.

But also, just feeling like, yeah, we were supposed to be so happy.

I'm being told I am happy, you know, because I came over to this beautiful house that, you know, my aunt had in the suburbs of Baltimore.

For the first time in my life, I had my own bedroom, my own bed, you know.

We had running water, we had toilets, we had refrigerators, all these things that we didn't know, I didn't even realize existed.

And so, in that way, it was a dream come true, but in so many other ways, you know, I lost a sense of myself.

I lost my sense of self-confidence and competence, you know, because of the language issue.

And I lost my parents, because they were having to basically like live at the grocery store, this very dangerous grocery store in the middle of Baltimore that they ran.

And it was like surrounded by thick bulletproof glass.

My dad was actually shot at, at one point, and the bullet grazed his neck, so he survived, but it was a really hard time.

And so, yeah, so that experience was just pivotal.

So, both of my books, Miracle Creek and Happiness Falls have stories about people who are immigrating and who have immigrated, and who know what that sense of loss and also just like being lost feels like.

-But it's more than that.

There's also a sense of resilience, right?

And a sense of, where will you find the courage and the strength to have that, to move on, and to continue to do something else.

So, we're gonna fast forward from this 11-year-old girl who then decides, okay, I'm gonna be a lawyer.

So, you were a lawyer, but there was a pivotal night when you thought, well, I kind of really enjoy the courtroom, but I don't enjoy some of the rest of it.

So, tell us the story of you going and reading that book and changing your mind.

-Yeah, so I think I actually became a lawyer because I wanted to be an actor.

So I went to a school, a high school that's for the arts, for performing arts, and I actually majored in acting.

And I was actually told by my acting teachers, you know, you are Asian, and there really aren't roles for Asian actors.

So-- -Again, you're thinking, really, I'm here now.

-Right.

-Now, I can't do this.

-Yeah, and so they were like, we hear you're good at like academic stuff.

Well, why don't you go do that?

And I was like, okay, what can I do?

This was in the '80s, you know?

And I was like, what can I do?

That's kind of like, you know, that I would love.

And so, I thought of those people playing lawyers on TV and how dramatic they were.

You know, there's like a performative element to it.

And I was like, that's what I can do.

I can be a lawyer.

So that's how I started.

And I did love being in the courtroom.

That was the one part of being a lawyer I loved.

Everything else I hated.

And the problem, of course, is that only 5 percent or so of your life as a lawyer, you know, of your career, is actually spent in the courtroom.

So, it wasn't-- -But that's what they show on TV.

-Right, exactly, exactly.

So, I did not know that there were all these other parts that I hated.

And so, one day, I was at this place called The Cliff House, which is closed now, unfortunately, but it overlooked the ocean.

And it was a blustery day.

So, I was the only person who was in this restaurant.

And I sat by the window, looking at the ocean, just looking and just enjoying the view, ordered a bottle of wine, some fruit and, you know, cheese and things like that.

And I read this book, cover to cover.

And I loved it so much.

And I closed it.

And it was Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods .

And I closed it and I thought, "I can't remember the last time that I was this happy, that I didn't, that I was this carefree, that I didn't have worries and stress in my mind over some case or another."

And I thought, "This is no way to live."

And when my husband walked in to dinner that night, I said, "I think I'm gonna quit being a lawyer."

And he was like, "Okay, all right."

He was a lawyer.

And the next day, we actually got engaged.

So, there you go.

-Oh, wonderful.

-So, it was a life-changing trip.

-That's a great story.

-Yeah, yeah.

-So, you become an author and you're gonna be telling stories.

Now the group in Happiness Falls , this family you've lived with for a long time, telling, having written short stories about them, and you got to know them as people in your mind, as you develop characters.

But how was it to develop the characters?

I understand you don't know what's gonna happen along the way.

And so, what's that process like for you to get to know this group, to get to know this family, or to choose the topic or what you wanna cover?

-Yeah, so like you say, I knew this family, the father who goes missing and the 14-year-old son who is non-speaking because he's autistic and he has Angelman syndrome, which is a rare genetic condition.

I knew them, and the narrator is 20-year-old Mia who is, I think she's funny, but she's also just very sarcastic, and she's kind of a know-it-all.

So, I know this family really well.

And as far as, you know, the story and discovering that along the way, that was what took me a really, really long time to figure out.

And I wanted to tell the story of what it's like to be a non-speaker, of what it's like to have a non-speaker in your family, and how you, and also what a family goes through in times of crisis.

You know, when somebody goes missing, it's such a time of emergency and chaos.

How do you manage that?

How do you manage dealing with the police, with your fears about what's happened, but also maybe some anger that you might have about things that you find out about this person who's gone missing that you didn't know about?

And how that process brings the family together and binds you as a whole, and how you become stronger as a result.

And you learn to really truly connect with each other, and communicate with each other, too.

So, I wanted a story that would help me to tell that.

And I just sort of thought, you know, I started with what happens if the father, who's a stay-at-home father, who's kind of the one who's taking care of everybody, goes missing, and nobody even realizes it for a little bit because he's the one who's taking care of everybody else.

And then, it just sort of went on from there.

-Well, I love the fact that you draw on personal experience from dealing with some health issues with your own children when they were smaller, but then having an immigrant family, and then being able to give us a hook at the beginning of the story.

So, your process of really not knowing exactly where it's going, and you can discover it at the same time, I think, is really exciting.

And I don't wanna mislead everyone that you knew this family in terms of they were your neighbors 'cause you knew this family because you created them-- -[Angie] Oh, yes.

[Rose] through a series of short, short stories.

-Right.

-[Angie] Absolutely, yes.

When I say, it's funny when I say like, oh yeah, I know this family.

I know, you know, people are like, well, who are they based on?

I'm like, no, no, no, no.

I didn't mean it in that way.

I just meant, I think what's happened, what's fun is that, you know, I started writing in my '40s.

My first novel, Miracle Creek, came out the week I turned 50.

-And congratulations on the success of Miracle Creek too.

-Oh, thank you, thank you.

And you know, what's cool is, so when I first started writing short stories about like 13 years ago, something like that, one of the first short stories I wrote was about this family, you know, Mia and John, who are the twins and a Korean immigrant mom and a white dad who's a stay-at-home dad.

And, you know, and Eugene, who is the youngest, who is the non-speaker.

And that story was published like ten years ago or so.

And then I started working on novels.

And so then, in the meantime, what happened, and I think this happens with some of my characters that are my favorite characters, is that they kind of grew up in my mind, you know?

So, when my own kids were applying to colleges, I would be thinking like, I wonder if Mia and John are applying to colleges around now.

I wonder what colleges they're applying to.

I wonder, you know, what essays they're writing.

And, you know, I wonder if they're applying to the same colleges, you know, that kind of thing.

-Right, right.

-And then, when I found out about certain therapies that my dear friends who have children who are non-speakers, when they told me about these new therapies that they were doing that enabled their children to spell out letters, you know, letter by letter, and through spelling, be able to painstakingly and very, you know, slowly be able to communicate, start to communicate with their families, I thought, I wonder if they're doing that with Eugene.

And again, like I know that these are not quote unquote "real people," but they were real in my mind.

And so, I think that's what I mean by I know this family.

And because I know this family, once I had sort of a superimposed kind of situation of this missing father, I was able to just go, okay, I can see what this family's gonna do.

Mia is narrating the story to us, and we're just gonna go from there, you know.

-Well, and you create them in such a real way that we feel like we do know the characters.

-Aww, thank you.

-We feel like we're right in the story with you as you introduce us.

And I think there's some overriding themes, right?

There's overriding themes of family and communication and of making assumptions.

-Yes.

-And of course, happiness.

-Absolutely.

-And where it comes from or not.

-Yes.

-So as we begin to delve into the characters, you've given everybody a little sense of Happiness Falls .

We teased in the beginning that it opens with a missing person.

And you chose missing instead of murdered because you could take that train all the way through the story, too.

But it's really not about all of that.

You've got so many other beautiful things woven through there.

-Yeah, but I mean, I love what you say that I chose the missing rather than, you know, somebody who's like gone in a different way, like murder or, you know, died by some other way or whatever, which is that the, and I think that's really important because what we are talking about, one of the themes about this is how sometimes we don't know things about the people that we think we know.

And so, by virtue of the dad being missing and so many possibilities being open to us, like did he maybe run away because he was, you know, so overburdened by, you know, having to take care of his three kids and all that kind of stuff.

Was he having an affair?

You know, did he have-- so you have all these things, and these are the kinds of things that you think about as you try to get to know them.

And so, if one of the big things that I wanted to explore was about, you know, how we don't necessarily know things, and how we assume things, and how we have to figure out and take the time to figure out, that, to me, made the missing person story so apt because in a way, the 14-year-old Eugene, by virtue of being non-speaking and the family making assumptions about him, but not really knowing whether their assumptions about him were true or not, he was missing, too, in that way, you know?

-Well, and the whole idea of questions, you know, Mia as a narrator was wonderful, and she's constantly questioning herself and constantly questioning everybody around her.

And she's curious and she's annoying, and she makes assumptions, like anyone would.

And I think you matched up her age with not only that, but the human nature of, I don't wanna believe this, but maybe I need to think about it.

-Absolutely.

And you know, the other thing about her that's so interesting, and I think you can hear it in her voice.

So, the first line is, "We didn't call the police right away."

And I think you can hear just the regret that she has, and the guilt and that questioning.

-Yeah.

-You know?

So, she is really thinking through, she's telling the story from after everything has happened.

And she is really just like looking at every single moment and with curiosity, but also with regret, and sort of thinking, what did I do wrong in that moment?

Could I have done something wrong?

Should I have done something different?

-Well, and I love the fact as it comes through, her John twin, they present very differently because of biracial family.

There's assumptions that society makes about what John can do and what Mia can do, and how they're different and what Eugene can do.

And even the gender reverse roles, right?

With Dad being the stay-at-home dad.

So, as you take us through this page turning story of everyone there, you beautifully wove in the child with disabilities, Eugene, and how the family dealt with that and tried to figure out how to reach him.

And I think it's so true that, isn't that what we're all trying to do is try to reach each other and figure out how we communicate and make assumptions.

-Absolutely.

And like you say, you know, Mia presents as Asian, John presents as white, you know, even though they have the same genes, and they have the same parents.

And so, and that like really leads them to have different experiences.

-And different assumptions even about what's happened.

-Yeah.

-You know, so they've got to work on that dynamic from themselves and then wonder, what do they tell Mom?

What do they not tell Mom?

-Absolutely!

-When do they bring her in?

-Yeah.

-So, you, that the dynamic of you taking us page by page, I couldn't wait to find out what has happened next.

So, take us through a little bit of the story with some of the other top points that you want people to really pick up on.

So, we want the reader to have the few-- the experience that we had to read the book.

-Yeah, absolutely.

So, I guess another thing that we haven't really talked about is that the father, they, one of the things that they find, is that he kept a happiness notebook.

And it's, he had a theory about the relativity of happiness that he called the happiness quotient.

So that's like another big thing.

So, we have a lot of entries from, you know, his notebook, which are really, I think fascinating 'cause I've been fascinated with, you know, questions about happiness for all of my life, because, you know, like I was talking about with respect to my moving to the US, going from, you know, what was supposed to be an unhappy life to a totally luxurious, happy life, but then feeling the opposite way, subjectively.

So, objective versus subjective happiness, how your happiness is relative to your own life, to your baseline, and to your expectations.

-I love that.

Yeah, and I was finding myself questioning, so what were my expectations?

And then, was I happy or was I not happy?

-Yeah.

-And thinking about that.

So, there's so much thought-provoking things that happened to me as a reader, as we're going through the story, along with the therapies and the other things that we question, and family dynamics.

I love your title.

-Oh, great.

-And, you know, we were talking about the fact that there's a lot of double meaning in that title.

And I know it wasn't the original title, but the word Happiness Falls .

If people look at the cover, think about the book, there's a lot happening there behind the scenes that you've so beautifully crafted.

Would you be willing to read something for us?

-Oh, of course, I would love it.

I think I'll read from the beginning.

And the beginning, part one, is called "Everyone's Fine."

And, you know, spoiler alert, everyone is not fine.

-Right.

-Chapter One is called "Locke, Bach, and K-Pop."

And all of the chapters have these kind of funny, fun titles.

"We didn't call the police right away.

"Later, I would blame myself, "wonder if things might have turned out differently "if I hadn't shrugged it off, "insisting Dad wasn't missing missing, "but just delayed.

"Probably still in the woods looking for Eugene, "thinking he'd run off somewhere.

"Mom says it wasn't my fault, "that I was merely being optimistic, "but I know better.

"I don't believe in optimism.

"I believe there's a fine line (if any) "between optimism and willful idiocy.

"So, I try to avoid optimism altogether, "lest I fall over the line mistakenly.

"My twin brother, John, "keeps trying to make me feel better too, saying, "'We couldn't have known something was wrong "because it was such a typical morning,' "which is an asinine thing to say, "because why would you assume things can't go wrong "simply because they haven't yet?

"Life isn't geometry; "terrible, life-changing moments don't happen predictably "at the bottom of a linear slope.

"Tragedies and accidents are tragic and accidental "precisely because of their unexpectedness.

"Besides, labeling anything about our family 'typical', "I just have to shake my head.

"I'm not even thinking about the typical-adjacent stuff, "like John's and my boy-girl twin thing, "our biracial mix (Korean and white) "untraditional parental gender roles "(working mom and stay-at-home dad) "or different last names (Parson for Dad plus Park for Mom "equals the mashed-up Parkson for us kids).

"Not common, certainly, "but hardly shocking in our area these days.

"Where we're indubitably, inherently atypical, "is with my little brother Eugene's dual diagnosis: "autism and a rare genetic disorder "called Mosaic Angelman syndrome, "which means he can't talk, has motor difficulties, and-- "this is what fascinates many people "who've never heard of Angelman syndrome, "has an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter."

-That is the perfect section to read, Angie.

-Oh, good!

-Perfect, perfect section to read.

-Yay!

-So, I especially want to thank you, Angie, for inviting us here to Great Falls.

It's an excellent location for the book, and for sharing Happiness Falls with us.

My special thanks to Angie Kim for having us here to talk about Happiness Falls right here at Great Falls, and a link to the book.

You know, there are so many more things to talk about.

You can check out more of our conversation online, where we get into Angelman syndrome, a little more about that, and a special part of her book, which are Mia's footnotes.

Tell your friends about us.

I'm Rose Martin, and I will see you next time Write Around The Corner .

[♪♪♪] -♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ [♪♪♪] -♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ -♪ Every day every day Every day ♪ ♪ Every day I write the book ♪ [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the generous support of The Secular Society, advancing the interests of women and the arts in Virginia and beyond.