This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures

In this trenchant and inventive debut essay collection, Kim, a creative writing professor at the University of Warwick, reflects on her family’s immigrant experience. The pieces focus on the hardships Kim faced moving with her mother and father from Seoul to rural North Carolina at age seven, and then as an adult to England, where she earned a PhD in literature from the University of Manchester before securing a professorship at Warwick. Kim reflects on feeling othered throughout her life, such as when she was the only person in her high school English class forced to take a standardized test, presumably meant to prove fluency. Experiments with form keep the proceedings fresh. For instance, Kim writes one piece as a free associative “play” showing how she relied on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry for comfort while dealing with familial and academic stressors in graduate school. Another, “Dear Manchester Chinatown,” is delivered in the second person as a love letter to the eponymous neighborhood: “You were the pocket of a foreign city where I could breathe easier among faces that looked more like mine.” Throughout, Kim’s astute observations reveal the varied meanings of silence, whether she’s discussing her struggle to connect with her parents or holding her tongue after a white interlocutor’s racially insensitive comment. Probing and deeply felt, this entrances. (Apr.)