Before they performed the surgery, Umma wore two faces.
I was not more than a child when I first watched her transform. The vase I had shattered lay a battlefield between us. My gaze traced from the carnage up her midline, though when my chin met her hips and my eyes hers, it was too late. Umma had let the night slip in. It borrowed her face but could not perfect its movements. Instead, it wore her limbs like an automaton and voice like a dying megaphone. Her face didn’t fit right, it had been stretched taught in all the wrong places. Instinctually, I recoiled.
Once, when she was asleep, I crept into her bathroom and saw both tal resting on her countertop. Her expressions had been frozen in horror and delight, respectively, the right mask contorted between fear and anger while the corner of her left lips flicked upwards in the impression of a smile. The faces sat amidst her serums, between the gua sha and the wrinkle cream, her anti-aging products all neatly aligned. Unmake yourself, they whispered to me in the darkness. Undo any evidence that you were ever here. I darted out of there and dove into my bedroom across the hall, pulling the blanket over my head as if to ward off the voices that threatened my invisibility. That night, I wondered if those same sounds swirled between her ears all day. Years later, I wondered if that was why she did it.
She never told me why she got the surgery, why she let them slice and reassemble her mask, cut and carve new contours into the skin she had worn all her life. Tcha she clucked when I asked after she made the announcement. This is usual back home. You forget. She spit the words out with mild contempt and they landed on the stove, bubbling in the anchovy stock she was preparing. At dinner, her mention of my forgetfulness coated my tongue with vinegar and stung the cut in my cheek I had developed from nervously chewing my own flesh. After that, I never asked her why again.
We returned home for the procedure; Umma wouldn’t have it any other way. Over there, it’s like a teeth cleaning, she explained. The equivalent of an after-dinner mint.
At least, this was what she said to Appa, who only shook his head in response. The thin frames of his glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose as he refused to meet her many glaring eyes. He knew he couldn’t stop her, no one ever did. How could they when such a quick switch of her tal loomed over any potential opposition? Appa was struck powerless when the lower half of her face slipped, when her jaw contorted into a far more angular construction and her eyes dropped oblique in an instant, devoid of light and life at all. When she donned her second face without even a flicker of fear or remorse.
Even still, he protested when she insisted that I accompany her. He seemed to worry the fever for surgery would infect me, like that poison or plague that had seeped into the very roots of our home, rotting it from within, would grab ahold of me as soon as I stepped into Seoul. His fear had basis. The whole country was undergoing surgery, constructing facades over its temporary housing, burying the honjok in darkened karaoke rooms, reconstructing itself by stretching new tal taught over its shame. Appa was afraid that the aunties would pick and pull at my cheeks, prod at my mono-lids, point to all the places I was too much, too big, too present. He told her this at dinner and I listened as they debated my role in all of this, tracing circles over on paper until the page was completely blackened with the same lines at nauseum. Umma slowly lifted each singular slice of kimchi to her mouth as Appa spoke and chewed deliberately without any sign of interruption. As always, the vast majority of their argument was conducted through sideways glares. It resided in the silence between them. Their disdain for one another sat somewhere between the sound of Appa’s metal spoon scrapping the bottom of his bowl and the rattling of Umma’s chopsticks against the shallow dish I had scooped rice into for her. They hardly fought verbally, not out of inability but out of fear. We all knew Umma’s words could dart out like a viper and wound Appa beyond repair. It was from him that I had learned how to bite my tongue.
Inevitably, Umma won out, and I packed a bag without any concrete intention of return. Umma planned the trip for the start of summer, when the sun sat low in Seoul and reflected off the endless stacks of windows until the city erupted in flames. Or so it seemed. My cousins would bound out of the apartment and through the streets, flit to cram schools and to meet tutors, coalesce in bars and outside convenience stores with soju and yakult to chase. Meanwhile, I stayed low to the floor of Emo’s apartment, melting into the architecture. They all teased me for evading the weather, for becoming so deeply American that I couldn’t handle the heat. In the first few days whenever we returned, I always struggled to fall asleep on the floor, my body between Umma and the wall. I had spent many summers that way—in a sleepless, heat-exhausted haze—and had no reason to believe this would be any different. Yet, I knew better than to protest. Instead, I followed Umma around Costco with a burgeoning shopping cart, shuffling the many gifts she had collected for each of her aunts and uncles through the endless aisles of our suburban metropolis.
Day One
My writing process often begins with self-doubt. For days before I put pen to paper (or fingers to keypad) I ruminate on the bud of the story in my mind, attempting to parse through what I’m trying to say on both plot-based and theoretical levels. Although I never get far with either, I spend near weeks trying to determine if the story has any basis and furthermore, if I should be the person trying to tell it.
For this piece, I began with the imagery of Korean traditional masks and reimagined the theatre as a technological feat, much like the Asian skin suit donned by Kyoko in Ex-Machina. Inspired partially by the plastic surgery craze that has taken hold of South Korea, I wanted to portray the horror of a carefully measured but foreign body, one which does not belong entirely to the woman who inhabits it. I also wanted to convey how plastic surgery mediates the relationship between daughters and mothers, when inherited features become something to despise and disparage.
I was particularly inspired by the Stuart Hall reading about The Spectacle of the Other and the ways that we signify or seek out representation of difference. ‘Difference’ has been marked, Hall writes. “Adding sexuality and gender to ‘race’, ethnicity and colour” becomes another way of signifying this difference, and I think much of what I was writing about spoke to a specific East Asian experience of embodied womanhood, and was cognizant of this difference while further marking it as other. There is an element of spectacle, of a body in action and under scrutiny, that I wanted to capture, yet in doing so, I recognized how I was continuing to perpetuate this idea of the orientalized body as one needing special attention.
As I wrote, I attempted to answer Hall’s questions, “Why is ‘otherness’ so compelling an object of representation? What does the marking of racial difference tell us about representation as a practice?” What follows are my gestures towards and answer, my grasping at some sort of explanation if for only myself. Much of this week was also marred by ongoing health issues, which also brought the process of being in my body to the forefront of my mind. In some ways, I suppose I skirt around the same questions always. What is like to be in my body, the experience of which is shaped by these forces that I constantly allude to in my fiction.
My creative work is not finished, and I plan to continue to mull over these questions as I continue this project long past the portfolio deadline. Thank you for your patience and kindness this semester, and fostering conversations about what it means to create this kind of work, to self-represent, to attempt to convey one’s own experience.
Day Two
I find myself gravitating towards works of short fiction to supplement my writing. When my sentences feel too lofty, I often grab Murakami and Ishiguro, unfairly lumping them together in my mind. Perhaps due to ethnicity, perhaps due to their equally sparse style. I am cognizant that my collapse of the two, however unintentional (as I am aware of differences in their style, subject matter, and lived experiences), continues to perpetuate this image of a singular Japanese monolithic voice (despite the fact that Ishiguro’s style and inspiration is distinctly British).
With this, I am reminded of Hall’s question, why does difference matter? Why does it matter that they are different from each other, and is it important that I slot them differently in my mind? Difference as a cultural study would slot them if not next to one another at least in proximity, as ethnicity reigns the predominant means of grouping and defining likeness in our current discourse.
Difference matters because it is essential to meaning, Hall writes. I am reminded of my professor shouting from the top of a chair at 9 am on a Thursday, trying to describe the essential principles of Buddhist dualism and oneness. We think it is the space between things that gives them definition, he said. The difference between me and this chair is so obvious to you. But what if it weren’t?
Perhaps I group Murakami with Ishiguro because of what they are not. Despite Ishiguro’s proximity to the English canon, they do not have an unequivocal stake in it, their presence in the English speaking literary scene, while normalized, is not a given. They both consider what it means to feel out of place in setting, their writing is haunted by this sense of not belonging that I rarely find in white authors. Even Murakami’s repetitious disillusionment with the city feels familiar, as it refers to a city that has recently sprung into its modern form.
Difference matters perhaps because it gives us categories to work with. Or perhaps because I am also looking for sameness, and it is only through articulating difference that I can find comradery with a person and not a chair.
Day Three
I am beginning to find my characters. I have a tendency to write, even when I’m not trying to, about me, and I’m beginning to draw important distinctions between myself and my narrator, myself and her mother, myself and the small world I circumscribed her in. (Still, I imagine the setting as my grandparents house where I lived as a small child, the architecture designed to force us all into communal space. But, for the most part, I am beginning to see this world as separate from my own and in this process, draw important distinctions between fiction and what fiction represents.
I went into today hoping to sort through more of the plot and figure out the logistical difference between the face mask as a representation of bipolar disorder and the face mask as a representation of losing control and the face mask as being observed and the face mask as plastic surgery and the face mask as becoming cyborg and the face mask as—
I don’t think I sorted that out in the slightest. I am, however, more comfortable with the face mask as all of these things and other metaphors that I have not yet parsed through. I am working on being more comfortable with the idea of not knowing, of leaving up to interpretation, of meaning more than one thing. I think perhaps this is, to some degree, a part of my creative project.
In part, I think this desire to be comfortable with discomfort is rooted in a desire to eradicate the lines between self and Other. “The argument here is that the ‘Other’ is fundamental to the constitution of the self, to us as subjects, and to sexual identity,” Hall quotes Freud. In becoming comfortable with multiple meanings, I hope to hold onto this sensation of otherness that I imbued on my characters—as that is fundamental to their experience and my own—while not limiting their definition to being othered.
Day Four
In her introduction, Claudia Rankine writes that “good writing is [not] good because it achieves the universal, but perhaps instead that in the presence of good writing a reader is given something to know. Something is brought into being that might otherwise not be known, something is doubly witnessed.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of sight and witness and the politics of paying attention. I recently read a blog post about the attention economy and what it means to pay attention, how we have found ourselves pulled in multiple directions and our attention spans have shortened, how we are overstimulated and taught to turn our attention towards action, rather than understanding. In this piece, the author Jasmine Wang quotes Simone Weil, who says, “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
Writing, for me, is a process of attending to. Of paying close attention to something in the world, so much so that it lives in my mind past our ephemeral earthly cohabitation. Much of Rankine’s configuring in “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary” deals with the idea of paying attention, how we attend to difference and mark it as a category of its own. How we imagine race as an additional layer to writing which touches upon some universal truth, how we imagine good writing as some interrogation of some unambiguous interior that looks and sounds like an upper middle class white sensibility. She pushes against this definition by offering writing as an attending to, as an opportunity to point to a particular kernel one knows much about and ask others to pay attention.
I want to pay attention in my writing. I want to pay attention to the things I struggle to articulate, to the feelings that seem beyond my grasp. Writing is a lonely experience I have often found, as it requires me to completely isolate and enter my mind, turning over phrases that perhaps will never be shared. On the other hand, it can be an opportunity to be most connected to the world as I have observed it, to communicate what I have been paying attention to.
With this work, I am trying to express something that I have felt and seen. I am asking my reader to pay attention.
Day Five
I think this will be the last process note that I leave. My process is not done, and it is good to reflect upon it, but it is time for me to lose myself in it, to submit completely to the writing rather than the self awareness of doing it.
I wonder if I am too aware of what I am trying to say and the distance between what I say and what I mean. Someone once told me that seduction is the space between what you say and what you mean. In some ways, I suppose that is true. But mostly, I feel as though I am on the brink of teetering into that void.
My story is nowhere near finished. I feel slightly as though I have barely begun. My narrator is still stuck in the same place she started, we know little-to-nothing more about her life than we did when I began. (I use the royal we here when really I mean I.) I am wading through the thicket of untold story, the unwritten nebulous and preventing me from seeing further than a paragraph down the line.
I don’t want to be overly prescriptive. I don’t want to decide what happens before it does, or meticulously plan out what will be said or how my characters will feel. I have never been able to write that way, though I suppose there is value in scaffolding that I am missing by leaning into my own near-sightedness. The first time I put on glasses, it was slightly disorienting. I was surprised to learn that the world could be clearer than I had known it to be, especially because I thought that I had seen the fullest extent of what was out there. It wasn’t an astronomical change but I was acutely aware that things could be clearer than this, that what I thought was in focus was slightly out. To answer Hall’s question, I believe otherness is such a compelling object of representation because we are curious about things beyond ourselves. After all, the only thing we can ever really know is us. I am intrigued by otherness because I want to know what it means to be more than me, to exist beyond my body, to be guided by someone else to pay attention to something beyond my immediate surroundings. (Recently, a friend was describing the strange experience of seeing something he doesn’t talk to anymore. She’s not a part of the world anymore he said to which I argued that the world is so much larger than the 20-30 people he saw socially on a regular basis. Is it? He asked. That’s all I really know from my experience. Everything else is just my speculation.) Everything, to some degree is otherness, and literature allows us to transcend that for a moment and step into the other. I hope to convey that whenever (if-ever) I finish my story. Even if not, this process has been valuable in helping me think about what it is I am trying to accomplish in my fiction, and if it is even a possible pursuit.
