INTERVIEW: R.O. Kwon by Anu Khosla
Exhibit
R.O. Kwon
Riverhead
Interview by
Anu Khosla
In 2018, I bought a hardcover copy of R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries. I had never heard of Kwon, but the description –– a young college girl named Phoebe Lin gets slowly pulled into an extremist religious cult –– piqued my interest. As quickly as the spine started to loosen, I found I had fallen deeply in love with Kwon’s work. It was only after finishing the novel that I learned of Kwon’s personal story, that her own loss of faith had inspired The Incendiaries. I was an instant fan of her work and only found out later that she is a local San Francisco-based writer.
Exhibit, Kwon’s long-awaited and highly anticipated follow-up novel, tells the story of Jin Han, a Korean American photographer facing creative blocks in her work and maybe also in her personal life. In a subtle nod to Kwon’s earlier work, Jin is a graduate of the same fictional elite college as The Incendiaries protagonist, Phoebe. Jin and her filmmaker husband, Philip, head to a house party in Marin one afternoon. It is there that Jin meets the ballet dancer, Lidija Jung, who is living in San Francisco while she heals from an injury. Lidija becomes Jin’s muse, but maybe also something more.
I caught Kwon on Zoom to discuss literary versus visual arts, inspiration, anxiety, genre, the experience of being an Asian American writer, and, of course, the Bay Area arts scene.
Anu Khosla: I was interested in how San Francisco shows up in the text as having a flourishing art scene that also felt interconnected across disciplines. Is that also how you experience the Bay Area off the page?
R.O. Kwon: I do find that the Bay Area has a flourishing art scene. With the visual arts, it's not a hub the way New York and LA are, and it's also not one of the major publishing hubs. There are ways in which the city feels like a one-industry town with tech, of course. But I always tell friends who are either moving here or are thinking of moving here that as writers and artists, because we're an embattled minority group here, I find there to be a wonderful sense of community.
I was talking to a friend who had moved here from New York, and she was feeling a little distressed because she’d been living there for 20 years. I was saying, honestly, I love being a writer here. I love the events and the literary communities that we have here. People show up for one another in a beautiful way. It's also true that I personally need so much time to write anything that I also appreciate that every night there's not some party where I'm just like, “Well, maybe I should go? Five good friends will be there,” which is what it feels like anytime I visit New York. I guess this is just me saying that if you're an artist and you want to live in the Bay Area, you should come. The rent situation is really fucked up, but it is still a city full of art.
AK: I loved the way the book depicted this relationship between the visual artist and the literary artist. Your writing was very visual to me. Of course, your protagonist is a photographer, so I'm sure that was very intentional, but the detail and mastery blew me away. I'm curious to hear about your process for embodying the experience of a visual artist.
RK: I did spend a great deal of time researching the visual arts for this book. I took photo classes. I love looking at visual art anyway. I feel like it's such a wonderful side effect of being a writer. There were so many times when I was like, I have to go watch this dance performance because it's research for the novel. I have to go to this exhibition at the museum because it's research. It's really such a blessing to follow our interests and have this core impetus for continuing, for learning all the time. I took ballet classes –– really, really intro ones. I took a choreography class. I interviewed visual artists, dancers, and ballerinas who very, very kindly gave me their time.
At the very start of the pandemic for about two months, I could barely read anything. It was so disorienting for books, the one thing that had always been there for me, not to be as available. Thank God I could still read poetry. But even then, at some point, I was reading a poem a day, and I was on deadline for Exhibit. I was just like, how am I going to write a book if I have suddenly and horribly lost my ability to read a book? Granted, it came back after those two months. But during that period, what was absolutely available was visual art.
I love Alexander McQueen's book from the Met exhibition. I was walking around with it like Linus with his safety blanket. I essentially wanted to eat it because of the splendor of it. It felt like a cooling liquid on my brain or something. That's not quite right. It felt like drowning in beauty, or drowning in splendor. I keep returning to the word ‘splendor’ with this work. Some of that made its way, I think, into Exhibit.
AK: I was going to ask about the phrasing that you used in the text: “image had left me” or “she had image.” That really struck me, this idea of image being something you could possess. How did you land on that particular phrasing?
RK: When The Incendiaries came out in 2018 and then into 2019, there was a period of between a year and a year and a half when I could barely write. I could write a little, but my head was so full of things that had to do with publishing a book. I wasn't quite there, but I do live in real fear that the words will leave one day and that language will leave. And that feels like an almost unbearable loss. That was part of the experience I was having at the start of the pandemic, too, with barely being able to read. I was also barely able to write during that time. Just the terror, this thing that is at the center of my life and means, and around which my life is organized, and without which my life would be so different. Given the size, magnitude, and importance of language and literature, for me, without it, my life would feel very bleak, I would plunge into profound grief. It was that heightened fear which made its way into Exhibit. For a solid year, Jin hasn't been able to take a single picture that she's willing to keep, which is a much more extreme version of what I was experiencing. I was just working with one of my great fears.
AK: In the book, we learn that Jin often works in triptych form. Why did you choose triptych for her?
RK: First of all, I love the word triptych. Acoustically, it's so satisfying. Visually, it's so satisfying. Triptych, all those letters... That P and that Y and that H. It's visually so satisfying. It's so fun to say. I also love Diptych. I love both.
But triptych, in some ways, I think it remains true, and it could perhaps remain true for the rest of my life, that I'm always writing about faith. I grew up really religious. I was going to be a pastor, and then I lost the faith. In some ways, I'm always writing about that loss. It was a pivotal loss. My life is organized into a before and after. There was the before when I was super Christian, and my idea of a really fun Friday night was to go to a praise rally. And then there's the after. I think a lot of people leave a religion as totalizing as Christianity was for me, and they feel freer or more joyful.. And what I felt instead was terrible, lasting grief. In some ways, that grief has never really abated. For the first year after I lost God, I wasn't sure I was going to make it through alive. It was such a brutal time. And so there are the religious connotations, of course, of a triptych.
I do seem to be drawn to triangles. I guess desire triangles. I remember a youth group pastor said something like, “We should only ever date people who are also Christian because that way, in your relationship, you’re one leg, the other person in your relationship is one leg, and then God is the third, and a triangle is the most stable geometric form.” I'm suddenly realizing that that's quite literally the structure for The Incendiaries, at least, and a little less so for Exhibit. At first, with Exhibit, I tried to keep the faith aspect out of things because, in some ways, I just felt... one grows tired of one's grief. This happens over and over when I try to keep the faith aspect out of my writing. At some point, I was like, the book feels too thin. There's something missing. And I was like, “Oh, fuck. It's that motherfucker again. I'll bring you back in.”
AK: I feel like there are so many hints of different genres in Exhibit. There's romance, there's grief, there's revenge fantasy, there's thriller, there's intergenerational drama, there's myth, there's erotica. Were you considering some of those traditional genre forms as you were writing?
RK: When I read, I don't really think about what genre something I'm reading belongs to. I am alive to the idea that this is a novel, this is a memoir, this is poetry, but I’m not formally thinking about genre.
Once I started getting into literature with a capital L, almost all of my reading until after college, and all my favorite writers were just extremely dead white people. So dead. I really loved and still love Henry James. I really loved and still love Virginia Woolf. My parents, bless their hearts, left so many books around the house, and I stormed my way through anything that was in front of me. I had a goat's appetite for books, which is like tin cans, large plants, whatever. I'll eat all of it. I read the entirety of Christopher Pike's collection of horror books. I read Anne of Green Gables so many times. I wonder if that more catholic reading experience, catholic with a lowercase c, might have also made its way into the book.
AK: Some literary writing feels like it has to obfuscate and hide the romance, the fantasy, and the erotica. There was something so bold and raw in Exhibit, which maintained the tension, and the beauty of it. How did you think about these elements in the work?
RK: One can guess the reasons very quickly, but it doesn't logically make sense to me that sex should be kept out of literary fiction. What about sex does not belong in literature? What about anything doesn't belong in literature? It's such a queer book. It's such a kinky book. Writing a really queer, kinky book as a Korean woman, as an ex-Catholic, as an ex-evangelical Christian, there were times when I was grappling with what amounts to daily panic attacks because of how alarming it felt and the extent to which my body was just hollering “danger, danger” at me for doing these things. My body was like, “If you let on in public that you have perhaps ever had sex you're going to be killed.” But I felt really compelled to write about queer, kinky sex. To write about women's desires and women's bodies.
AK: As Asian-American writers, maybe we have additional cultural baggage there. There are a lot of writers who come from other traditions, maybe some French writers, for example, where sex is almost gratuitous. But I haven't seen a lot of Asian-American writers talk about sex and the body so boldly as you did in this text. What was it like for you to do so?
RK: My experience of writing this book involved sometimes daily hours-long panic attacks. I got to a point where I now can work through an anxiety attack. On the one hand, I'm proud of myself. On the other hand, that's not a skill I ever wanted to build. I would have preferred that didn’t happen. But I've realized there are a lot of ways in which the whole Korean woman, ex-Catholic, ex-Evangelical thing, it's just this triple heap of shame around everything having to do with sex and desire. And I'm never going to get out from under it. It's because I can't reason with my anxiety.
But you can be scared and do that thing anyway. A lot of people are going to think this is a thinly veiled autobiography. I wrote down some things where I felt like, "I can't bear to have anyone think that I think this or that this is how I am." But I did try to walk toward the fear and to trust in the fear as a guiding sign. It has so often been the case that when I'm reading, if I come across a line or a passage or a scene where, I'm just like, “Oh, my God, someone else has this feeling that I thought I was perhaps shamefully alone in the world and having?” It's one of the greatest giftsthat literature can give. I so badly wanted to provide that fellowship for other people as well.
AK: I recently went to see the SF Ballet for the first time. Dance is so embodied in a way that writing is not always. I haven't read a ton of work about ballet before, and I wonder why. What were your touchpoints to ballet?
RK: I took a choreography class, mostly just to sit in and see what that would be like because I obviously had no idea what I was doing. The instructor would tell us, “Plan out a sequence.” Then I just sat there because I was like, I have nothing to contribute here, I'm just going to watch. Us writers, we'll sit at a desk, we'll just sit there. But they flung themselves up and down. They were stretched out on the ground. Their bodies were moving as they were thinking in a way that I found to be fascinating.
When I started Exhibit, I watched ballet for the first time as an adult. It was Alexei Ratmansky's Shostakovich trilogy at the SF Ballet. I just had an ecstatic experience. I felt as though the bodies on stage were talking to my body but on this cellular level. It seemed to be bypassing language in a way that I found to be so intensely moving. From then on, I was like, I really want to write a book that includes dance.
For the first draft, I tried writing the book from Lidija’s point of view, from a ballerina's point of view, but I ran up against too large of a wall there. Ballerinas start ballet so early. Their bodies are so shaped and hewn by ballet. I found I couldn’t inhabit it. That was when Lidija became a central character but no longer the narrator.
AK: I've always felt this tension when I view ballet because, like you say, I have this reaction to the beauty that is visceral. But I'm also like, wow, there's the male gaze, and here is this woman being tortured –– that feels like the norm for traditional ballets.
RK: Both photography and ballet have historically, and in a lot of ways still today, suffered from problems with the male gaze and whiteness. They're both disciplines that are not very hospitable to Jin and Lidija’s bodies. At some point, Jin and Lidija talk about that explicitly. I'm fascinated by the violence in the language of photos: the capturing, the shooting, the seizing. It's such a violent and male-coded language.
Ballet is so hard on bodies, and especially on the woman's body. Look at what pointe shoes do to people. A doctor friend said that he loves watching dance, but he can't watch ballet because he just looks at what's going on with their bodies, and he's like, “This is so fucked up.” Their spines, what they're doing to their legs, and their hips. He can't bring himself to watch it. I was thinking about that while writing Exhibit. How incredibly stressful that ballet forces so many people to retire in their 30s. To love something that much and know that you have that little time, that compressed time, is fascinating to me. Thank God, as writers, it's something that our bodies are –– I'm knocking on wood –– equipped to do basically until we die.
AK: A common question diaspora writers face is should you translate a word into English or can you keep it in your mother tongue? If you decide not to translate, you have to decide whether or not to italicize a non-English word. In Exhibit, you actually use a few words in Hangul script. They're not just italicized or written in English. How did you make that choice?
RK: Especially since it's a first-person narrative, I asked myself, how would Jin think about it? For mother and father, it's just in Korean when she refers to them. I don't transliterate it because that's how she would think about it. She would hear it and know it in Korean. In English, it's usually either spelled as A-B-B-A, or sometimes A-P-P-A, but neither is how it sounds in Korean. With the Korean words that I didn't write in Hangul, those weren't words that she would use as often as she would 엄마 and 아빠. Those weren't words that are close to her heart, but she would just think about them in Korean.
I’m interested in fidelity to thought that can be as close to a character's mind as possible. It helped that there was zero pushback from my editor. I often think about how I've looked up so many terms from reading that I don't otherwise have any use for. I know so much about 19th-century British tea customs. I've looked up sailing terms so often, though I've barely even been on a sailboat. But it's fine, too. I like looking up words. I enjoy coming across a new word when I'm reading. Readers can look up some untranslated words. For those of us who are multilingual, that's the way the words happen in our heads. They're not separated by these are in English, and these are foreign words. They're all just words.
