When I was almost two years old, my grandmother flew from Hongcheon, South Korea, to Flushing, Queens, to take care of me.
Summer in Seoul is full of thick heat that clings to your neck, the back of your knees.
Memory warps and stretches and shifts to fit the strictures of your life.
My grandmother lived under Japanese colonial rule until she was nine. Korea, still united and whole, was colonized in 1910. During this period of forced occupation, Japanese teachers taught Korean students how to view the world through their imperialist language, their history, their foreign tongue.
Growing up, I fluctuated between wanting to modify my looks and embracing them.
When I was in the second grade, I learned that I looked different from my classmates.
By the time I was a teen, I was an expert at scanning people's faces, always in search of eyes like mine. I devoured glossy magazines, ever mindful of the language we used to talk about beauty. The sections on how to apply makeup intrigued me most precisely because their audience never included me.
Words have power, and especially in the realm of beauty, how we speak about ourselves is important.
As a Korean American, I grew up yearning to see actors that looked like me. On the rare occasions I saw an Asian celebrity, I adored them unflaggingly.
When I heard that Hollywood was going to make Kevin Kwan's novel 'Crazy Rich Asians' into a movie, I was so ecstatic I nearly cried.
As a major feature film with Asian Americans in leading roles, 'Crazy Rich Asians' is important. We hope that this movie will be our 'Black Panther,' announcing to Hollywood that we are here, we belong, and we are ready for more.
It's so important for us to write complex, realistic women because that's what we are.
My grandmother raised me when I was little. I was born here, and my parents are immigrants; they needed someone to help take care of me because they were working a lot, so my grandmother came from Korea. So I'm very close with my grandmother, and I keep in touch with her a lot.
Regret is something I wanted to write a lot about because once you make a decision, regret doesn't do anything except linger inside you.
I came from a practical family. The idea of being a writer seemed impossible to me.
For me, writing is something that I need to do. If I'm not writing, I'm not happy.
I don't know if it's unique, but I know many Korean American people of my generation who want to know about their grandparents' lives in Korea, but their family members won't tell them because it's too painful. But my grandmother is just a natural storyteller, and she very openly spoke about really difficult times in her life.
I'm not writing necessarily for an audience. I think about the audience at the end, once I have a complete book. But, when I'm writing it, I really need to feel like I'm learning, and I'm investigating something that I'm personally interested in.
I love books where you can fall in love with the character. And when I say fall in love, I don't mean to be so enraptured by them but to know them really deeply.
