This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures

by SJ Kim, Hannah Choi (Read by)

Overview

A searing essay collection that explores displacement and loss, creativity and change, institutional power and progress.

Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar, and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration, and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations—especially within the Asian diaspora in the West—as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown.

Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers across cultures who sustain her. As borders close in and nations enter lockdown, the journey that Kim traces is fraught—and at once illuminates that the act of remaining present has its own power, allowing boundless hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874770525
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

SJ Kim was born in Korea and raised in the American South. She resides in the UK and teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick.

Hannah Choi is an American actress based in Los Angeles. Her TV/film credits include appearances on ABC's How to Get Away with Murder, American Housewife, and Grand Hotel. She received her MA in acting from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire "across the pond" in the United Kingdom. Her roles often showcase strong, trustworthy, career professionals with a sometimes dry and sarcastic bent. When not narrating, Hannah can be found with a good cup of tea, or throwing some new pottery at the ceramics studio. She loves the sci-fi fantasy genre in any medium, and is a particular lover of rainy days.

Editorial Reviews

"Rather than drawing readers into the discrete and measured intimacy of many memoirs, Kim leans into the inaccessibility of one’s full experience as interpreted by another. The author’s quiet absences sharpen the edges of her inspection of entrenched, implied superiority and easy erasure in discussions of race and in the expectations of immigrants…Kim materializes as a teacher who takes her role seriously as she calls herself and her readers to action."— Kirkus (starred review)

"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."— Publishers Weekly

"SJ Kim’s pellucid lyricism hides a razorblade: I haven’t read a more beautiful, more raging and anguished account of racism and female erasure. It’s a book about finding a toehold in a world that would rather you slipped and fell. It's a book about survival and unbelonging. It is necessary reading."— Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

"I stopped reading This Part Is Silent at first, because I was frightened: I recognized myself to have become what spiritual workers call ‘open.’ Should any combination of words destabilize me like this? Had I been entered by a spirit? Little by little, words became sculptured pieces. We are let into a Korean American family operating in an English environment. The craziness that this kind of life brings to other perceptions and self-perception is beautifully demonstrated. The words no longer hit: they are music. No alien spirit, the spirit is no stranger. It is us."— Erna Brodber, author of Louisiana

"SJ Kim so aptly captures the constant feelings of displacement, the way displacement becomes air to breathe in and out, air that can suffocate. Kim’s speaker is displaced again and again, and the fragmented language and structure of this book beautifully reflects that displacement. This Part Is Silent is lyrical, heartrending, and important."— Victoria Chang, author of Obit

"This Part Is Silent is a testament—a wounded work that explores academic precarity, microaggressions, and the works of Yusef Komunyakaa and Kim Hyesoon, written by a young Korean American writer trying to survive in Manchester’s Chinatown, higher education, and contemporary racial discourse. Kim’s vulnerable text takes autofiction in a turn that’s at once multicultural, metatextual, and multilingual."— Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

From the Publisher

★ 2024-01-19
An academic wrestles with truths of family, immigration, and her profession.

Kim immigrated from Seoul to rural North Carolina as a young child, then moved to the U.K. as a young adult. In this piercing collection of essays, she folds her experiences as an “immigrant twice over” into her academic research on the Southern Gothic and a professional memoir of sorts. The author describes exchanges between her and her Korean cousins as well as those between her and her employers and mentors in British academia, many of which offer a haunting exemplification of embedded power dynamics and racial condescension. Kim creatively and effectively experiments with format through pointed page breaks, plot points and insights hidden in footnotes, varied use of the second person, and one essay structured almost like a screenwriter’s sketch. However, the true force of the text rests in the way the author uses silence—e.g., Korean characters inserted without translation, unadorned quotes from her research subjects (especially Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa), and shadowy personal details. Rather than drawing readers into the discrete and measured intimacy of many memoirs, Kim leans into the inaccessibility of one’s full experience as interpreted by another. The author’s quiet absences sharpen the edges of her inspection of entrenched, implied superiority and easy erasure in discussions of race and in the expectations of immigrants. They heighten her meditations on the historical, contemporary, and potential future harm caused by insensitive classroom discourse, failure to administer either credit or blame, and the temptation to avoid “the urgency of harder, harsher truths.” Resisting academia’s rigidity, Kim materializes as a teacher who takes her role seriously as she calls herself and her readers to action: “Ask why. Ask why without a question mark at the end. Say all the silent parts out loud. Thrive in discomfort.”

A radically brilliant work.

Kirkus Reviews

2025 ALA Carnegie Medal, Long-listed

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