Whenever I think about the word “sophomore,” I remember myself in high school and college—knowing a little more than I did the first time around, but lacking the confidence and insouciance that would come naturally in later years. I feel a little embarrassed for the past me, but sympathetic, too. There’s the term “sophomore slump,” both in school and among artists, can mean a lack of motivation, or second projects that disappointed after beloved first efforts. “Debut” holds the ring of promise, where disappointment feels intrinsic to the word “sophomore.” For better or worse, people love to call second books “sophomore” novels, with all its accompanying connotations.
This month, I’m publishing my second novel, Real Americans, seven years after my first. My friend Crystal Hana Kim is publishing her second, too: The Stone Home, set in a reformatory in South Korea in the 1980s. I met Crystal in 2018 while she was promoting her debut novel, If You Leave Me. She was part of an authors’ panel at The Ruby, the work and event space I’d recently founded. I remember being scattered and exhausted, but I also remember Crystal’s kindness; she left me with a couple Korean sheet masks, as though she knew how much I needed them. In the months leading up to our respective sophomore publications, we have traded notes and commiserated. I’m proud of the books that we’ve written. Hers is vivid, visceral, vital. Mine challenged me year after year, yet somehow it’s done. We wanted to learn more about each other’s processes: how a second book gets made through life changes, in spite of uncertainty and doubts. We even compare diary entries. This “conversation” took place in a Google document, so we could both indulge our tendencies to revise.
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Rachel Khong: It feels like the world has changed since our first novels were released in 2017 (for me) and 2018 (for you). The pandemic happened, for one thing. Yet, there’s also this feeling of deja vu, especially with this election cycle. I’m curious about how you’ve changed as a person—as both a writer and a human being—since that time.
Crystal Hana Kim: I don’t even know where to start! I think the biggest change in my personal life is that I’ve had two children. Becoming a mother in 2020 in NYC when it was the epicenter of the pandemic and we didn’t have any real understanding of what was happening was a surreal, confusing, scary experience. My sense of time, as I’m sure everyone can relate, shifted with the pandemic, and then continued to alter with motherhood. My days were marked by breastfeeding and naps and stolen moments of quiet when I would write furiously as a way to hold onto my writerly identity. Now I have a newfound level of clarity on what I want for myself and what my priorities are. I’m also constantly relearning how to give up control, which is difficult for me but also, I think, a healthier approach to life. How has your life changed since Goodbye, Vitamin was published?
Khong: I wrote Goodbye, Vitamin while in grad school, while working restaurant jobs, while working at a quarterly food magazine. In 2018, I started a small business and community space for women and nonbinary artists called The Ruby. Each of those experiences changed me, but The Ruby taught me the value of community in a way that I had never fully believed in before, in collaboration over competition. I hadn’t really known there was another way to exist—I had been so steeped in the cultural conditioning that prioritizes capitalist values like overwork, hustle, achievement. But creating The Ruby moved me in a different, more collective direction: it wasn’t about business for business’s sake, but about sharing, about intimacy, about imperfection, about creating rather than consuming. And The Ruby introduced me to some of my closest friends. Thinking about power structures, how we create connection—all of that shaped the writing of this book. But even as I was reassessing what I had been taught to value, running The Ruby—keeping an in-person community afloat through the pandemic—meant I was overworking, I was hustling, I was a shark who couldn’t stop swimming. So I left The Ruby at the end of 2021, because I realized there was no way I would have been able to finish the novel, which I had begun in 2016, otherwise. (Thankfully, it’s still running without me, and I hope to pay a visit on my book tour!)
I want to hear much more about writing and parenting, and how that shifted the way that you write. Did it ever feel like a threat to your writing? That’s such a common narrative about parenting. Or did it enrich the writing? That’s perhaps a competing narrative.
Hana Kim: In my twenties, I was terrified by the idea of becoming a mother. I was most afraid of what it would do to my writing, that it would sap my energy or shift my focus, that my children would consume me completely. I think that’s the most common narrative—that you have to choose between motherhood or art. That you can’t be an art monster if you are also a parent. And in those early months with my first, I was afraid of losing my sense of self as a writer. But I’ve found my footing now. For me, parenting has distilled my priorities. It’s reinforced what I always knew, which is that I need to write, I have to write. Parenthood has made me more interested in navigating themes of caretaking, tenderness, community, the lengths a parent would go to protect their own. All of those ideas are explored in The Stone Home, and I don’t know if I would have been able to write them with as much potency if I hadn’t become a mother.
I distinctly remember listening to you on a podcast in 2017 when Goodbye, Vitamin had come out. I didn’t know you then, but I had wept while reading your novel and admired you from afar. I was so delighted, then, to find out we’d be publishing our second books at the same time. Real Americans is so different from your debut in terms of structure, writing style, and geographic locations. Can you tell me about how this book came to you?
Khong: I would never have wanted to write the same book twice. That’s not interesting. I always want to be trying something that seems beyond my capabilities, as a writer. As with Goodbye, Vitamin, this book began as what I thought was a short story. I often write short fiction when I’m just trying to find out what I’m thinking about, what is obsessing me at the moment. I started writing what would become Real Americans in December 2016. It was the most surreal time: the seemingly impossible had happened, and Trump had just been elected. I was in shock. I wanted to write something that felt immersive, escapist, and sucked you in right away. The first page of Part I, Lily’s section, is the first page I wrote. And then, of course, it became clear that the times were informing and infusing the book itself: these questions of race, power, identity. By the end of 2016 I had a good sense of who Lily was, but I didn’t know anything else. It would take me many more years to figure out the rest. I will say, though, that each character came to me, clearly: their voices distinct and wholly their own. I don’t think the first pages of each of the characters’ sections changed very much. It takes me much longer—years—to figure out the ends. I have to write the whole thing before I see what the book is about, and then adjust and deepen accordingly.
I read your first novel, If You Leave Me, a little more recently. After moving to Los Angeles, I found your book on the shelf at my local library branch. I was impressed by how devourable it was. Both If You Leave Me and The Stone Home are filled with love and sadness…and this unmistakable grit that I think characterizes your work. Your work has been called “lyrical,” and it is that, too, but “grit” is really the word that comes to my mind. The books are indelibly yours, and no one else could have written them. You mention a formative trip in the back pages of your book. How did The Stone Home begin for you?
Hana Kim: I love that “grit” is what comes to mind. Receiving praise from a fellow writer is such a gift! For The Stone Home, I came across an Associated Press article in 2016 about South Korean “reformatories” that were created in the years leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. “Homeless” and “vagrant” children were rounded up off the streets, ostensibly to be taught life skills, but in reality imprisoned and used as free labor. There’s one photo—a young boy jumping off the back of a van, surrounded by children and guards, and it’s clear he has no idea what’s waiting for him. I kept returning to him, but at first I didn’t know if I wanted to, or could, write about these institutions. Then in 2018, while visiting family in Korea, I met Han Jong Sun, a survivor of one of the most infamous institutions, The Brothers Home. I met him on a rainy day, with my aunt as a cultural translator. He was staying in a makeshift shack outside of the National Assembly. The shack was surrounded by posters with headlines and photographs of the abuses of The Brothers Home. His goal was to stay there, protesting, until the South Korean government acknowledged and apologized for what they had done. We went to a nearby restaurant, and then a tea shop and talked for hours. I’ll always remember his candor, and how much I learned from his activism. Speaking to him, and receiving his blessing, allowed me to begin writing in earnest.
Khong: How was the process of writing this book different from the process of writing If You Leave Me?
Hana Kim: Writing the first book was so different in that I was protected from any knowledge about the publishing industry. After If You Leave Me, I had to work harder to safeguard my writing, to block out any thoughts about audience expectation. On a craft level, the processes were different too. I started If You Leave Me in graduate school, where I initially thought I was working on an interconnected short story collection. I sort of ‘tricked’ myself into writing a novel. With The Stone Home, I wanted to stretch my writing muscles, try to grow and aim for new goals. I constrained myself to a shorter period of time and a physically enclosed space while expanding to a larger cast of characters. I wanted the narrative to have a deepening momentum that combusts at the end, all of these people in this small space acting as a burning fuse. I’m so curious about your process, and whether it differed this second time?
Khong: I know I was technically an adult when I wrote my first book, but Real Americans feels, to me, like the first book I’ve written as an adult. What I mean is that I worked at it diligently and devotedly. It felt more like a marriage—something I committed to, that I worked at—whereas Goodbye, Vitamin felt like flings, stolen moments. Even when I was at my busiest, running The Ruby, I made sure to carve out an hour in the mornings to write. On mornings I did the opening shift at The Ruby, I would make the communal pot of coffee, then place myself in the “podcast room” (this tiny dark closet hung with egg cartons and moving blankets) and write. For the first couple years, I only had those daily hours. And in the last years of writing the book it required more: three to four hours, artist residencies. I mean that in the best way, though. I got married a few months before Goodbye, Vitamin was released, and I think I learned a lot about writing a novel by being in my committed relationship. To both marriage and novel writing, there are challenges, annoyances and frustrations, but also really deep satisfaction, joy, belonging, intimacy, transcendence.
I would love to hear more about your writing process. How it has looked historically, and what it looks like now. Do you have a regular writing schedule, or is it less stringent than that?
Hana Kim: I love that comparison of writing to a marriage. It really is a commitment, especially as we get older and have more obligations, and as technology evolves to provide more distractions. When I’m teaching, I try to shift between ‘teaching days’ and ‘writing days.’ But I still find myself jotting notes on the subway, or during idle office hours. After my second kid was born, I was determined to enjoy maternity leave, to bask in it, knowing that the writing could wait a few months, that living was also a way to inform my writing. I mentioned this earlier, but with my first, I returned to my novel (which would become The Stone Home) only a few weeks postpartum. I was sleep-deprived and delirious and I don’t think the pages I produced then were very good. This second time, I gave myself time. When I did eventually sit down to write, I was so energized. All of these ideas for a third novel that had been marinating in my mind came out of me.
Khong: You write so powerfully about Korean characters living in Korea. Did you always know that Korea was going to feature so centrally in your work? Have you always written about Korea? (Did you ever feel any hesitation, or fear of getting things wrong?) How does being Korean American inform your work?
Hana Kim: In undergrad workshops, I initially wrote vague characters without a clear race or identity. I was so determined to not write about Korean characters, afraid that would be the only thing I would then be ‘allowed’ to write. But it was only when I started writing about Korean and Korean American characters that my writing became more vivid and true. I’m drawn to writing about Korea because it’s a part of my history, but I try to approach it in a way where I can explore larger themes of motherhood, oppression, and how to find hope in difficult circumstances. I joke that I’m writing my way toward the present-day and my present-self, so my third novel, which I’m working on now, is very much set in the States and (so far) focuses on the experiences of a Korean American woman.
Khong: I love that. Is history something you feel naturally drawn to? Was that a subject that you excelled in in school, for example?
Hana Kim: I’m drawn to history in the sense that I’m always looking backward in order to understand the present. I like mulling over questions about lineage, cultural memory, how the past has made us. Why we are the way we are, and how none of us have been formed in a vacuum. History as it was taught in schools didn’t particularly engage me though—the focus is so heavily on the white, American, male experience. On ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ History can feel so dry when taught out of a textbook. What I love is writing toward the perspectives and stories we haven’t yet been told.
Khong: I think that’s such a good point about what makes good material for a novel. It’s what you’re interested in, passionately, not something you were told to study or that you’re given a grade on. Real Americans is about science, but through high school and college I was a terrible student of it. I wasn’t a memorizer—I’m still not—which made STEM hard for me. As an adult, though, I’ve come to it in my own way: I love learning about animals, plants, our genomes, and how they make us who we are. To me that’s one of the greatest gifts of being a novelist: getting to learn and delve really deeply into topics that I find fascinating, that no one is telling me to be interested in. Getting in touch with what I’m interested in, first of all, and then pursuing those interests. It’s a blend of things that I’m curious about and questions that I’m always turning over in my mind.
With Real Americans, I was interested in how powerful people and systems shape our lives. I was also interested in learning about China’s recent history, what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution. I was interested in gene editing technology, what’s possible now and what will be possible in the near future. And it’s about questions I’m always wondering: What makes us who we are? How much agency do we have?
I’d love to know what interests you explored in The Stone Home. And perhaps more broadly, what do you find yourself paying attention to?
Hana Kim: I started writing about this reformatory center in 1980s South Korea, but I knew it had to be more than an account of that darkness in order to be a novel that I wanted to write, that would fulfill me for the next however many years it would take to finish. A theme that came up early in the process was caretaking and community, and how we come together in difficult times. I think that was very much informed by how I felt not only after the 2016 election but also in 2020, when we were all isolated, and how that sharpened for me the importance of care in my friendships. I’m also interested in the idea of perception and storytelling—how we see others, and how that informs the narrative we create about the people in our lives. That’s a theme that’s carried over from my first book, this grief and relief that we will never truly know another person fully. Even the ones we are most intimate with—a parent, a sibling—will remain mysterious to us.
I was also really compelled by this question of why history repeats itself. The thing is, a few months before I read that AP article about The Brothers Home, I had actually learned of a very similar institution created by the colonial Japanese in Korea in the 1940s. This site is now an artist residency, but it was once a “camp” for “vagrant” children. When I read about The Brothers Home, created forty years later, I couldn’t shake this horror of Korea’s dictators reenacting the oppression of our colonizers. I wanted to explore that in the book on a micro level by looking at how the characters are forced to work against one another, and how hope can still prevail.
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but you explore questions about time, genetics, and destiny in Real Americans. What was the research process like for you?
Khong: I have to be honest that the research process was so messy and spread out over so much time. The research informed the book itself, it wasn’t as though I had the idea for the book and then did research accordingly. They both happened at the same time, each creating the other. For a long time I didn’t know if the book was about physics or biology. With writing I often know the general feeling I’m trying to evoke before I know the route I need to take to get there, and so I was asking a lot of very smart people embarrassingly vague questions for…well, years. I use Evernote and have a folder I called “Box for new thing 2016” where I saved every article that I thought might have to do with the book. One piece that was essential was Sarah Zhang’s “The Last Children of Down Syndrome.” (I’m still saving stuff to the folder even though the book is done! I can’t seem to help it.) I read a lot of books about eugenics, and I read a lot about Crispr and gene editing. But I mean it when I say I was not organized about any of it…the creative research process is, at least for me, very different from the method I’d use to write a paper. I would read, forget, read the same thing again. I talked to friends with science backgrounds. I cold-emailed several scientists on the Internet: professors and people at companies often had their emails listed. Almost no one responded to me, but one scientist did, Derek Jantz, who was an early developer of a gene-editing technology. He was very generous with his time, we talked over Zoom. Near the very, very end of the writing process I was invited to do a residency at Cold Spring Harbor, a research laboratory on Long Island that used to be the home of the Eugenics Record Office; I’d learned about it early on, and it was foundational to the book. I based May’s laboratory on it, in fact. And so the residency seemed fated. There, I got to sift through old eugenics record office archives. It was chilling. And I got to visit labs, talk to scientists and assistants. That was an invaluable experience, too.
What is your research process like? (Are you more organized than I am?)
Hana Kim: That’s incredible that you got to do a residency at Cold Spring Harbor! Talk about fate. In real life I’m an organized person, but something about the research process is messy for me too. I think it’s because in the beginning, I don’t know exactly what I need, so I’m reading and saving and searching in a haphazard way. So much of the writing is intuitive, and then I’m filling in with research as I go. The interview with Han Jong Sun was most formative to the book. I then reached out to a lot of human rights organizations in the hopes of learning more about how the South Korean government got away with hiding these institutions for so long, but there’s such little public information that I didn’t have much luck. I studied the photographs that were available—of children being carted off in trucks, hunched over sewing machines, assembling shoes in workshops. I read and watched testimonials. Portraying my characters’ psychological and emotional states accurately is really important to me, so I read with that in mind. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, was really illuminating. He emphasizes hope and community again and again. In stark contrast to that experience, I also read Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny, which is based on the author’s interviews with Franz Stangl, a war criminal who was a commandant of Treblinka, one of the largest Nazi extermination camps. That was a chilling and truly disturbing read, but important in order to understand how someone can create a narrative to absolve themselves.
There were so many instances in Real Americans when I felt a jolt of recognition, particularly in the ways Lily is treated and perceived as an Asian American woman. When writing, do you set out to write about these themes or do they come to you more subconsciously?
Khong: You mentioned writing raceless characters when you first started out writing; it was the same for me. In books I’d read white characters and Black characters, but seldom Asian characters. The Asian American experience wasn’t reflected in a lot of literature of the time. I knew Amy Tan, but her books really centered the Chinese experience. Writing a book that centered on the Chinese experience would not have been true to who I was, or am. My family is Malaysian, and we are ethnically Chinese, but I came to the U.S. when I was two years old. I feel American, but I’m often reminded that I don’t appear American when other people remind me of that. We have a word for that now that we didn’t when I was growing up, or maybe just didn’t know about: “microaggression.” In my own life, I experience more microaggressions than I do aggression-aggression, and so Lily, moving through the world in an Asian American woman’s body, experiences some of what I have, or what I’ve observed.
I think writing is a way of making the invisible visible, trying to put words to consciousness, which in some ways is impossible. It’s impossible to know exactly what it’s like to be you, and vice versa. But I think books bring us the closest to understanding, and give us an opportunity to see where experiences overlap. As you articulated so beautifully, my writing felt much more true once I was able to write my own experience into it. Race is not something that Lily thinks of constantly, but she can’t not think of it, sometimes: her boss can’t manage to get her ethnicity straight; cash-strapped, she considers becoming an escort, and of course includes that she’s Asian in the Craigslist ad. Writing through this was a way to make the otherwise invisible visible.
It’s such a gift that we have so many Asian American writers writing now! Just this spring, there’s Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece and R. O. Kwon’s Exhibit. I wish I could have read us, growing up.
Do you remember the moment when you began writing about Korea, and about Korean characters?
Hana Kim: I wish we could have read us too. I think I’d be a different person if I had grown up with access to such rich Asian American literature. It took me a long time to feel comfortable writing about Korea and Koreans. I was home for summer break during college, and my parents were sharing stories of their childhood. My dad told me how he and his friends would run through fields catching grasshoppers, and how you could string them up by their wings and then later fry them over a fire. He talked about how he didn’t realize it then, but so many of their games revolved around catching living things—the grasshoppers, but also fish, tadpoles—because they were hungry, and their bodies craved protein. I couldn’t stop thinking about that, and what my parents’ lives were like as children, and how different the world must look to them now. When I returned to creative writing class in the fall, I started writing stories set in Korea as a way to get closer to my parents, though I wouldn’t have articulated my sudden interest in this way then. Hearing about their past made me want to know them as children, and though that’s impossible, writing is one way to try.
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Khong: We are both keepers of line-a-day daily journals. I use a five year diary designed by my friend Tamara Shopsin, and I’m on my second diary, meaning I’m in my ninth year of documenting my life in this way. I thought it might be interesting to compare notes on what we wrote about our novels, as we were writing them.
December 15, 2016: “Good writing morning, not to jinx it… maybe something new I hope.”
December 21, 2016: “I wrote 2,000 words and can’t tell if they’re stupid, but was happy to.”
January 31, 2017: “Wrote… unsure of where to go next so I’m just adding. I don’t know, scenes and feelings. It’s very different from G, V”
December 8, 2020: “The joy of writing and revising is fading a little bit. This section feels clearly not as good and I fear I have written all crap.”
December 9, 2020: “More writing, revising. I think I figured out some bad habits. Narrating rather than painting a picture. It’s hard.”
December 10, 2020: “Another day of writing/revising. Feeling like I know what to do but not necessarily how to do it. Trying to remember/keep in mind that the writing is the best part.”
January 12, 2021: “Writing felt hard today even though I got a lot of words down. I just felt like I might not be smart enough to do what I want to.”
Hana Kim: Wow, going back to look at my old entries and seeing the evolution of the novel in these bite-sized increments was such an experience. I feel very tender toward this past-Crystal. Here are my entries!
November 12, 2017: “Slow day. I changed timeline to fit AP Article. Not sure how to write about this period of time yet.”
November 28, 2017: “Good day! Was more focused and revised chapters – getting voice and perspective down.” (I remember writing this while at the Jentel residency. Little did I know I would toss out one of those perspectives completely a few years later!)
February 2, 2018: “Looked back at and revised the Nari chapters I had written at residency. Have a plan for the rest of P1?” (The character Nari is not in the novel now.)
April 23, 2018: “Jackie and I went to the National Assembly and met 한종선. We talked for a long time. A lot to think about.”
February 22, 2019: “Emotional. Feel low. Is it because of the novel? I wrote and thought about structure anyway.”March 20, 2019: “I reworked one of my characters completely and figured out a new plan. We’ll see. Will have to rewrite a lot.”
March 16, 2020: “Wrote, but distracted again by coronavirus news. Will do better tomorrow.”
March 18, 2020: “I reduced my news reading time and feel a lot better. Wrote more today too. It’s scary, with E working and the baby coming.”
Khong: Maybe we can end with some entries from when we were feeling optimistically about our books, or closer to the end!
May 16, 2022: “Wrote, all the usual things. Still feeling positively about this revision.”
June 3, 2022: “Got to the end of my draft. Need to go back to my starred sections, but feeling… good?”
January 19, 2023: “I feel so close to being done! I need to write the prologue and finish a section tomorrow! Want the prologue to feel like a poem.”
January 20, 2023: “I ‘finished’ the book and Tricia printed it out for me. Felt happy.”
May 3, 2023: “Did research for future book (maybe??).”
May 4, 2023: “Still excited to be working on this potential new thing! We’ll see how/where it goes.”
Hana Kim: Here are some of mine. It’s striking how much my mood is connected to whether or not I got to write that day:
December 3, 2020: “My writing day! Wrote wrote wrote – up to the epilogue now. Momentum!!”
March 17, 2022: “Feeling really good about my novel!! Confident and excited. Worked on it all morning.”
October 25, 2022: “Worked on novel revisions for 20 minutes before work and it made a big difference in mood!”
March 14, 2023: “Got feedback from JW! Novel revisions! Yay!! I am so happy. Really excited about novel!!”
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Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the novels The Stone Home (William Morrow, 2024) and If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018), which was named a best book of the year by more than a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
Author photographs courtesy of Rachel Khong and Crystal Hana Kim
