Hyeseung Song’s debut, Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon and Schuster, 2024) is a fearless and honest portrayal of mental health, racial identity, and artistic yearnings. The eldest daughter of Korean immigrants, Song uses vibrant and luscious language to examine and subvert the “model minority myth” while making distinct and effective craft decisions to capture decades of her life. A meaningful journey of self-actualization, Docile takes the reader from Sugarland, Texas, to Ivy League campuses, to her birth country of South Korea, and eventually to New York City.
I spoke with Song over email and Zoom about Docile’s publication, her relationship with her parents, her life as a visual artist and a writer, and more.
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The Rumpus: What has it been like to have this book out in the world?
Hyeseung Song: It has been more beautiful, but also harder, than I would have expected. My book came out in mid-July, a tough time for a book to come out anyway. [This July] felt like ten years happened in a week: the DNC, the RNC, Trump being shot, Biden stepping down, the rally in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris’s ascension. All this happened within seven days of my book coming out.
I’ve gone through a particular experience that I think a lot of writers and debut memoirists may not have gone through. My father had a complicated relationship with my book. He never read it. At the beginning of August, my father passed away unexpectedly. I never stopped touring, I never rescheduled anything. I felt like I had to steward the book through. Sometimes, I feel like I’m grieving out of my mouth doing these events and interviews because I cannot talk about this book without talking about my father. I knew, going in with the launch, that when I’m fifty or sixty, I’ll look at the book and have realizations because I’ll be older. I didn’t know how much death would collapse and compress that timeline and give new wisdom and orientation to the story and the craft.
Rumpus: You are a painter as well as a writer, which comes through with your vivid, descriptive writing. How does your visual art practice interact with your writing practice, and vice versa?
Song: I’ve used my eye for a long time to see certain things: divisions in the world, metaphysically, the light realm and the dark realm, and everything in the middle. That metaphysical categorization I use in the studio I bring to the writing that I do. One of my friends said my writing practice is like watching a movie: everything is very propulsive, then all of a sudden, it feels like everything stops and there is a picture, really well described. I am always thinking about that light realm, the dark realm, and the things in the middle.
Anne Anlin Chang, who just came out with a book called Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, asked me an interesting question: “Why did [you] decide to write the scenes of racial identity, mental health, art, instead of making paintings instead?” I really don’t have a good answer for that. When I’m writing, as I said earlier, I come to the writing with a lot of curiosity. My painting practice is very methodical. The two practices come at things from a very different perspective. One is curious and unplanned, and the other is very methodical.
Rumpus: It must be satisfying to have different kinds of creative processes.
Song: Yes. Some of the adjectives that early beta readers used to describe Docile are “filmic, cinematic, a lot of visual imagery.” Those were the times I had a lot of fun writing. It was very satisfying to me in a deep way to write those particular scenes that feel like you’re sitting there. They feel more sumptuous, and there’s more attention to detail.
Rumpus: There is a visceral feel to many scenes in the book. Some large events in your life are described later and do not have a big scene, like your divorce. How did you create scenes that seem mundane, and yet pull the reader in, with those details you mentioned?
Song: Unlike a lot of contemporary memoirs that may cover the span of two to four years of someone’s life, mine covers a very long span. Some of the feedback from editors who passed on the book was that the book should end sooner. I totally disagreed with that feedback. Craft-wise, it demanded a lot of thinking about what to compress. In other places, [I had to ask myself] if the reader would follow me to a bridge in Harvard, where nothing is happening, [other than me] talking about how I must look like a token Asian student on a college brochure and [in] crew, racing under that bridge. There’s no momentum or propulsion going on in that scene, if you plot it out, but it adds a lot of layers to certain themes I was trying to develop.
Rumpus: Your memoir begins at age five when your family moves to Sugarland, Texa,s from Seoul, South Korea. Why did you decide to begin there?
Song: We think a lot about the American Dream. Through the immigrant lens, including for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, it is tied to tropes like the model minority myth, and we all know it is an illusion. I wanted to start at a place where we’re living in a magical sounding place: Sugarland with sugarcane fields. I wanted to start off with a question: “Is this going to happen for this family?” It seems so ironic and fabricated and impossible, but you, as a reader, are rooting for the family to get what they came for.
Rumpus: It is very much like that, and as the book progresses, I was rooting for you to pursue what you really love, which is art. It took a long time to get there, didn’t it?
Song: It took a long time. I was frustrated with the character me, the character I, in Docile. Every time I revised it, I wanted to shake myself and say, “Why didn’t you know it here?” If this were a novel, I would have gone into the hospital once and I would have been cured. But that’s not life. Life is much harder. It takes a long time to heal oneself and change oneself. So, there were many times when I was revising, worried that the reader would be annoyed because it takes so long for me to pull away.
Rumpus: You had success as a student yet struggled with your identity and mental health. You address racism, ableism, and capitalism as some of the challenges you faced but can only see when looking back, with narrative distance. How did you choose to write toward this?
Song: The model minority myth [is] not really a myth, because so many internalize it. This is something I’m careful not to talk about, in this way, in the book. This conception is that all AAPI are docile try-hards who can be counted on to maintain the status quo. This is the pattern of capitalism and scarcity, which has been in place for generations.
In the book, I talk about poverty math with my mom. She’s constantly doing mathematics about what she has bought, when the rent is going out. It’s the crazy litany of calculations. When I’m young, I hope we can make it. As I get older, I’m so annoyed because it’s something I don’t want in my life.
When I think about poverty math, it’s placed over the idea of the model minority myth that we have to be a certain way and do certain things to perform, in order to deserve basic fundamental things like love, respect, dignity, food, shelter, and water. In this book, the toggling between the two poles of scarcity and abundance shows that I, the protagonist, am trying to get to the abundant side, afraid of the poverty math.
The reason that the [early] feedback from the editors is wrong is simple: if I had written to the point of getting married to my astro-physicist husband from Princeton, or becoming a painter in New York City, it wouldn’t work. I had to write to the point of losing it all: career, husband, money, my mom, my mental stability. And yet, I still can find my self-worth. I’m still enough. I’ve written to failure, off of this toggle, into enoughness. That’s what the mission of the book is: to show that and not to end where I am triumphant.
My agent said the ending is precarious. At first, I didn’t know how to feel about that word, but now I lean into it. Maybe there is another hospitalization, maybe there is more failure, but that’s life, and life is precarious. It’s important to me, on a craft point.
I never used the term “model minority myth” in this book. I’m not writing a book about bipolar like Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know did about complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The mission of the book was to illustrate one life that’s trying really hard to grapple with these big concepts without knowing a lot about the concepts when they’re happening. That’s the environment we’re living in at the time.
For me, [it was] a more effective way to write this book—rather than going from anecdotes to research—because I wanted the reader to understand the diagnosis at the same time the protagonist is understanding it.
Rumpus: Your portrayals of people, especially your parents, are loving and honest. How did you approach this?
Song: I wanted it to be loving and honest but maybe it wasn’t. I think a lot about, “Was I a good artist, writer, or memoirist for my mother and my father?” People give a lot of advice about this topic, about intent and implication, and how to share what you have written with other people. Another one is you can even write into this idea of leaning into cacophony, leaning into the idea of different subjective experiences that make up the truth.
In my life story, my mother’s voice was so absolutely internalized, [so] in some ways I didn’t want to lean into that cacophony. I wanted to let her speak for herself. She said these things that were so outrageous and cutting. The fact that we were in conversation on the phone and there was not that physicality, this helped me address the idea of ethics because my mom could speak for herself. That’s the way I chose to do it. And in the end, everyone I was in a good relationship with and wanted to stay in a good relationship with, whom I’d written about—I gave them pages from the book, and I told them I would change actual facts and we could talk or process, but no one took me up on it. Everyone was actually okay.
Rumpus: Was it important for you to trust the reader to draw their own conclusions about the people in the book?
Song: I wasn’t writing a hybrid memoir. I wasn’t writing critique or reportage or facts or research. My ideal reader is very intelligent and makes a lot of connections. I am not saying that people who write hybrid memoirs are not thinking of their reader as intelligent, but I knew the reader could do it, so why do it for them?
Rumpus: The symbol of the golem shows up in your paintings and in the book. You write that a golem is a symbol of voicelessness and advocate they should have their own lives. What made you use this symbolism?
Song: There are many similarities in golem symbolism and Prometheus. With the Greeks, [Prometheus] gives the fire to the humans to create mortals. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature is a golem. I’ve thought about it for years, this idea that you create a creature from the formless mass, then a breath of life activates the lifeless substance. It comes from biblical Jewish tradition. The golem is made by a human creator to rescue and aid the Jewish people. I think the more interesting question is, “Is the golem good or bad?” In Jewish tradition, the golem is supposed to be neutral but ends up having agency either way because we’re all golem and we all have free will. It’s this idea that agency helps finish and complete us, that resonated for my book.
I think about my mom, trying so hard to shape me in her image. We are all made in the image of Christian ideas. My mom was always trying to do that—ignoring my own agency. I could, through interacting with the environment and the world and learning things and making mistakes, complete myself.
In the epilogue, I write about the lesson of love being the same as the lesson of art: if you love something, you have to allow these things to have their own lives. The book itself is art, so people are going to interact with it the way they interact with it. The place of art in my life is that it is very redemptive. Even though my parents unconditionally loved me, I didn’t feel unconditionally myself when I was with them. The place that I felt unconditionally myself and unconditionally expressive of myself was when I made art. So, I think it was really fitting to end the book talking about how art was a place where I fell in love with myself and that I could be my own golem and be trusted to have my own life.
Rumpus: It can be hard to write a memoir about difficult life events. How did you take care of yourself?
Song: I took a lot of breaks. There was a lot of time where I knew I was not getting anywhere because I was not doing the emotional work that I needed to do, and I was basically writing a diary entry. I needed to wait and do other kinds of creative work or other kinds of emotional work, whether it was therapy or somatic work or talking or not talking. That’s why it took such a long time to write this book. It took a long time because I was painting and hustling. I had to eke out my own writing community. That was really fulfilling and wonderful, but it took a long time. People have to give themselves more grace. It takes effort to do what we are doing.
Rumpus: The end of the book is like a love story, where you reconcile things within yourself. Did you have to advocate for this, since it’s not a traditional tied-up-with-a-bow ending?
Song: My editor had no thoughts about it. The ending is the only part of the book where, if I read it out loud, I choke up. In the original manuscript, each chapter showed how I was always trying so hard to solve the problem of myself. One chapter is about being a great daughter, a great student. Another one is about being a great American, a great Korean, a great wife, all these things. I remember going back to that and realizing that there is a method to this way of thinking. I looked at that and realized in this epilogue—it’s not called an epilogue—it’s called a “Not-so-Perfect-Asian Girl,” but the last chapter I talked about how I did all of these things—being a great daughter, student, wife, Asian, whatever, and it was my way of nodding back to the first iteration of the manuscript. I have to hand it to my editor and my agent, I think they liked the last part of the book. To me, it felt right too.
In the end, I’m really pleased because my dad has the last word. He’s the one who refocuses what I think of as failure in my life and shows that it is actually success. That is a big gift personally, too, to look at that paragraph given that my father is gone now. It seems very prescient because that was his superpower. It wasn’t his business. His superpower was always to be able to think about things in the best possible light.
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Author photograph by Jack Sorokin
