The first time I heard the Korean folktale of Chunhyang and Mongryong was when my parents took me to see a memorial of Chunhyang during a light-filled summer drive from Seoul to Jeonju last year. All Korean children know it, my parents explained with pride, offering me a precious glimpse of their world before I entered it. In this classic story, often compared to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers must defy the social order of a rigid Joseon Dynasty class system to be together. As obstacles mount, they are forced to risk everything for each other, laying bare the profound cost and transformative power of forbidden love.
In her latest novel, Dreamt I Found You, Jimin Han explores the legacy of this famous tale in a modern-day Korean American community when the bonds of love within families, friendships, and romantic relationships are tested by a political controversy that threatens their idyllic New England beach town. It revolves around three women: Dahee, a Manhattan educator who arrives for the summer to help her cousin Channing; the idealistic and debt-ridden Channing who is fending off the advances of an obsessed local politician determined to end her fairytale romance with another man; and Ames, an ambitious journalist who uncovers the scandal lurking beneath this love story. Of all the inventive novels that Han has written about the Korean diaspora, this one beats with the tenderest heart about the complexities of living in a close-knit immigrant community.
In mid-March I had the pleasure of sitting down with her at the AWP conference in Baltimore to discuss her inspiration for this transporting novel, the importance of imagining other possible lives for ourselves, the challenges in portraying a Korean American antagonist, her definition of love, and how her writing process has changed over time.
The Rumpus: I want to begin with a question about creative inspiration. What sparked the idea for Dreamt I Found You? Was it a particular story or a K-drama? How did you learn about the Tale of Chunhyang?
Jimin Han: This novel is my love letter to the power of stories. My parents always took us to libraries because we didn’t have a lot of money—my father was a resident, a physician in training, with just enough to feed and clothe a family of five—but we could go to the library and take out as many books as we could carry. So books have always just been a way for me to feel connected to people and experiences. After I wrote The Apology (Little, Brown and Company, 2023), my second novel, I was thinking about ways that stories impact people’s lives, how they give us a sense of what’s possible for us. I love that there’s a Romeo and Juliet in every culture, and Cinderella stories, and other folk and fairy tales. But the specificity is also fascinating, how different they are from each other. So I asked my aunt about Korean stories, and she went on and on about the Tale of Chunhyang, and then I researched it and was amazed by what I found. I also talked to my cousin’s wife who grew up in Seoul, and she recommended some K-Dramas. There’s a really fun one that’s from 2001 called Sassy Girl, Chun Hyang. You can see it on Kocowa.
Rumpus: Oh, I love that there’s a sassy version of the Tale of Chunhyang, which always seemed historical to me. I really enjoyed the whole K-drama sassy girl thing!
Han: Yeah, there are a bunch of Sassy Girl K-Dramas! I also feel like the story of Romeo and Juliet, which is essentially the Tale of Chunhyang, had an impact on me in my own family. My father’s mother married a man her family didn’t approve of and they disowned her, which comes up in The Apology. I’ve wondered how it affected my life. My grandparents didn’t have a happy ending so it became a cautionary tale: don’t leave your family for someone you love because it may not work out. What would it be like to grow up hearing that story? So I wanted to explore how this same Korean tale, the story of Chunhyang, could influence two different Korean girls growing up. Would they have the same kinds of feelings about what was possible for them? What if we make critical life decisions without even realizing why? How do you imagine what’s possible for yourself? What kind of impact do stories have?
Rumpus: That brings me to my next question. Your three novels are so distinct and exhibit an incredible range in style, subject and scope, yet there is a through line of women dealing with the consequences of reckless decisions by the men in their lives. Could you talk a little about what draws you to this theme?
Han: I love that you saw that. And of course, we don’t think we’re writing the same stories, but I guess we’re obsessed with the same ideas, right? You were talking about how the Tale of Chunhyang could be read as a sexual assault narrative because she endures all these forms of coercion by the corrupt magistrate who wants her for himself. I don’t think everyone would say that because there’s social class stuff, too—but at the same time, the story is absolutely about that. Chunhyang isn’t allowed to marry Mongryong because she’s not of his social class. Why can’t we love who we want to love? And for women to be punished for it—look at this country today. Women are the majority, yet we’re being prescribed what we can do with our bodies, that affects our health directly. Why are we in this position?
Rumpus: That’s so true. Why are we in this position today? It’s beyond frustrating.
Han: And you see it in literature. With Chunhyang, her suffering is seen as being virtuous. As if somehow this is noble of her,like suffering is something we should aspire to. And to what degree as women, as girls growing up, were we accommodating boys and men? Even in school, boys can be physically more in their bodies and we can’t, like we have to sit a certain way, be quiet and still. In my own family, I have two brothers, and my dad bought my brothers every kind of bicycle there was: Big Wheels, tricycles, whatever it was, and I wasn’t allowed to have one. So I just taught myself and rode my cousin’s bicycle because he was my size. My mother was a physician in Korea, and she could have had a career there, but she came here with us and gave that up. It’s a little bit of a love story because in some ways, she came to the US to save her marriage. She followed my father here. But what was the cost of that? I felt I had to make up for her sacrifice.
Rumpus: How so? Did she want you to become a doctor?
Han: She didn’t ask directly but I always felt it. Again, it’s what we hear growing up maybe? We take on our parents’ dreams in some way. For me, it was my mother’s. So the long-suffering part of accommodating men, you’re right.
Rumpus: What I loved about East End, the fictional seaside town you created, was that Korean Americans and people from different backgrounds could enjoy their summer vacation in a languid, dreamlike atmosphere. It sort of reminded me of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful. I was wondering if this book was in conversation with any other novels.
Han: Both great books. It was really nice to imagine this fictional town. There was a piece of that from when I lived in Providence and after we moved away, we would visit my cousins during summers. There was a larger Korean community there than in Dayton or Jamestown where we moved afterward. Fiction allows you to explore what you kind of hoped would be—just imagining it. I thought about how Hello Beautiful followed or diverged from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and how those choices enriched my reading experience. For instance, Laurie was a minor character in Alcott’s work, but we open with the character based on him in Hello Beautiful. I had already started writing Dreamt I Found You when I came across Napolitano’s novel, but it made me think of what more was possible, and it sort of gave me permission to go deeper in my own book.
Rumpus: How did you decide on Dahee as a narrator? It’s so interesting to me that she’s an insider as a Korean American, but she’s also discovering the seaside town of East End as an outsider while observing her cousin navigate an increasingly complex situation.
Han: I’ve lived with my aunt and uncle and there were times when my cousins lived with us, and I thought even in those situations there’s so much you don’t know about the family dynamic around you—I mean, between parents and their children. That’s what was intriguing to me. As a cousin, Dahee is part of Channing’s family, and yet she doesn’t really know what’s happening for Channing with her parents. And Dahee thinks she’s made decisions that keep her safe but then she comes up against what she doesn’t know. She didn’t grow up in that family or in that town. I just thought that was interesting for her journey—getting out of the city, and always holding East End in this special, romanticized way. Korea, as a country that my parents left, was idealized too for them, so I grew up hearing things that I discovered had changed when I went to visit South Korea myself.
Rumpus: And maybe it’s important to have something like that for yourself, even if it’s a bit of a delusion.
Han: Yeah.
Rumpus. I found the character of Kent fascinating because he very much plays the part of the villain in your novel. He’s based on the corrupt magistrate in the original folktale, and in your novel, he’s Korean American. After everything Channing has gone through because of him—spying, harassment, stalking, imprisonment—when she finally gets the evidence to publicly expose him, she feels reluctant to do so because of the risk of harming the entire community. When Channing says: “I hate that he’s Korean and he did this to me. I don’t want people to think Koreans are capable of this…[T]he racists use this as evidence against us,” I thought it was such a smart way of putting this problem on the page. Could you talk about what she’s grappling with at that moment?
Han: I think that’s why I wanted to have Ames as another point of view as well because she talks about her experience with him, that he’s not so terrible. He’s doing good things. He’s actually better than all these people who’ve left the town.
Rumpus: Look at how much he does for the community! He goes to church. He gives to charity.
Han: Right, he helps local Koreans. So I just wanted to show that though Channing seems to be focused on herself and unaware of so many things, she still is aware of that burden of being responsible for each other, and we all have different experiences of people. I was more interested in the women, especially Ames, because she’s moved back to pursue her career in journalism and write longer pieces. I wanted to show that there’s different reasons why people return to community too, and work together. I just hope that we do more of that in our lives today. I can’t believe my daughters have fewer rights than I had growing up. I was trying to figure out if Kent could just put Channing in jail like that? There had to be some reason for it, something. But then this also happened in Season 4 of Bridgerton—Sophie is actually jailed. It was so fun to see Chunhyang’s storyline there.
Rumpus: Sacrificing the vulnerable to save the larger community or way of life.
Han: Yeah. But there are wonderful men, too. My uncle had such a similar experience as my father—losing his parents at the same age and fleeing to the south after the war broke out. But he’s such a different human being. He’s so kind and gentle. There’s no division of labor in his home. He’s such a great role model for me to see what’s possible. It’s important to have those examples right in front of you beyond stories, too—to have those kinds of figures in your life.
Rumpus: Could we talk about love? What is your definition of love?
Han: I believe in love stories. Not in terms of rescue but in terms of how we truly see each other. I think of finding that someone or more than one, however you see love in all its forms, in terms of being transported: finding yourself capable of learning more about yourself through love, relationships, interaction, all of that comes with love. There are so many forms of love, but with romantic love, people seem to want to control that, restrict it. Why don’t we let people love who they want to love? Why do we want to say you’re only allowed to love a certain kind of person? It’s so political who we’re allowed to love.
Rumpus: Which is absolutely ridiculous.
Han: Yes, and I wonder about love in the community. How can we take care of each other so that more people can economically benefit instead of the few? Dahee’s dream is to live in a house with Channing, her father and her grandfather. It just seems impossible for her to be able to afford that.
Rumpus: Speaking of dreams, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? You mentioned checking out books from the library when you were growing up, so it sounds like you were a big reader. Could you talk a bit about your journey as a writer?
Han: I was born in Seoul and didn’t come to the US until I was four years old and my nickname in Korea was Chamseh which means songbird. My family tells me I was always making up songs and singing for things I wanted, like for my father to return from wherever he was traveling. And I was also always following my older brother to comic bookstores. He loved to read, so my love of books probably came from watching him. I think writing must have come out of that—instead of making up a song of what I hoped would happen, I made up stories.
Rumpus: Do you have any favorite books that influenced you as a writer?
Han: I just finished Sonora Jha’s Intemperance and loved it. Reading makes me want to be part of the conversation. Some early books I loved when I was young like so many other writers was of course Little Women and Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Bell Jar, all of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Books I read later that made me feel I could write were a book of short stories by Kang Sok-kyong, Kim Chi-won, and O Chong-hui called Words of Farewell, (it’s translated from Korean.), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was of course a huge influence, and I always recommend Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel to everyone.
Rumpus: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Han: The prolific novelist/memoirist Paul West once destroyed me in undergrad by slashing a page of my writing with the words, “Prattle” in red pen. But he did me a favor, I have to say now. I’ve never talked about it before because it hurt so much but I get it after all these years. I see now that he was telling me to write things that mattered. Sure, I could throw some words together on the page, but what was I saying? What was at stake? Why should a reader care? Because of that, I wrote less in his class but he inspired me to write some of my best pieces and for that I got a lot of praise from him too. In contrast, the next semester, I took an independent study with the brilliant Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and he encouraged me to write anything I wanted. I wrote the most that semester! I’d taken an autobiography class with him before that and it had the best reading list. Anyway, in the independent creative writing course, we had such helpful conversations about writers. He made them seem like real people and made me less intimidated by them. He told me about Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin whom I’d never heard about during the pre-internet days in my high school. This really was the key, I think. And so I read and wrote a ton. He found something of value in everything I wrote. I’m grateful for both experiences.
Rumpus: What is your current process like these days? Do you write every day? Do you have any specific rituals?
Han: I wish I could write every day! I try to and when I’m on deadline I have to or else the fear of missing a due date overwhelms me. Breaking a big project down into small steps helps. In terms of time, I’m at my best when I write in the morning, first thing, even though it’s hard when there are all the social media notifications and emails to answer. But if I can hold them all off until at least 1 pm and I can get three or four solid hours of work done I feel so much better about myself. On top of that I have a dog to walk so after I take care of my writing and my dog, I turn to everyone else.
Rumpus: I’m curious to know if your writing practice has changed since your first novel. Do you struggle at all to balance creative expansion with satisfying reader expectations as your body of work grows?
Han: I feel more free to write what I want. My editor is always like, “Do something new.” She’s such an advocate for exploring new forms, new ideas. So I don’t feel that I need to do the same thing, which I would find boring. And yet, I’m so grateful to everyone out there who has read what I’ve written which makes me feel a little pressure to not let them down. I want each book to be better than the last—loved more, I hope.
