Found

in Translation | by David
Hoon Kim | The New York
Review of Books
On July 12, 2021, we published “When I Lived in French,” an essay by
David Hoon Kim. As the title implies, it is a memoir of the writer’s time
in France. But it’s also a series of re ections on identity, belonging, and
language—the account of a young Korean-American’s becoming
himself through his adopted tongue.

If Kim is not (yet) so well-known as a writer, that is partly because he has

published relatively little in English. He made a big impression back in
2007 with a short story in The New Yorker called “Sweetheart Sorrow,” a
haunting tale of a thwarted romance set in Paris. And then…nothing—
until just now: his rst novel, titled Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost ,
which is out next month, builds upon that original narrative; and an
excerpt appeared a few days ago, as “The Mirror,” in The New Yorker’s
Flash Fiction series.

What rst caught my eye about Kim’s essay for us was its juxtaposition
of trenchant perceptions about le racisme ordinaire in France with the
author’s love of the French language, an engagement so profound that
his Parisian friends would consult him on correct usage of their own
native tongue. As I soon learned, when Kim and I corresponded via e-
mail this week, neither French nor even English was Kim’s rst language
—he grew up in Seoul, speaking Korean, before, at the age of eight, he
moved with his family to Oregon, and then to Washington State. It was
only as an undergraduate, already French-curious, that he moved to
France—living successively in Rennes, Calais, Lille, and Paris—and
found his true linguistic home.

“It’s strange to look back on those years, because, for me, there’s my life
before I learned French and my life after,” he said. “Akira Mizubayashi—
the Francophone Japanese writer whom I quote in my essay—writes
that he was born in French at the age of nineteen. I feel similarly.”

Kim never nished his graduate degree, and cycled through freelance
gigs as a copy-editor and translator—the narrator in his novel is a
French-speaking Danish-Japanese adoptee named Henrik Blatand who
works as a technical translator—until he started attending writing
workshops and ultimately studied at the Sorbonne under the novelist
Dominique Barbéris. “Those two [latter] years I consider an uno cial
writing program of sorts, a pre-MFA, if you will,” he said. Kim left
France in 2004 when he was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
which proved a departure in more ways than one. “There, I started
writing ction in English, you could say, for the rst time in my life,” he
told me. “Of course, no one at Iowa knew this—that I was learning to
write in the language I had grown up speaking—because, well, it would
have been a weird thing to tell someone who hadn’t asked.”

“Sweetheart Sorrow” was a fruit of that time in Iowa. For most aspiring
ction writers, to get a story in The New Yorker is a life-changing
breakthrough. For Kim, apparently not. What happened?

Thinking back on it, I can see that the publication of “Sweetheart

Sorrow” froze me in my tracks. I felt that I had done everything
backwards, to my detriment. Instead of boosting my con dence, it
made me wonder if I could write something that “good” again. It
 didn’t help that, on top of everything, I also felt con icted between
continuing to write in English and going back to writing in
French.

The choice I ended up making is perhaps the obvious one, in light

of my New Yorker publication: I decided to concentrate on my
English writing. I spent the next six years working on that novel
before nally abandoning it while at the Stegner Program [at
Stanford]. After that, I didn’t write anything for two years. It was
the news of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that
pulled me out of what had been a sort of depression, and I started
writing about the Paris I had known, rather than a historical Paris
occupied by the Germans, which had been the setting of my
previous, failed novel.

He still reads mostly in French, even if the decision to write in English

has now stuck. Since his essay deals, in part, with how language
constitutes reality and selfhood, I was curious about whether he
experienced himself di erently in the two languages. “When I write, I
often nd myself frustrated by what one language lacks that the other
has—though, in this, I admit I’m less forgiving of English than of
French,” he said. “In any case, I don’t think I write the same way in the
two languages. I am more detailed and verbose in French, whereas my
English is more concise, matter-of-fact.

“Personality-wise, I’m not so sure,” he went on. “I do remember

someone [at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where Kim
was a fellow] telling me I had a more lively demeanor in French, that I
gesticulated and smiled more. Perhaps she was trying to tell me
something.”
I’d read, in a 2007 interview with Kim, that he particularly admires the
work of Samuel Beckett for its equal facility in English and French—
Kim wrote a student thesis on the author’s two versions of Molloy.
“What I admire in Beckett’s writing,” he said, “is that in translating
himself, he manages to both rewrite something completely and still
remain, in my opinion, faithful to the other version. That’s very hard to
do, especially when it’s your own work that you’re translating.”

Apropos, I wondered whether there was a French edition of Paris Is a

Party in the works, and if so, who was translating it. “Funny you ask,” he
said. “There was little chance that my book would be translated into
French if I didn’t do it myself. I also wanted to do it as a sort of
challenge, to see if the French world of my novel would stand up to
being rendered in its ‘original’ language. Lastly, I didn’t want someone
else speaking for me in French.”

That point—about self-de nition, respect, and authority—returned me

to thinking about his abiding anger at France for its xenophobia. My
question, especially after the pandemic year and the widespread reports
of anti-Asian racist incidents in the United States, was whether this
country was so very di erent.

The truth is, I often feel alienated in the US, too, possibly even
more so than I did in France. Part of it is that I feel I shouldn’t feel
alienated here, in the country of my citizenship, where I speak the
language I know best and live in an area with the highest
concentration of Asians outside of Asia.

There’s an expression in French, avoir le cul entre deux chaises,

which means, literally, sitting on half of one chair and half of
another. Speaking for myself, I don’t think it’s possible to fully
embrace the cause of one group if you feel yourself (also) a part of
another group. Not being in France makes me feel more French,
the way I was never more American than when I lived in France.