By Helena Rho
In shattering and gorgeous language, Hyeseung Song, a painter and a writer, cracks open the myth of the Korean American model minority and striving for the American Dream in her memoir, Docile. Luminescent and raw, this memoir reminded me of why I wrote my own memoir and why Asian voices matter in the telling of stories of pain and joy, identity and ownership.
Helena Rho: From the very first paragraph of your memoir, I was mesmerized by your use of language: “The billboard rose above the highway in a seduction, in a command: ‘Come home to a Royalton Custom Home, Exit 114’ emblazoned against a rendering of a redbrick house surrounded by fresh fulsome trees and astroturf. The windows in the shutters glinted with stars, indicating cleanness and newness, and it worked—the windows beckoned to me.” The lush detail and your painterly use of words seduced me, and I couldn’t wait to read the rest of your memoir! I know that you’re also a visual artist in addition to being a writer and I wondered how each discipline informs the other in your work. Do writing and painting require different approaches for you?
Hyeseung Song: I love it when readers point out the visual language. Someone recently told me reading Docile was like watching a spotlight move from scene to scene—apt given my art training utilized chiaroscuro set-ups: one bright light source in a darkened room. I don’t purposefully pump up the filmic or visual when I’m writing; I think the way I conceive the world has been informed by years of close observation and is now just reactively imagistic.
I tend to work quickly in the painting studio, even with bigger compositions. I do sketch and journal before I stretch a canvas, but I like to dive in and not belabor things too much. When I was a student, I was taught to work very slowly and methodically, which I did not always enjoy; it made me precious about my work and inflamed my perfectionism. Now I’m much happier whenever something unintended unfolds on the canvas. The toggle between the planned and the stochastic (often coinciding with realism and abstraction in my work) is what I really revel in.
In comparison, I worked on Docile for twenty years. I revised and rewrote a good deal as my understanding about my life changed as time went by (my manuscript had to catch up!). Post-processing wisdom, technical scaffolding, drive to communicate, emotion—that’s the difference between a bunch of journal entries on the one hand, and a finished memoir on the other; between doodles and a painting.
HR: Ann Napolitano, the author of Hello Beautiful, among other novels, has famously said that a writer should follow their obsession. I recently watched two movies: Mr. Turner about J.M.W. Turner and At Eternity’s Gate about Vincent van Gogh, and I was struck by how visual artists seem to be driven by obsession. What do you think about the idea that artists create work based on their obsessions?
HS: I do think this is true, though I want to be careful around the word “obsession.” Even more than in the literary world, the art world has its own obsession with the idea of the obsessive mad genius who must create at the expense of intense suffering to himself (the genius is almost always a male). I wonder if obsession is better understood as an epistemic idea, rather than purely psychological (and toxic). I create art (whether that’s paintings or writing) about a handful of ideas that I am too curious about to turn my attention away for too long. So, if that is obsession, then yes, I am obsessed.
HR: It takes time to marinate a memoir, doesn’t it? I’m so happy to hear another writer took a long time to write their memoir because I thought there must be something wrong with me for taking so long! Though sometimes, I wonder why I wrote a memoir because it is such an act of vulnerability. What artistic merit drew you to memoir?
HS: When I was a student in the creative writing workshops of Princeton, you could either be a fiction writer or a poet. Back in the late ’90s at the university, there were no courses in CNF, memoir or essays. I ended up applying in fiction because at least I would be composing in prose. My first stories? I thought I was just writing about the most maddening people in my life: my family. I was curious about them because they’d influenced me so much, and yet I didn’t really know quite how to make sense of them. Of course, I understood later that I was trying to puzzle myself out.
After I left school, I continued writing and kept being curious about myself. One day, years later, I understood that what I was writing was a full-length project, a book. More or less about ten years ago, you started seeing memoirs with experimental structures—hybrid memoirs, memoirs in essays, etc. The first completed iteration of Docile was actually in essays, but it wasn’t really working. I think I had written myself into that structure partially because I didn’t have an ending, a complete arc, to my story. I shelved the book and kept living life, and it was life that gave me more fodder—and an ending and a denouement to the book. I returned to my manuscript and saw exactly what it was demanding. I revised the book, taking inspiration from the structure of the novel. Docile demanded propulsion, and it was my goal to write a page-turner.
HR: There is an art to creating a memoir. The “I” in memoir is a character. That “voice” is crafted by the writer to tell their story from a specific point of view. And where a memoir begins, and ends are structural choices made by the writer. Your memoir starts when you are five years old and covers in detail your school and college years. Why did you start there? Why not later, after you gained “success” as a painter or after you married for the first time?
HS: I’m writing another book, a second memoir, about mental health and the importance of feeling one’s feelings. People ask all the time if it’s a “sequel” to Docile because it begins a few years after the first book ends. But memoir isn’t simply chronology of course. It’s theme, and Docile is a memoir about identity, specifically racial identity which is shaped by my childhood in Sugar Land and Houston and which is complicated by family dynamics. The story about identity starts when I am about five years old and reaches a homeostasis at about age 35, once I’ve gotten divorced and am single again. You’re absolutely right: I could have ended Docile once I became an artist in New York (maybe with my debut show), or when I’d gotten married at 25—both “triumphant” moments. But Docile is so much about creating an identity outside the construct of the model minority myth. The counter to that myth was something truly surprising to me: it was embracing that I was enough, no matter what I did, how hard I tried to earn love and recognition, or how much or how little I had to show for my efforts. Towards the end of the book, it could be said that I had lost absolutely everything: my mother, my golden husband, my career, my mental health, my financial stability. But the actual triumph of Docile is that despite all that, I still had myself. And that was enough.
HR: Your parents, Korean immigrants, had a harsh life in America, the land where they thought all their dreams would come true. Their ambitions impacted you in negative ways, and yet, you write about them with compassion. You chose to include examples of their love toward you, not just their abusive behavior. Why did you make those choices as a writer and a daughter?
HS: I made a portrait of my mother in my studio a few years before she fell ill. It is not one of my better paintings. I always told myself I could make another, sometime down the line, but of course the line was shorter than I knew. I had tried my best though, to capture what I saw as her essence. The fact that I could not put it down isn’t because my mother wasn’t enough; it was because I was not a great artist that day.
I had a lot of time to think and craft the characters of my parents in my memoir. I look at Docile and I think, unlike in the portrait of my mother, I did a good job capturing their essences. They were larger-than-life figures to me always, especially my mother, who was my alpha and my omega, so maybe it was that bigness that made it easy to capture. That being said, Umma is dead and will never read Docile, and my father is afraid to even look at the book. (Neither has he ever sat for a portrait; he passionately refuses.)
Putting my parents down on the page was about telling the truth, my truth. I don’t think I was making so many writerly choices. I was making emotional ones. I don’t know what that says about me as a writer. Maybe it means I’m a bad one. But the container of memoir is fluid, and I was happy to be creating within it.
Helena Rho is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominated writer and the author of American Seoul: A Memoir. A former assistant professor of pediatrics, she has practiced and taught at top ten children’s hospitals: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh and is a devoted fan of K-Dramas, Korean green tea, and the haenyeo of Jeju Island. Stone Angels, her debut novel, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in March 2025.