By Audrey Fong
Helena Rho’s debut memoir American Seoul spans Rho’s life from the moment she left South Korea at six years old to present day. Within this memoir’s 224 pages, Rho touches on a a huge variety of topics such as: sexual assault, domestic abuse, divorce, language, family, and education.
Rho is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominated writer, a medical doctor, and a former assistant professor of pediatrics. Her essays have been included in anthologies published by Southern Methodist University Press: “The Burden of Baby Boy Smith” in Rage and Reconciliation (2005) and “The Good Doctor” in Silence Kills (2007).
Audrey Fong: American Seoul starts with a prologue about the day your car was rear-ended, resulting in injuries whose effects are still felt to this day, and about your divorce. Why was this an important place to start your memoir?
Helena Rho: Well, to be honest, I totally ripped off Cheryl Strayed in what she did in Wild—the dramatic moment when her boot falls off a cliff. It’s a classic structure in nonfiction narratives popularized by John McPhee: start at a dramatic moment in the middle or near the end of your story and then go back to the beginning before completing the narrative arc to the end. I wanted to start with the most dramatic moment—my car accident. The car accident was also the precipitating event to me leaving medicine. I was literally crashed out of the life I was expected to lead into the life I wanted to lead. From doctor to writer. From duty to freedom. And then, the reconnection back to my Korean culture — relearning Korean, cooking Korean food, and returning to the country of my birth.
AF: A lifetime is such a massive thing to condense into a little over 200 pages. What was the process of re-remembering and selecting moments to include in the memoir like?
HR: Painful. Really, really painful. I’m not sure I’d write another memoir again. But I don’t think I selected the moments included in my memoir as much as those moments chose me. For instance, Chapter 10, “The Korean Woman,” is about a conversation I had with a Korean shopkeeper in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. What happened in that small Korean grocery store tugged at me — why did I no longer feel shame that I couldn’t speak Korean? That question drove me to write the essay that became the chapter. And the essay, published in Fourth Genre, in 2020, was written years ago. When my collection of essays became a memoir, I knew “The Korean Woman” had to be a part of it.
AF: Throughout your memoir, you talk about the pressure to be a good Korean girl and how you were seen as the umchin tdal, which you define as the Korean word for the ideal child or the child other children despise. How did the pressures to be a good Korean girl or to live up to being an umchin tdal affect you? And how have you come to terms with those pressures today?
HR: The pressure to be the perfect Korean daughter to my parents, the perfect wife and mother, the perfect model minority to a mostly white society almost killed me. I thought I was supposed to be what everyone else wanted me to be. I didn’t allow myself to think that what I wanted was important. Until my car accident. And then the years and years I spent in court because of my ugly divorce. I went to therapy! Which was so critical in the re-framing of my life. And being a writer, now I refuse to let anyone write the narrative of my life. But it’s still hard for me to continue breaking away from the expectations of a model minority, the expectations of others. But I keep trying. It’s all anyone can do. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” as Samuel Beckett once said. I feel like the story of my life is about failing better. Or at least, I hope so.
AF: I noticed that you discuss language quite a bit – how you learned English in Uganda and stopped speaking Korean and then later on, as an adult, decided to take Korean language classes. Why was it important for you to reclaim the language of the country you were born in?
HR: Yeah, re-learning Korean was really hard. Unexpectedly bleeping hard. I thought, “I used to speak this language. How hard could it be?” Stupid question! Korean and English are the most difficult languages for the speaker of one to learn of the other. They’re almost opposites. And when I lost my Korean as a child, I also lost my culture, my mother tongue. When you lose a language, you lose where you come from. You lose history. You lose a part of your identity. I needed to learn Korean again to reclaim my identity and my sense of belonging.
AF: Divorce, domestic abuse, estranged family, sexual abuse – American Seoul covers some heavy topics. I imagine it must be difficult to process all of this, let alone write it down. How did you manage to write about these difficult topics while maintaining your own mental wellbeing?
HR: I drank a lot of wine. And soju, specifically, peach soju. But seriously, I think writing a memoir is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done — this coming from someone who gave birth to two children and survived a pediatric residency where I sometimes went 36 hours without sleep! I wanted my voice to be heard. I wanted to tell my story. But I never thought of writing a memoir as “therapy.” I had to take the flaming wreckage of my life and turn it into art. As a writer, I wanted to create something meaningful, something that would endure. A thing of beauty.
AF: Your memoir discusses your move from being a pediatrician to being a writer. It’s inspirational to see that you made a career change and decided to pursue your life’s dream at age 40. Do you have any advice for people who want to make a huge life change?
HR: To misquote Mary Oliver, you only have one wild and precious life, so what are you going to do with it? Don’t live in fear. And to quote another writer, George Eliot, or at least something attributed to her, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
AF: Lastly, you mentioned that you went to Cuba to conduct research for a novel. May I ask what stories we can look forward to next from you?
HR: I’m in the process of revising the shitty first draft of a novel, The Light of Stone Angels. I love writing fiction — I love just making shit up, instead of worrying, “Did that patient really say that? Am I being fair to that person in what I’m writing? Was that really what happened?” The Light of Stone Angels is a novel about three Korean women, spanning the years of the Japanese Occupation of Korea during WWII to contemporary time. The central character is Angelina Lee, a Korean American. I think of my novel as, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko meets Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Because these two books were the inspiration to write my novel — Lee’s epic story of Korean Japanese making their way through history and Adichie’s story about Nigerians in love navigating their way in a modern world, which is, by the way, the funniest book I’ve read on race. I wanted to write about Koreans in the diaspora and the sorrow of leaving one’s homeland, but I wanted my novel to be also a love story viewed through the strangely funny lens of race and displacement.
American Seoul is available from Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, The Last Bookstore, Powell’s City of Books, Strand Book Store, and Yu and Me Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.