Activity Report - Korea, Dancing On My Own, Motorcycle Lessons

It's been a week.

I will admit to being, like many, stunned at a week of chaotic events that includes a failed coup in South Korea, shut down swiftly by citizens and legislators—I was moved especially by the scenes of protesters helping to physically lift their representatives into the building to vote against the coup.

I have thought about reclaiming my Korean citizenship at times over the years—I gave it up at age 18 in 1985 because I didn’t want to go and serve in the military, a requirement then for retaining double-citizenship. Especially as the military then was a scary place to be, though I suppose it always is—maintaining the power of President Chun Doo-hwan, the military dictator remembered by many in this article about grandmothers texting their grandchildren about the old days of dictatorship in Korea as they head off to protest. And while it is clear the younger generation is keeping those days in mind, I find myself wishing I was there to protest and sing.

Currently reading:

I have been reading Simon Wu’s excellent essay collection, Dancing On My Own: Essays On Art, Collectivity and Joy, after meeting him last month at Yale. Named for that Robyn song, yes, which is a favorite of mine, and which he goes very long on in a way that is amazing to see, Simon’s essay collection, if you don’t know him, came out this year and is a pleasure, each one an excursion into his sensibility as a critic, an artist curator, and a writer. He is often able to catch himself or others in a particular moment, sensing if not also articulating some of the rarer emotions and sensations that are a part of contemporary life and art. And his contemporary life in particular.

Some recent essays that I believe are outside the book, for fun: “Costco in Cancun,” for example, is the story of him on a trip with his parents, which he booked using Costco, which his mother reveres as a tool for living inexpensively, as we learn in the collection. “Six Handbags” is about six handbags he bought pursuing “a portal to a glamour so total it could engulf me.” And “The Year of Asian American Media” mirrored back to me some of my own feelings about the many new stories in print, on television and in theaters, stories I am aware I am a target audience for—written in 2023, the year continues in 2024, as it were, and a differently populated essay could be written that includes his collection and another on my TBR, Geoffrey Mak’s Mean Boys. But I also appreciate the simple reflection Simon’s essay opens with:

When I moved away from Brooklyn last year to go to graduate school in New Haven, I’d wake up feeling listless and randomly anxious as I checked my text messages. I missed both my friends and the city, realizing in their absence that they had come to constitute my self-conception. Without them, I had to assert that energy myself, and it made me tired and self-conscious.

I’m still halfway through the collection but I felt the need to write about it now for this week’s update. It is more of an appreciation for his artistry, the precision of his thoughts, and also the companionship a book can provide during a kind of existential loneliness like I am feeling now. A book that also helps to explain that loneliness and makes it legible to me.

But it is also the case that I am thinking through a moment from several years ago, when during my tour for How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, a young queer Asian American reader asked me where my queer Asian American joy was. Because he didn’t feel it was in the book. And with some shock, I realized that I had not written about subjects like the gay Asian friends group I was a part of in Brooklyn in the late 1990s and early Oughts, friends who kept me company as I wrote and published my first novel, who gave me my first author site as a birthday present in 2000, and saw me through 9/11. There’s also the friend and mentor in San Francisco, Rico, a mixed Asian American gay man like me who taught me to ride a motorcycle and sold me my first motorcycle, and when I bought my first motorcycle jacket, he helped me choose it and then customized it, installing gussets to cinch the waist.

Only photo of that cinched jacket detail, credit to unnamed ex-boyfriend photographer.

Me, in the beloved jacket. Photo by Patrick Clifton.

I understood I had not described either these stories or those like them as it felt, well, too personal, somehow, despite me describing so many other experiences that would seem to be as intimate or more so. It was as if some part of me had drawn a line and said to me, No, this belongs to you, but differently, and turned me in the other direction.

I am, then, trying to learn about how to write about those joys.

Speaking of which…

I am a guest on Kristen Arnett’s new newsletter, Dad Lessons, giving a martini lesson.

Coming soon: I have been preparing a diary of a research trip I took to Paris in 2008 for my second novel, The Queen of the Night, around the time of the election of Obama. I’ll be sending that Sunday, since this is an overdue update (travel, sickness and a power outage delayed me). It seems the novel is having a bit of a resurgence 8 years later, which makes me happy— Katie T. Lee on Instagram is leading a read-along of The Queen of the Night, and Constance Grady at Vox just named the novel as a book to help you get through the next four years.

Until soon,

Alexander Chee