Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, winner of the 2022 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, comes out today. In her recent San Francisco Chronicle review of the book, Joan Frank says that “Every page not only delights and instructs but also provokes and moves us, lingering like a remembered dream. . . . Waiting will quietly pull you in and knock you out.“
Below Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade and current Flannery O’Connor Award judge, interviews Spaulding about her collection.
Taking over as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is a bit like coming home. In 2008, my collection received the prize. I was 44 and had been writing—sometimes more seriously than others—since I was eighteen. There was no voice whispering presciently, “Just do your time in the slush heaps and in October of 2008, you will win the Flannery.” So: for many years, I wrote. And for many years, my work was rejected. I took over as series editor at the beginning of 2022 and was deeply impressed with the 29 collections that, out of around 280 submitted collections that year, the four screening judges sent my way. Among those 29, I was immediately captivated by Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, Carol Roh Spaulding’s uniquely linked collection of stories and one novella, which follows three generations of the Song family, beginning with the family’s emigration from Korea to California shortly before the 1924 Immigration Act. Decade by decade, with shifting perspectives, Waiting for Mr. Kim lays out what it means to be a daughter and what it means to be a mother, what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be an Asian American woman in this country. I read the collection through once, then set it aside in my pile of strong candidates while I read through others. The day before my decision was due, I read it through again in one sitting and knew that it was most certainly the winner.
Lori: Early on in one of our conversations about the collection and the impetus for writing these stories, you told me that the stories came out of a void, a need to imagine the Korean part of your ancestry. Can you begin by explaining what you meant by this, perhaps by talking about your family history within the context of these stories and their themes and preoccupations.
Carol: I never saw myself as Asian-American. We didn’t even use that term back then. Asian people were still “Oriental” in the 60s and 70s. I grew up hearing “what are you?” a lot because I looked vaguely Asian or exotic, but I wasn’t racially legible to others. My mom, a Korean American, married my dad, a white guy, and moved with him to central California, away from her family in the Bay Area to a white neighborhood in Fresno. She was proud of her Korean heritage. She used to host these fabulous Asian-themed dinner parties for which she would cook amazing Korean food, and she went all out with the details – dinner served on floor cushions around low tables, little rice paper candy favors, those colorful paper parasols for the drinks, and of course chopsticks. We also used to have foreign exchange students living with us, so it’s not like we were a white bread family. But somehow none of this resulted in my feeling Korean or in wanting to know more about Korean culture. I just thought I was white. In fact, I had to learn I wasn’t white. There was no “mixed race” category to embrace with pride. And my parents never talked about “identity” – again, these weren’t terms many people used back then – so I also didn’t have a vocabulary to talk about feeling vaguely unsafe and misplaced, racially speaking. That, coupled with the fact that my mom didn’t like to talk about her upbringing, is what led to my estrangement from my Asian side. As an example: when I was in high school, I caught a glimpse of my mother’s birth certificate. It listed her middle name as Sung Ok. I had never seen or heard those words. She used to tell us that her parents hadn’t given her a middle name. That seemed odd. When I realized that for whatever reason she didn’t want to talk about her Korean name, I figured race was this uncomfortable and secretive thing.
Lori: And how do you think that your mother’s discomfort helped fuel your need to write these stories?
Carol: I absorbed a lot indirectly; I suspect Mom felt different from her three older sisters (she was brainy and awkward) and she wasn’t close with her own mom (my halmoni). All of this is to say the stories are a way to fill in what my mother wouldn’t talk about. Still, it never occurred to me that I could write about any of this until well into graduate school. Like Marie Myung Ok Lee put it recently about her own formation as a writer, I was busy trying to write Flannery O’Connor fan fiction. I never dreamed anyone would want to read about Asian Americans, and, frankly, I’m still not certain it’s my job or my place to write about them, since I’m not Asian. But I’m not not Asian, either.
Lori: You have described Waiting For Mr. Kim as a story cycle, so let’s talk definitions for a moment. Can you explain what you mean by that and whether you think of a story cycle as different from a novel-in-stories or linked stories?
Carol: First of all, a story cycle is a collection of stories that can stand alone (as most of those in the collection did in previous journal publications) but are interdependent at the same time. In comparison to “linked stories,” which is a broader term, a story cycle often includes perspectives from multiple characters across generations. They are suited (but not exclusive) to immigrant narratives because often the diasporic experience in a family can mean that the past is not a shared story. Furthermore, a kind of reluctance to speak of the past seems common in Asian American literature, from Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother telling her in the first line of The Woman Warrior that she must not tell anyone the story she’s about to share, to the generational silence of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. You don’t speak of the things that brought a sense of shame or disgrace, even if they weren’t your fault. The loss that can result when generations are separated by chasms of silence can be made whole in a sense by gathering those perspectives into one collection. In Waiting For Mr. Kim, the characters don’t necessarily know how the cultural, historical and familial past informs their present, but readers have the opportunity to contemplate that.
Lori: That is a wonderful definition, and I particularly appreciate your comments on how a story cycle felt almost uniquely suited for the themes and history that you explore in Waiting for Mr. Kim. You also write beautifully about female desire and sexuality. In one of our early Zoom conversations, I noted—when we were talking about your novella “The Inside of the World”—that one of the last taboos of fiction seems to be that of older women having sex and falling in love. In the story preceding the novella, “Made You Look,” you take on the formative years and experiences that shape the way that girls are introduced to sexuality and thinking about themselves as sexual beings. In fact, this theme runs throughout the book: women as sexual beings. Why is female sexuality, especially that of older women, often regarded as a taboo, and how did you approach writing female sexuality?
Carol: I didn’t have any conscious approach to writing about female sexuality, I think because I see the experiences I narrate in the lives of the women and girls in the book as being woven into their beings as both Asian and female, if that makes sense. When Grace as a young mother is sexually harassed/assaulted by her boss, she is aware that she is being both exoticized and sexualized, that these go together. Her daughter has a heightened sense of sexuality informed by race when she wonders about porn that features Asian women and about the masculinity of Asian men. Later, the daughter chooses a decidedly masculine, Caucasian man who doesn’t think it’s a racial slur to call their son “chink”. Much later in life when Grace takes a younger Asian American lover who defies emasculating stereotypes of Asian men, the two of them muse about what it means to be Asian from their different generational perspectives (Grace “missed” the sixties, raising three kids). As we know now, women of color navigate the same terrain as any women in patriarchy, but with the added topography of racialized views of their sexuality. This topography complicates how they develop and influences how they see themselves and how they are perceived. I try to describe some of these complications in my portrayals of the women in this book.
Lori: The title story, “Waiting for Mr. Kim,” is another of my favorites in the collection. Not surprisingly, it had a great reception when it was first written—it won Ploughshares’ Best Story of the Year, a Pushcart Prize, and was widely reprinted—as did other stories in the collection, though the collection itself took nearly two decades to make its way out in the world once the stories started appearing in literary journals. Story collections often have a hard time finding publication, even a collection as stunning as Waiting for Mr. Kim. What were some of the low points and challenges of bringing it out into the world, and what were some of the pleasures or joys.
Carol: When I won the Pushcart, I started getting inquiries from agents. At that point I had 3 or 4 stories to work with, but everyone wanted either for me to turn the stories into a novel or to wait until I had a novel, and then they would do a two-book deal with the 2nd book being the story collection. I put the collection on the back burner, although I kept publishing the stories and they kept winning awards. You ask about the joys. Honestly, with each story I felt like I was filling in a piece of my family background that had been missing. Understand, I’m not talking biographically. These stories aren’t factually true, but they access the emotional truth of some relationships that I never would have understood without this imaginative undertaking. Still, no one was buying. So I wrote a novel that didn’t sell, and then focused on revising it. Now and then I’d send the collection out again, with different configurations of stories. I got finalist a few times, but it was never quite right. I let it sit for many years, figuring it was just not meant to be. In the meantime, my novel won an award and is now forthcoming, and I started my current project, essays on the in-between; they’re very much my focus now. I’d forgotten about the collection – I truly believed the stories were past their prime and no longer relevant — until I saw your encouraging note on the FOC website inviting submissions for the FOC Award. I felt like you were talking directly to me, and your words inspired me to try one more time.
Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories is available for purchase today from your favorite local bookstore. (If they don’t have it, ask them to order it!) You can also purchase it from any online book retailer or directly from the University of Georgia Press here.
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