New England Review

Behind the Byline

Caroline Kim

Fiction reader Katy Cesarotti talks with Caroline Kim about cultural identity, dichotomy, and the unsaid in her story “Hiding Spot” (NER 43.3).

Katy Cesarotti: The story opens as Mrs. Lee’s son, Ken, visits home with his girlfriend after two years of estrangement. The first section closely follows Mrs. Lee; later the story hinges to her son, Ken, and we see his childhood home through his eyes. Can you talk about your use of perspective in this piece?

Caroline Kim: I used to think I had to write from only one perspective—first, second, or third—and if close third, stay with a specific character. But the longer I write, the less rigidly I feel about such things. When I began this story I thought it “belonged” to Mrs. Lee because it largely unfolds from her perspective. It wasn’t until I finished the first draft and was reading it back that I even noticed that there were times when the story moved into Ken’s point of view. I hadn’t noticed it at all while I was writing. But it kind of felt like the story was telling me something by the ease with which it moved back and forth between them: that the story didn’t belong to one character or the other but was about their need and desire to connect with each other.

KC: The title, “Hiding Spot,” refers explicitly to Mrs. Lee’s hidden rings. One of the things I loved most about this piece is the balance between concealing and revealing, what’s said and unsaid. How did you think about hiding in this story? What inspired you to explore this theme?

CK: Mrs. Lee has a long relationship with hiding things. Some are tangible and valuable, like jewelry or cash, and some are reminders of the past, like old photographs and letters from Korea. Even more importantly, she’s been able to keep a part of herself hidden from others. An essential piece of herself outside of whatever was expected of her as a woman or a mother or an immigrant.

Even though the theme of hiding seems so glaringly obvious to me now—it’s even in the title!—I wasn’t aware of it for a long time. Because the story begins with a moment of crisis in Mrs. Lee’s life, when she can’t find the jewelry she thought she had so cleverly hid, it seemed natural to write toward other times and other parts of her life when she felt the urge to hide. Ironically or not, these moments were the ones that revealed Mrs. Lee most clearly to me.

KC: Mr. Lee is a quiet presence in the story, but he fills the space: the bookshelves of his Korean war books, his silences. Can you describe how you approached the two partnerships of the story: Mr. Lee and Mrs. Lee, and Ken and Celeste?

CK: Even though Mr. Lee is not the greatest parent or husband, I have a lot of sympathy for him. Mr. Lee is a person who’s given up due to his difficult life, much of it coming from his experiences as an immigrant. I describe him in the story as “whittled . . . down to someone who only wanted life to be agreeable.” This has led him to become a shell of the person he once was—a person who reacted too often with anger and violence but who also knew how to have fun, enjoy music, was open to life. But now routine is what’s keeping him alive. Because of all this, he’s more tragic to me than Ken or his mother who at least want to keep trying to connect with each other.

In terms of the two partnerships in the story: Mr. and Mrs. Lee and Ken and Celeste, they don’t have much in common. Mr. and Mrs. Lee’s relationship comes from a different time, a different culture. It’s frozen in time. On the other hand, there’s a lot of uncertainty yet in Ken’s and Celeste’s relationship, there’s also hope.

KC: Despite her vivid presence on the page, Mrs. Lee goes without a first name throughout the story. So does Mr. Lee. Ken’s girlfriend is often referred to as “the girl” until he finally reveals that her name is Celeste. Can you talk about naming and identity in this piece in relation to their familial roles?

CK: Great question. As a Korean American writer, I often find myself struggling with names for a variety of reasons. In the first place, Korean and American cultures have different attitudes toward them. In America the individual’s name is extremely important to identity—I think of this whenever I see monogrammed towels—whereas in Korea, one’s relationship to others is what’s paramount. Even now I couldn’t tell you the first names of my relatives—I only know them as “Younger-Aunt-on-Father’s-Side” or “Oldest-Uncle-on-Mother’s Side”. Neither way is better nor worse; they just tell us different things about their cultures.

I also feel conflicted because I’m aware that the minute I give my character a name like “Dongwon” some sense of distance is created. And I can understand why—the name feels unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar. Foreign, on the page as well as the eye, ear, tongue, and mind. As a reader in English only, it looks unfamiliar to me too. At the same time, how else can we make the unfamiliar familiar except by normalizing the fact that in America many of us have foreign-sounding names?

Each story is different and calls for its own negotiations with names, but usually I don’t name my characters until it becomes necessary in the story. In this case, Mrs. Lee’s first name is never revealed because it never comes up—sadly, there’s no one in her life close enough to her to use her personal name.

The reason Mrs. Lee refers to Celeste as “the girl” for most of the story reflects her general feeling of disconnection from American culture. Looking at Celeste, she feels she has no entry into understanding what a young white American girl like her thinks, feels, or cares about and vice versa, that she is unfathomable to Celeste. Even so, she knows she has to try and finally says Celeste’s name out loud for the first time at the end of the story.

KC: By the end of the piece, Ken and Mrs. Lee reach a fragile détente. How do you see the characters’ development over the story—how has their relationship changed, or failed to change?

CK: I feel quite a lot of hope for Ken and Mrs. Lee going forward. It’s not going to be easy or perfect, but they finally establish a connection with each other in the car. Though she’s still enormously worried about him, especially with all the responsibilities of fatherhood headed his way, she recognizes that he’s made real changes in his life. Wanting to show him her support, she gives him her mother’s jade ring and tells him to give it to the person he chooses.

KC: What’s on your to-read list right now?

CK: Recently I went down a Jean Rhys rabbit hole and read all of her novels. I’m now reading a biography of her life. I was powerfully struck by the immediacy of her writing, how fresh and alive it still feels. Her books feel like they could be published today.

Otherwise, I’m mostly doing research reading for my novel which is set in the 1890s, when the Yi Dynasty in Korea effectually ended with the murder of Queen Min by Japanese assassins. So, lots of very interesting history books about that time of the world, when the industrial revolution began changing the East as much as the West, when monarchies began crumbling everywhere or were violently overthrown, and it became no longer possible for Korea to hide as the Hermit Kingdom anymore. Ha! And there we are back to hiding.

Katy Cesarotti is a fiction reader for the New England Review. Her work has appeared in Story and the Southwest Review. She lives in Chicago with a pile of books and some very thirsty plants.

New Books by NER Authors

October 2022

Itching to add to your fall reading list? Look no further! This October, NER authors gave us multiple collections of poetry, a wrought memoir, irreverent fiction, and a timely reissue of a dystopian novel. Support these and other NER authors by shopping our Bookshop.org page.

Su Cho’s debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, is out now from Penguin Random House. The Symmetry of Fish won the 2021 National Poetry Series, selected by Paige Lewis. Cho’s poems “How to Say Water” and “Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana,” were published in NER 41.1.

From Tin House Books comes Ethan Chatagnier’s debut novel, Singer Distance. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly praised the novel as “Soaring . . . Readers are in for a memorable adventure.” Chatagnier’s Pushcart Prize-winning story “Miracle Fruit” appeared in NER 37.4.

We Are Mermaids, Stephanie Burt’s latest poetry collection, was released by Graywolf at the start of the month. Throughout the pop-culture-filled collection, “Burt’s imagination is rendered in mellifluous, energetic language” (Publisher’s Weekly). Burt is a professor of English at Harvard University. Her essay “Skating with Delmore” appeared in NER 41.2.

Poet Emma Bolden’s debut memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is out now from Soft Skull Press. This deeply personal work recounts Bolden’s lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis. Bolden’s poem “Confiteor” appeared in NER 41.2.

Longtime NER contributor Christine Sneed just published her latest novel, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, with 7.13 Books. Winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, Sneed’s new novel is a “bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21st century” (7.13 Books). Sneed’s work has appeared in several issues of NER, most recently 43.2.

Edited by Christine Sneed, Love in the Time of Time’s Up: A Short Fiction Anthology was published by Tortoise Books in early October. Booklist calls the collection “complex and hotly contemporary . . . reads like a time capsule, sure to help readers make sense of the cultural moment.” Sneed’s writing most recently appeared in NER 43.2.

Hot off the press from Wandering Aengus Press comes a reissue of Lucy Ferriss’ The Misconceiver. In The Misconceiver, “Ferriss worthily acknowledges the complexities of the abortion debate, and her dystopia . . . is thoroughly imagined” (Kirkus Review). Ferriss’ essay, “Meditation on Middle G” appeared in NER 42.1.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

Behind the Byline

Angelique Stevens

Photo by Jasna Bogdanovska

Staff reader Megan Howell talks with Angelique Stevens about systemic inequities, her memoir-in-progress, and the lived experiences that inspired her essay “Care Credit” from NER 43.3.

Megan Howell: Two prominent motifs in your essay are teeth and cockroaches. At first, they seem diametrically opposed: you’re able to escape the roach-infested houses of your youth while continuing to deal with dental issues. However, you also hunt for roaches as an adult. Reflecting on your childhood, you write, “I don’t know what made me think that just moving from one place to the next would alter [my family’s and my] situation, but that was my first lesson on the nature of change. In my child’s way, I learned that evolution is layered and multifaceted and takes years to actualize.”

Do you think that any part of you, physical or mental, has managed to escape the effects of childhood poverty? 

Angelique Stevens: Yes and no.

Yes. Last night, I came back in from walking the dog; and from my backyard, the moon rose under a gorgeous velvet blue sky outlining beautifully my modest early century mint-green four-square; and I thought how lucky I am to own this city house with a fenced-in yard and three floors and a kitchen that needs upgrading and a furnace as old as me. It’s astounding to me that all of this is mine considering where I came from. In many ways I have indeed left poverty far behind. I turned 52 this year. I’m healthy. I’m a full professor at a community college considering retirement in a few years. I have travelled all over the world. I am an extraordinarily grateful and highly privileged member of the middle class in the United States and of a small percentage of people worldwide who can not only sustain their lives but do other things like travel, take time off to write a book, spend two months in South Sudan.

No. And there’s not enough room for this answer, because when you start to peel back the layers of poverty in this country, you realize that those effects run very deep. When I wrote that line about the nature of change, that “life doesn’t just flip like a quarter when the situation improves…,” I understood that to be not just representative of my own life but also of the ways in which our country processes change. The quarter flips, the situation improves, but so much remains the same. So much of our American ideals are dependent on this “bootstrap” ideology, that people, like me, who “make it out” are pegged as an example of a meritocracy at work: those who work hard and make good choices can single-handedly change their lives. But so much of that philosophy disregards the overwhelming systemic inequities that contribute to poverty, those embedded in our healthcare industry, our educational institutions, our governmental policies, federal housing regulations, our prison industrial complex, and most importantly in our history: one rooted in genocide, slavery, and white supremacy.

A few months before my sister died of a suicide overdose, she told me that she had been picked up for marijuana, said she wasn’t going back to jail no matter what. I believe it contributed to her final spiral into deep depression and psychosis. None of us knew growing up that marijuana had been decriminalized in New York since the 70’s, yet Gina had gone to jail for it and none of us had the money to pay the fine. And now I see that the people who suffered the most from this are disproportionately poor and black and brown. I saw the news yesterday that Biden flipped a quarter, pardoned everyone convicted of marijuana possession under federal law, and it completely destroyed me. I was on the floor heaving sobs. Those are the kind of effects that I’ll continue to live with and in until I die.

MH: What made you decide to name this piece “Care Credit”? Why not “Roaches”? Or “Teeth”? Or “Teeth and Roaches”? 

AS: I love this question and mostly because I didn’t come up with the title. I had been calling it my cockroaches and cavities essay for a long time and considered just naming it cockroaches and cavities. I originally named it “Formations” because of the nature of change I’m trying to highlight here. Then it became “Patterns” because of the ways in which we repeat patterns in our own lives and down through generations and in our larger history. Then someone suggested “Care Credit” and I thought that was the best fit because it takes the focus off the individual and puts it on the health care system, on economics, on the larger ideas this essay is speaking to. But there’s also the irony in the use of “care” in the title as if this industry is more about care than profit.

MH: One thing that I noticed in both your essay and in life is that the body is the closest thing we have to natural, objective truth. We can’t argue our way out of illness or death. Insurance, however, is completely made-up, though our political system often treats it as natural and thus inalterable. How do you process this distinction when both your teeth and lack of good insurance have done so much real damage to you? Does it matter? 

AS: Except for the few years I was in foster care, I didn’t have health insurance growing up and right up into my thirties. There’s a scene in my memoir in progress where I was hospitalized with a broken femur after a car accident. I was around eight and my parents didn’t have insurance either, but hospitals can’t refuse treatment to people with medical emergencies. On the morning they were supposed to set my leg by drilling a screw through my thigh, they gave me anesthesia; but, because of another hospital emergency, the doctor didn’t get to me before I woke up in the late afternoon. They did the surgery anyway with me wide awake. They injected a local anesthesia above my knee. A little while later, a bevy of nurses trailed the doctor into my room, each to hold one of my limbs while he drilled a seven-inch screw through my knee. The sight of that drill going through my leg and the pressure and blood and skin horrified me. I resisted them with every fiber of my being, but my tiny body was no match for them I screamed and wiggled and finally reached over and bit one of the nurse’s hands as hard as I could. Later, I was admonished for my actions.

I don’t imagine this kind of thing happens normally and I don’t imagine it happens for people with means. These kinds of stories are everywhere but you hear them mostly from marginalized bodies who, too often, experience the inequities of our health care system in violent and inhumane ways. Add to that the lack of insurance and those inhumanities are compounded, because we’re essentially saying to our people, that only those with means deserve good health care.

MH: You also challenge the idea that the body, teeth specifically, can tell a person’s whole life-story. You show how deft medicine is at revealing the traumas of poverty (e.g. lack of healthcare, unhealthy eating habits) while ignoring the personhood of its victims. Of your day-to-day life as a student and daughter, you state, “I wonder how that […] would conflict with the evidence of poverty plaguing my mouth in the form of missing teeth and cavities” (58). 

To what do you attribute medicine’s blind-spots towards your experiences? Classism? Racism? The indifference of the natural world and decay?

AS: I’ve been obsessed with being healthy lately, listening to podcasts, reading journal articles, following longevity doctors and scientists on the socials. I’ve mostly cut out sugar, refined carbs, and alcohol from my diet. I drink a shake full of greens and protein and collagen every day, I prioritize more time outdoors, less time doing menial things. Each week I strength train three times and try to cycle a hundred miles. For a long time, I believed that this is all part of the natural aging process, of reaching and passing that half century mark, of wanting to live a long and healthy life. I’ve learned that many of the diseases most likely to kill us, like atherosclerotic disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and foundational diseases like insulin resistance and type two diabetes are preventable. Not surprisingly many of those diseases are especially common for those without access to healthcare and preventative education; specifically black and brown people and those in poverty.

But lately, because I’m knee deep in finishing my memoir about my sister’s suicide overdose, I’ve come to realize that my obsession is deeply rooted in survivor’s guilt. It has more to do with the loss of my entire family than with the aging process. They all died prematurely and violently from these types of diseases. It wasn’t just our teeth, our lives were riddled with health issues like diabetes, which is so common in Natives, heart disease, asthma, arthritis. Add to that, lifelong mental health issues and addiction and the problem is compounded exponentially. Layer over that the systemic racism, classism, the perceptions of poverty so deeply embedded in our country’s psyche, and the stranglehold both insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry has on doctors. After a while, it becomes extremely hard to pinpoint any specific reason for the blind spots embedded in the whole structure of health care.

MH: Our culture has recently taken up the cause of mental-health awareness. When discussing our mental-health crisis, well-funded campaigns and lauded write-ups often skirt around class. (“Inside the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis” from The Times is one example that comes to mind. Zero mention of childhood poverty.) In a way, powerful interests (e.g., billionaires, think tanks, etc.) are trying to escape inequality like so many poor people, beating back its widespread consequences (i.e., more depressed kids) while failing to address it directly. Only, they have the resources to eradicate poverty entirely. 

Do you think that their class-related shame is similar to yours growing up? Or does their power make it different? 

AS: Power changes everything.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment,  among other publications.

New Episode of NER Out Loud

A. E. Kulze: On ladybugs and female mystics

“If you don’t think the lives of women hold as much value as the lives of men, for thousands of years, a thousand years later you’re not going to know very much about the women that existed in those time periods.”

Created, edited, and hosted by NER summer interns Andrew Grossman and Kate Sadoff, NER Out Loud episode 21 presents a reading and conversation with A. E. Kulze, author of the short story “The Ladybugs” from NER 43.2 (summer 2022).

After reading an excerpt from her story, Kulze talks about her writing process, the role of the unconscious in forming the whole, and the joy of a perfect editorial cut. She also speaks more broadly about gender and domesticity, the failures of contemporary feminism, and the Desert Mothers, who’ve been largely forgotten to history.

Listen to the new episode on Soundcloud—and subscribe to NER Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher!

Andrew Grossman and Kate Sadoff are Middlebury College students, both English majors with a focus on creative writing, class of 2023.5. As NER‘s summer podcast and publicity interns for 2022, they also produced NER Out Loud episode 20, featuring coauthors Milia Ayache and Amina Hassan and their play “Splits/kin” published in NER 43.2 (summer 2022) as part of the international feature on Lebanese writers.

Andrew Grossman (left) and Kate Sadoff (right)

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