Me-K AHN ON REVISION

Whenever I'm struggling with the seventh or eighth draft of a story, I'm reminded of Toni Morrison's thoughts about writing being more about the editing than the actual writing. To write is to fall in love with the editing process! And despite how thrilling it is to finish the first draft of an entire story in one sitting, I enjoy the editing and revising the most. This is the stage when the characters can really come alive and lead you to where they want or need to go. Editing and revising can take you to the most unexpected exhilarating places if you don't get in the way and just let the process take over. The worst thing I can do is try to map out the ending before I get there. I need to get out of the way and let the writing do the writing.

Me-K AHN

EXCERPT FROM 6.25 (Yook-i-oh) by Me-K AHN

EXCERPT FROM 6.25 (Yook-i-oh)

  X saw them together. Well, actually, she saw Producer MJ first, naked, all six-feet of him in front of her, blocking the doorway of his apartment. No glasses. Flaccid.

       She’d knocked three times. He never locked the door, so she walked in.

      Had he planned to just stand there behind the closed door until she left?

      Behind the Producer in the bedroom, pale skin glowed on the futon in the grainy darkness. It looked like an Ingres nude, long and elegant. The beauty of it stopped her. She expected to see the nude surrounded by silk and satin tapestry with a bead-encrusted peacock feather duster in hand. It was Jimin. Thinner than she’d imagined. 

      She could hear the echoes of the protest in the distance outside. The President of Korea had just allowed U.S. beef into the market even amid breakouts of Mad Cow disease in Montana. It was 10 p.m. Protesters had come out in record numbers for the all-night candle vigils.

      She couldn’t move, fixed on the creaminess of Jimin’s skin. She wanted to reach out and touch it. As if it might make it easier to leave. She clutched the toothbrush she’d just bought from the 7-11 tightly in her hand.

      “I’ll put some clothes on,” the Producer said.

The line of his waist snaked violent in the darkness. As if his body were transforming. He threw the covers over Jimin who barely stirred.

       X did not wait for the Producer to dress; she ran, out of the warm, grainy frame, into the cool echoes of the riot police, her suspicions confirmed. She finally had a reason to run away. Yet she knew she could only run so far; images of Jimin kept passing before her—Jimin filling MJ’s glass, Jimin at his elbow, Jimin polite, ingratiating in all the right ways.

      In these quaint alleys she once loved, the lingering tear gas from the riot police still stung her nose, though a strange calm had settled for the moment.

      But then MJ grabbed her arm from behind, and everything went red inside her. He was out of breath and stopped them in front of a cobblestone wall. She noticed the contours of his face were more agitated than usual. It was what she usually loved about him, the drama of his face, the lines so bold and assured they etched themselves into her. She stared at the silhouette of his long chin, and saw Jimin that first night they met, making sure MJ had enough dried squid and peanuts with his beer, showing his guests to the bathroom.  

      The Producer pulled her closer. “X, we didn’t do anything,” he said. “We were just sleeping.” His touch was desperate in the way it lingered on her. 

      She jerked away, and saw Jimin again, this time on the floor with that collage in front of her, that shorn hair. “I thought you were on your way back from work,” X said.

      MJ nodded, his black curly hair still disheveled.

      “And ten minutes later you’re in bed with her?” She threw the 7-11 toothbrush down. “Very impressive.”

      “I told you…,” he said. “Go ask Jimin yourself.”

      So X turned back as if she were heading towards the Producer’s apartment. But then turned again to the main street. Away from Jimin. Back towards the burning smell.

ON BORDERS AND ERASURE by Me-K

     If Sappho says, “Desire melts the limbs,” then is it the very desire of my characters that distorts their faces, disturbs the symmetry of their bodies? It is fairly obvious that mobility can be a conduit of desire, that moving in and out of places, crossing borders, is in part a grasping for that which these characters themselves don’t have. But what exactly do the characters want? In Eros the Bittersweet Anne Carson asks, “Whoever desires what is not gone? No one...[for] to be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope”. Is it those spaces in between, the gaps and ruptures between origin and destination in which my characters wish to remain? Or are they grasping and leaning towards something else?

     As I saw my characters moving back and forth not only between geographical borders but psychological borders and boundaries as well, changing their minds on a whim simply because they could, going in and out of relationships, friendships, kinship, I began to see them disappear, render themselves invisible, and it was a self inflicted kind of disappearing act. I saw them start to erase themselves unconsciously. They not only begin to fragment, morph, and distort, but they ultimately disappear. They come to not exist even though of course they still exist. What they gain in one sweep or pass of movement, they lose in another and so forth. They erase themselves metaphysically. 

     In the story “Zelig ca. 2008,” a struggling filmmaker can't decide what girl he wants. As soon as he professes his love to a screenwriter, he leaves her for a starlet, but then keeps seeing the screenwriter, who accuses him of living in his own fantasy world, of erasing himself in his own dissatisfaction, his own indecision. The story begins:

        This is a story about O, a man who was disappearing into the plots of his films, but going about his everyday life anyway. Lately it was love letters, for the first time in his life:

        You're perfect for me.

        We'll build a cocoon and love in it forever.

        Screenwriter X had dumped Director O two months earlier because she claimed he had no beginning and no end. Because he was a mystery that no one could solve.

         Later in the story O says:

         Zelig was a guy who could jump into anyone's skin and just become that person. He was such a natural.

        Zelig was such a chameleon that he didn't exist, X said. He existed as so many different people that he cancelled himself out.

        That makes him even more real to me.

         Because you're living your life in a film, X continued. A film that doesn't

exist. Chasing after starlets that don't exist. It's your own movie playing inside your head. You're disappearing into the scrim of your own script.                  

     I began to attribute the erasure in part to choice. Desire is heightened in our culture, a commodity to cultivate and then exploit, something to prey upon. Everywhere around us, desire is created, nurtured where it didn’t exist before. This kind of planted desire results in a grasping, a restlessness for the astounding array of options available to those with access. Where to live? What country? City? Apartment? House? Where to work? What kind of work? Who to date? Marry? Break up with? Friends? What to eat? Books? Music? Internet? Bars? Restaurants? Trips? And once we get what we desire, once we achieve those desires? How long can these results last? Since we can’t desire that which we have, how long before we are on to the next thing? Desiring, longing, grasping, wanting, needing something else we do not have.

     Too many options can manifest in a certain kind of paralysis, leading to a groundless kind of wandering. No decisions can be made. One wanders from one thing to the other, lost, unable to make important decisions that could ground, unable to stick with something for long enough to connect. In the “Zelig,” after making love to X, O wavers about his new starlet:

               I’ve run out of things to talk about with her, O said. I don’t know what I’m doing.

              You’re being fictional, X said.

              O laughed. And do fictional characters exist? Can I exist if I'm fictional?  If I'm fictional, I can always exist, he continued and smiled. I can always be 26 years old. Like I promised myself.

             The more you talk the less real you become, X said. You’re canceling yourself out!

3 MOTHERS

KIM HYESOON

I agree with Korean poet Kim Hyesoon's sentiments about the word "mother" as a synonym for "parting," "separation" and "farewell." As a transracial adoptee, this word is naturally complex and problematic. I have more than one mother: the one who gave birth to me, the one who looked after me until I was adopted, and the one who adopted me. With each mother, I have almost irreconcilable feelings of parting, separation, farewell, and even betrayal. I accept these feelings as unresolvable. I do not have to resolve them. I can continue to feel them in a way that acknowledges the burden put on the concept of mother and motherhood, that acknowledges an expectation difficult if not impossible to satisfy. I can acknowledge the feelings in a way that fuels my work and my life in the only way such intense and wonderfully disturbing feelings can.

Me-K'S BEGINNINGS

My writing grows out of my training as a visual artist. It is an extension of my work first in printmaking collage and found object sculpture, then in video installation and film/video art. I was very influenced by the visual art of Robert Rauschenberg, Egon Schiele, Barbara Kruger, and the films and video art of Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, and Janice Tanaka.

I am fascinated by the language used to describe the fragmentation and disintegration in the paintings of Picasso and Schiele. I became obsessed with describing the way in which the faces of my characters would distort, become ugly, melt away, then morph before disappearing. I find the grotesqueness of the imagery entirely beautiful.

In "6.25 (Yook-i-oh)," a story in which the fallout from a love triangle inspires a screenwriter to detour into her own destination, I set up scenes based on the imagery of Egon Schiele's portraits. Similar to how Peter Greenaway derived his sets and costuming in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover from a 17th Century painting by Frans Hals, I attempt to translate Schiele's tableaux into my scenes and characters. The energy and movement of the characters' outlines and silhouettes is disturbed by the frenetic, nervous brush strokes of Schiele, and corresponds to particular points of shame, betrayal, and desperation.

An Excerpt from BLOOD RED by Me-K

        The trouble with the apartment began last Tuesday, when three men came to take the windows away. I peered around the front door and pretended to understand the tall one’s staccato words, which blurred in my ears. When he finally paused and tugged on the bottom of his green utility vest, I bowed slightly into the small silence between us. He pointed to the back of the apartment and walked past me through the kitchen to the living room. A musky industrial scent filled the air as the other two men followed him to the balcony.

        Was it the gas meter? The water dispenser? Or the washer hook-ups? I didn’t know how to ask these things, so I gazed out the door past the clusters of identical high rises into the hazy Bukhan mountains. The early afternoon smelled like a construction site. People were flocking north of the Han River for this air I could barely breathe, this air that would darken the inside of my nose by day’s end.

       But then again, what exactly was I doing here in the Lucky Apartment complex in the northeast of Seoul? I had recently arrived on a research fellowship with only a handful of Korean words. Komo, my paternal aunt, never told me why I’d left Korea as a baby to live with her and Uncle in Chicago. She never spoke of my parents or of my Korean name as if my life had started with her.  

       I walked into the bedroom, next to the living room, and sat on the floor cushion in front of the sutra table, pushing away a draft of the film script I was working on.

Three men just came to my door, I typed on my laptop. They are on the balcony now, making a lot of noise. What should I do?

        The shuffling and mumbling continued; then the front door slammed, leaving the apartment cold, breezy.  When I stepped onto the balcony, the vertical blinds were flapping hard against the guardrail, the wind pulling me closer to the windowless edge. 

       How did they remove the glass panels from the sliding doors so quickly? And when would they bring them back? 

        I looked over the edge, and saw myself tumbling forward, down through the crisp open space of autumn, disintegrating into pieces before I hit bottom. I saw Oppah, my big brother gazing up at me from the parking lot below with a cigarette in his mouth, leaning against his SUV, smiling. He wasn't in his grey robes, the ones I’d seen him wearing at the temple where I first met him a few months earlier.  He was in his black-and-white golf attire, light breezy slacks with a polo top. He was probably wondering what I wanted to do, if I wanted to see the latest blockbuster film, if I’d eaten dinner yet.

An excerpt from COULD by Me-K

     

       She kissed him because she could, and when he told her not to meet anyone else that evening, she agreed, though she knew she would meet another later. And then another after that. If she didn’t agree, his middle-aged face would collapse into a little-boy pout. Maybe that was why she let his words slip away—he was her brother after all. She liked him and she didn't. 

        He grabbed her hand a little rough, and she flinched. She didn’t pull away because she knew it had to be temporary. Just like everything else. Like this time in Korea. She hadn't stayed in one place for more than a year for as long as she could remember. Even in Chicago, she’d moved every year it seemed, never satisfied with the apartment, or the rent going too high. 

        The research fellowship to develop her film script could last a while, but the longer she stayed, the less comfort she felt, although there were moments of stasis where she felt a shaky kind of connection. Like that party with Mina after the Seoul Film Festival.  She was able to make small talk with a group of younger filmmakers, which she didn't mind so much with all the alcohol and food that kept appearing. They shared a long series of whiskey shots, which she chose to sip, and talked about her odd, soothing voice, her long, slender fingers. But they didn't know her well enough yet to demand anything in return.

       If she stuck around Korea, people would become increasingly curious and demand more of her, tire of her evasions.  She didn’t like talking about her script; it hadn’t developed enough since she arrived. Most Koreans would eventually tire of her anyway, given their attention span; they were just as quickly bored as they were intrigued.

       Her brother pulled her closer to him on the linoleum floor in the apartment.

     “We should measure the windows on the balcony,” he said. “You need some curtains.”

     “Let’s do it tomorrow,” she said. “It’s too late now.” In fact, she liked the permanent view of the Bukhan mountains. She didn’t want to obscure it with fabric.

       She’d recently rediscovered this brother, along with another older sister, and she knew she had to be careful. He’d almost caught her this morning with Ji-tae the actor, arriving at her apartment just ten minutes after Ji-tae left. 

      “It’s all in the timing,” Ji-tae had said to her as he ran out the door. “And my ex is due to arrive soon. I know you wanted to see me this weekend, but there’s nothing I can do.”

WHERE Me-K'S STORIES COME FROM

Me-K photo by Ethelbert

Stories usually come to me in first lines or images. They come to me in fragments, so I spend much of the time figuring out what the story itself wants to be about. And then even more time in the editing process. As the stories develop and progress, they become very much character driven. In "Blood Red," I had an image of windows being taken away from an apartment. I was also reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, and I was compelled by the image of the tree in the scarred back of the slave. So I decided I wanted a tree to grow out of the floor of the highrise apartment. That's where I began: a windowless apartment that grows a tree.

My story "Could," was inspired by Christine Schutt's story collection Nightwork. I was startled by her frank and dreamy treatment of sexual taboo and sexuality. I was watching a boring movie while the first line of the story came to me: "She kissed him because she could." I wanted to write about female sexual agency, and how the protagonist struggles with physical and psychological boundaries in her world of excessive desire and uncertainty. 

BORDER CROSSINGS: Inside the fiction of Me-K

Over the last ten years or so I've traveled back and forth from the U.S. to Korea regularly. After meeting other fellow travelers and expats, I began to ask: What is the psychological effect of these multiple border crossings? I met many others who shared a similar mobility propensity and I began to see patterns of behavior as I was simultaneously writing stories, and meeting and observing more people. Even those without regular incomes will spend most of their money on travel, to brush up and ultimately clash against cultural and language differences. I witnessed the friction creating a curious kind of psychological disturbance in individuals, which can manifest rather extremely in their intimate relationships and friendships. They are seeking refuge from an otherwise unsatisfying, unpleasant situation, only to find that they regress and experience a psychological kind of displacement as well that can lead to fragmentation of both body and mind. 

 I began to create characters based on these experiences, and saw them develop into chameleons and charlatans. They are savvy and naïve. They can adapt and change as well as stagnate and wander. My characters are mostly Korean American expats and Korean adoptees with a sprinkling of Korean Koreans who have escaped their families, their troubled relationships and jobs. Sometimes they are looking for new careers, extended family, love. Other times, they don’t know what they are looking for.

LONG AND OVAL by Me-K

        It was the Year of the Dog and she was disappearing. All her friends were getting married without her. And her Aunt kept saying it was the most auspicious year for her to marry. She knew who she wanted, an artist like her maybe, someone she could watch movies with, discuss them over drinks or even gelato; the idea of him kept her from falling into oblivion. The mirrors she liked to look into might not reflect anything back if she didn’t find him soon.

        So when she saw the Director at a film festival in Toronto, she stood beside him until he spoke to her first. They were at the opening-night party, in the VIP lounge with the endless sparkling wine. She was hawking her script and he was premiering his short film.

She’d already walked by him a few times en route to free drinks—away from the producer guy trying to befriend her—and she noticed his face immediately. A perfect oval with nicely spaced brown eyes and full pink lips; a defined, even jawline framed by smooth thick hair parted down the middle. This kind of symmetry made her smile. She needed to see things aligned. It gave her the illusion that everything was okay. 

Even though the Director went on talking to his friend, he gazed at her just long enough to slow her down. “Did that guy just speak to you in Japanese?” he asked, and pointed to the producer guy.

“What is it, my hair?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Everyone in Korea thinks I’m Japanese.” His voice was even enough—not too pitchy or tonal—to put her at ease.

“It’s those colors you’re wearing,” she said.

He put his hands in the pockets of the army green blazer over the bright orange shirt. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s the hair clip, right?” she said. “I know—it’s more minimal than baroque, not as shiny as the ones in Korea…or is it all these layers of brown crepe I’m wearing over the denim? I usually don’t look like a chocolate wedding cake.”

  “I knew you were more Korean than Japanese once I saw you in profile,” he said in a cheery clip.

She sipped on her wine. “Why did you ask me about the Japanese then?”

“It’s called a ‘neg,’” he said. “It makes you vulnerable to my charms.”

In fact, she’d been drawn to the irreverent tone of his come-on; it was funny and brave. She wanted to know how he could act jaded and exuberant at the same time.

“Korean American, right?” he said before she could respond.

“And Canadian wannabe,” she added. “I love this city!”

“My name is O,” he said with a big smile. “And we should get married!”

“It’s about time Director O,” she said. “It’s the Year of the Dog, and all my friends are doing it.”

“Perfect,” he said. “I need to get my Canadian ass to Hollywood. And you could stay in Canada whenever you want…as my green card.” He snapped a photo of them side by side with his cell phone.

Who is Me-K?

Me-K photo by Ethelbert

  Me-K Ahn's writing has been published in FENCE, Kori Anthology of Korean American Fiction (Beacon Press), The Adoption Reader (Seal Press), Cantaraville, Prick of the Spindle, The Princeton Review, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and has won awards from the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Loft Literary Center, Transpacific Magazine, and the MoonRabbit Review. She has also made award-winning films that have been screened internationally. She is currently teaching Creative Writing at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, Korea.