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.