Contemporary Authors

• If You Leave Me: A Novel William Morrow (New York, NY), 2018

1. If you leave me : a novel LCCN 2017039672 Type of material Book Personal name Kim, Crystal Hana, 1987- author. Main title If you leave me : a novel / Crystal Hana Kim. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2018. Description 417 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780062645173 (hardcover) 9780062645180 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3611.I45295 I35 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Crystal Hana Kim - https://crystalhanakim.com/bio/

  Bio

  Photo by Nina Subin
  Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel If You Leave Me was published in August 2018. She was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner and has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Jentel, among others. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Washington Post, Elle Magazine, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an MSEd from Hunter College. She is a Teach For America alum and has taught elementary school, high school, and collegiate writing. She is currently the Director of Writing Instruction for Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

• Elle - https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a22664267/crystal-hana-kim-if-you-leave-me-interview/

  Crystal Hana Kim Champions Complex Women in 'If You Leave Me'
  'Just because people expect it doesn’t mean we’re going to fall in line.'

  image
  BY GABRIELLA CLIFFORD
  AUG 7, 2018
  Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, is as beautifully layered as it is devastating; in it, we encounter the resilient Haemi, who is thrust into marriage at sixteen, and charged with the care of her ailing younger brother, Hyunki. Through the eyes of five different narrators, we see how Haemi responds to each new role that she takes on, whether as a mother, sister, caretaker, lover, or wife. As it travels between the decades during and after the Korean War to reveal the traumatic decisions that war forces each person to make, the riches of If You Leave Me will leave you contemplating the passage of time and its impact on the ties that we keep.

  ELLE.com spoke to Kim about how her grandmother inspired the story, the impact of last words, and why the idea of "unlikable" women is so silly.

  Crystal Hana Kim If You Leave Me
  If You Leave Me is out now. READ
  COURTESY
  The events of If You Leave Me have a lot to do with timing. What are your thoughts on timing and relationships?
  I wanted to explore this idea of: What if at a critical moment, you make a decision that you then, for years later, are not sure if it was the right decision? How does that linger—and how does that affect you, everyone around you, and even your children and the next generation?

  You interviewed your grandmother as part of your research for the novel. What was that like?
  My grandmother raised me when I was little. I was born here and my parents are immigrants; they needed someone to help take care of me because they were working a lot, so my grandmother came from Korea. So I’m very close with my grandmother and I keep in touch with her a lot. I heard stories about her being a teenage refugee—they were so moving and horrifying and so different from my life here that I knew I wanted to write about it one day.

  Haemi is not my grandmother, but her initial situation is very much inspired by my grandmother. My grandmother also really wanted an education and wasn’t able to receive it. She also had to marry young, so those are the parallels. I’m really grateful that I got to interview her in a more formal setting because now I have this story about her that I can carry on. My grandmother can’t read English. She hasn’t read the book, but I’m hoping that it will get translated so she can read it.

  Crystal Hana Kim
  Crystal Hana Kim
  COURTESY
  There are a lot of departures in your novel. It's natural to want to cherish the moments before you know you are going to leave someone—how do you balance good memories with bad?
  Right now, it’s easier to balance the good memories because we have social media and we have cameras. But in the novel, they’re very present in the moment because they don’t have any way to capture the memory. Then it's so dependent on personality what parts of their interactions they’ll remember, because some will remember the bad more than the good. I think that’s based on temperament and the way that you view the world.

  Last words are so impactful and they become etched into these characters' minds—especially for Haemi and her childhood friend, Kyunghwan. Why is that?
  I wanted to explore this idea of departure and leaving, which is in the title, and I wanted the title to apply to all of the characters in a certain way, because these characters are growing up in a time in Korea that’s very tumultuous—politically, socially. There’s a lot of violence, so I wanted that to impact the way that they think about themselves. A lot of the characters see life as very fleeting, because they’re so haunted by the war that they feel like life is ephemeral. So leaving or desire to leave and last words have an impact on them. Regret is something I wanted to write a lot about, because once you make a decision, regret doesn’t do anything except linger inside you.

  Haemi and Kyunghwan want to run away together, but such an escape would also entail sacrifice. Do you think impulses can backfire?
  I think so. Because my main characters grew up during the Korean War, they’re very practical and they know what it means to suffer, so it’s hard for them to act on that because they know what the consequences are. They’ve had difficult lives and they know how difficult it is to be hungry or to be poor, so that stops them from being impulsive.

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  They then reunite after a long period of time. How do you think that affects their relationship?
  It’s so different from our lives now—they don’t have instant communication, they don’t have phones. I wanted to explore what these relationships would be like after they’ve come back, because they have had such little communication. Partially because they choose not to communicate with each other, but also because during this period of time you couldn'tーexcept lettersーso I wanted to see if they would be able to go back into the rhythm of their childhoods since they were all so close.

  How do these characters handle others' relationships to their loved ones?
  Jealousy and love and feeling possessive are all natural qualities when we’re in relationships and I wanted to explore that because...those are [considered] kind of negative qualities, right? But jealousy and possessiveness are hard to resist, so I wanted to see how these characters would push against that or not even realize that those are negative qualities.

  You wrote a piece about “unlikable” characters in which you argue that fiction needs complex, realistic women—can you elaborate on this?
  It’s so important for us to write complex, realistic women because that’s what we are. Especially in our current political state, women are talked about in very one-dimensional ways, and this trope in literature of “unlikable women” is so silly because we don’t need to be likable, especially now. We need people to see us as complicated and full of depth.

  So I really wanted to write Haemi as someone the reader would understand deeply and would want to root for, but also argue with, the way that you would argue with a friend—you understand where they’re coming from, even if you don’t agree with every decision they make. We need more women like that in literature so that we can diversify. Women, especially during this time period, were asked to be docile and very obedient, but not everybody is like that. My grandmother was definitely not like that—she was very independent. I wanted to show that just because people expect it doesn’t mean we’re going to fall in line.

  If You Leave Me is out now.

• Nylon - https://nylon.com/articles/crystal-hana-kim-if-you-leave-me

  On The Importance Of Writing A War Novel Through The Eyes Of A Woman
  Talking with Crystal Hana Kim about ‘If You Leave Me’
  BY KRISTIN IVERSEN · AUGUST 07, 2018
  On The Importance Of Writing A War Novel Through The Eyes Of A Woman
  PHOTO OF CRYSTAL HANA KIM BY NINA SUBIN

  Whether we speak of fiction or non-fiction, there is perhaps no narrative as robustly represented as the war story. Well, maybe the love story. Or maybe those are the same thing? No matter the case, most of these stories—the war stories, in particular—have one thing in common: They are told from the point of view of men, prioritizing their perspectives over those of women.

  In Crystal Hana Kim's beautiful, devastating debut novel, If You Leave Me, this narrative trope is subverted, as Kim centers her story around the life of Haemi, whose journey takes her from her time as a teenage refugee at the onset of the Korean War and through to her life as a wife and mother in the tumultuous years that follow.

  Though Kim's narrative jumps in perspective, from that of Haemi to those of her husband, Jisoo, and his cousin, Kyunghwan (both of whom are love interests for Haemi), as well as of Haemi's brother, Hyunki, and her daughter, Solee, this is Haemi's story, one which shows with clarity and insight the ways in which women are deeply affected by the exigencies of the world around them. It is a story rooted in a singular time and place, offering a lucid glimpse of a world and culture in the midst of a dramatic transition. It also offers a finely wrought portrait of what it was like to be a woman dealing with mental health issues, particularly as they relate to pregnancy and motherhood, before those issues were even vaguely understood. It is a story of empathy and grace, one that immerses readers into a world of strife and sacrifice, loss and redemption, a moving recounting of the way trauma is embedded in our bodies and minds for generations after it is first felt.

  Below, I speak with Kim about If You Leave Me, why it was the story she felt compelled to tell, and what lessons it offers readers today.

  Why is this is a story you wanted to tell? What inspired you to explore this time and this place and these people?
  For me, writing is something that I need to do. If I'm not writing, I'm not happy. When I started writing in college, I really pushed away from writing about anything related to Korea. And, I think, it was because I was worried that that's all I could write about, and I wanted to push against that and try to write about different people. But what happened was that my stories were really vague and blurry. So, it took me a while to realize that writing about my history is not something that confines me. I think what made me realize this is I come from a family where they love to tell stories, especially my mother and my maternal grandmother. I don't know if it's unique, but I know many Korean American people of my generation who want to know about their grandparents' lives in Korea, but their family members won't tell them because it's too painful. But my grandmother is just a natural storyteller, and she very openly spoke about really difficult times in her life. The more I listened to her stories, and the more I realized how complex her life was, and how complex Korea's history was, the more I wanted to write about it.

  Writing also to me is very personal in the sense that I want to always learn while I'm writing. I'm not writing necessarily for an audience. I think about the audience at the end, once I have a complete book. But, when I'm writing it, I really need to feel like I'm learning, and I'm investigating something that I'm personally interested in. So, I think, that's why I chose the Korean War—I knew my grandmother was a teenage refugee during the war, and I knew this was something that I did not know enough about. So during the whole writing process, I myself learned a lot about the Korean War.

  I wanted to ask you about the research that went into writing this book, but also, I wanted to say that it made me start researching this era and Korean history, and I found out so much in the process that I hadn't known, and so much that feels relevant, and so much that was surprising. What surprised you in your research?
  When I first started, I think I was a naive writer, in the sense that I very much wanted to just follow these characters. I came up with the character of Haemi early on, but, at that point, I thought I was writing an interconnected short story collection. So, she was just a minor figure in this short story collection. I was just following these characters, and at first, I wasn't doing a lot of research because I was trying to understand these characters' temperaments and personalities and their lives. Once I knew them really well—once I knew Haemi and Kyunghwan and Jisoo and Solee—and once I decided this was going to be a novel, that's when I started to start to do intensive research.

  I wanted to, of course, be factually accurate, but, I think, in order for me to be emotionally accurate, I also needed to make sure that I could really describe this particular time, and what the village looked like, what it felt like to be a refugee, and what the social implications of being a young woman would be. I needed to know all of that. So, I did a lot of research. It was a lot of reading historical texts, but also looking at sociological studies and watching documentaries. The thing that was most difficult about the research was that I had a hard time finding information about the Korean woman's experience during the war. That was surprising, but I guess, in retrospect, it's not that surprising. Because their voices were not valued, so it wasn't recorded. That's what made me take all these other avenues, because I knew that this was really important, and I wanted Haemi's voice to be the central voice. So, I needed to figure out what the average woman's experience would be like so that I could get a sense of that context and then make it particular to Haemi.

  There are so many aspects of Haemi's experience that are specific to her, to being a refugee and poverty-stricken at the outset of the Korean War, but then, also, there are other aspects of being a woman that are timeless and that still exist today, including a struggle with postpartum depression. What was it like inhabiting this character and bringing her to life?
  I love books where you can fall in love with the character. And when I say fall in love, I don't mean to be so enraptured by them, but to know them really deeply. That's what I tried to do with Haemi, where I wanted the reader to not always agree with her, but to really understand her character. Before doing a lot of research, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of personality and temperament Haemi would have, and I went from there. Once I knew what kind of person she was, it was easy for me to think about how she would react to certain events in her life, and then how that would propel and reverberate around her, to the people around her. I wanted to balance this idea of having a really particular individual unique story about her life experience. But then, there had to be universal themes of womanhood and gender and social expectations, because those are the kind of questions that I am still struggling with and trying to understand now. I think that those are the themes that, unfortunately, span centuries and time and distance. So, I wanted to explore those because those are the questions that I'm interested in, but I also wanted to make it unique to her story.

  I also think it's so important to tell a war story from a woman's perspective since they're voices have traditionally been silenced.
  Definitely! Growing up, I loved war narratives and war movies, but they're always focused on the men in battle. And it's not like home life reaches a standstill, right? The women are the ones who have to pick up the pieces, who have to care for the children, who have to work and make sure that daily life is running. I always found it really frustrating that there were never any stories where the woman suffering from war was a central figure for the central narrative. I think, in human nature, it's easier for us to sympathize with the physical trauma that we see, like soldiers losing limbs. But mental trauma is a lot harder for us to empathize with, or understand. When that mental trauma is exhibited by those who are not actively fighting in the war, I think it's much easier to dismiss it. So, I wanted Haemi to struggle with mental health, too, because, even if she wasn't fighting in the battle, she still saw a lot of death and was still a refugee. The war effects you even if you're not at the battle line.

  Another way in which Haemi's experienced is not prioritized is that she is a refugee, and she is displaced, but because she is those things within her own country, it's something that is not extensively discussed; her experience is devalued. And yet her feelings of rootlessness persisted throughout her life. What was important to you to convey about this specific type of refugee and displacement issue?
  I think that the idea of being a refugee in your own country is not a familiar one. I think that for Koreans, the idea of home and the idea of a motherland is really complicated, especially for those that are of my grandmother's generation. When my grandmother was young, Korea was still united. But it was colonized by Japan, and so they weren't allowed to speak Korean, they were taught Japanese in school. So, that sense of your home country was really a complex one, because she was not allowed to have that pride in her home country. And then there were five years of independence when the North and South were already broken up, and I think that a lot of people don't realize that the North and South were broken up temporarily by outside forces before the Korean War even began. And then, of course, with the Korean War, we're still in a stalemate technically, and I think that a lot of Koreans want Korea to be reunited. But, we also, for the past 68 years, have created such a strong sense of South Korean identity versus a North Korean identity. So this idea of home is so complicated for people in Korea and people of Korean descent. I wanted to explore the very early stages of that through Haemi, and Jisoo, and Kyunghwan because they all feel displaced throughout the novel, and I wanted to play with this idea of orphanhood or being an orphan. I tried to have them all think of themselves as an orphan at certain points in the narrative. Whether that is actually an orphan because their parents have died due to war, or when they're thinking about their place, their physical place, in society and what Korea means to them.

  It was so fascinating getting their different perspectives and seeing the ways in which trauma plays out on an individual and collective level, and the ways in which it reverberates throughout your personal relationships and then down through generations. How hard was it to explore certain things with your characters? The narrative goes to some dark places and the characters make some difficult, at times frustrating choices. Was that challenging for you?
  I love stories that are about very imperfect characters. Who wants to read a story about a perfect character? That's so uninteresting. I think because all these characters are so imperfect, that makes it frustrating to me sometimes as a writer because they're not always making the right choices in my opinion. They're not making the choices that I would want them to as a reader or as a friend, if I were friends with the characters. So, that was difficult, but at the same time, I was very sure in how the narrative needed to unfold. I didn't hesitate about the direction because I knew the characters so well, and I knew the choices that they would make and why. Well, I don't want to give anything away, but it's not necessarily a happy book. So, it was hard to write.

  It's not a happy book.
  No, it's not. I feel like when I read a book and I can tell when the writer is forcing a neat ending, I resist that. So, I didn't want to force an ending that didn't make sense for these characters.

  How did you feel upon finishing it? What makes you most excited about having this novel out in the world?
  Well, (a) I think I realized how important it is for me personally to write about Korea for my own growth as a writer and as a person. But, then looking outward at the reader, I'm really excited to have other readers—particularly Korean American readers—find some kind of connection with this book or have it resonate with them. I'm really excited about that because growing up I didn't read many Korean American writers and I didn't really know about them. Part of that was because the internet wasn't great. I think it's easier to find diverse writers now. But, I'm really excited to have people read about Korea, and I think that fiction is such an amazing way to learn about a history and a culture in a more emotional way than just reading facts or history textbooks. So, I'm really excited about that part, and I'm excited that I'll be able to, hopefully, contribute to people's greater understanding of the war and Korea.

  Yeah, [America's involvement in Korea and] the Korean War is so overshadowed in American history by Vietnam and World War II. But knowing about it is just such a key part of understanding who America is in the world today including our roles in other, current conflicts.
  It's so true. Especially with North Korea in the news. I think that with Trump being our president, he makes Koreans seem othered and alien. I think it’s so important for people to understand the history of the war and what happened afterward, in order to understand what's happening now.

  If You Leave Me is available for purchase here.

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• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2018/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-crystal-hana-kim/

  DIFFERENT VOICES: A CONVERSATION WITH CRYSTAL HANA KIM
  BY AMY DANZER

  August 6th, 2018

  Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me, centers on a love triangle among three young refugees in South Korea during “The Forgotten War.” As Kim tells the story of young Haemi and her two courters, Jisoo and Kyunghwan, she simultaneously tells the story of war and what it means to be human in its crossfires: the uprooting, displacement, waiting, not knowing, going without, being at the mercy of government as well as fellow civilians struggling for resources alongside you, striving for normalcy and even daring for exuberance in the face of devastation, the profound strain on families, and being forced to make decisions to survive—decisions with consequences that far outlast the surviving.

  Kim’s generosity of detail so completely transports the reader to Korea (1951–1967), and her commitment to perspective makes for a polyphonically rich and heart wrenching experience.

  If You Leave Me is finding itself on numerous “must read” lists. It was just long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, made it to the New York Post’s “20 Best Reads for Summer Break” list, and The Rumpus’s “What to Read When You’ve Made it Halfway through 2018” list, as well as many others.

  I recently had the privilege to talk with Kim about war, family, displacement, trauma—as well as inspirations for her book.

  ***

  The Rumpus: What is writing, for you?

  Crystal Hana Kim: Writing is a way for me to explore the questions I have about the world. By writing through the lens of fiction, I feel freer to tell the truth. For this book, I was interested in the Korean War and what the trauma from this period of time could do to a mind, a body, a country of people, and even to future generations.

  Rumpus: What themes or topics are you most interested in exploring?

  Kim: Gender politics, especially regarding the way women are portrayed by society. Power imbalances—particularly the way society, culture, and tradition idolizes and reinforces specific roles for women.

  Rumpus: It seems like class is a topic you tackle as well.

  Kim: I want to explore voices that I haven’t heard before or that aren’t written about enough in our history… I want to amplify those who are marginalized because of their gender, sexuality, or class.

  Rumpus: What were the seeds of your project?

  Kim: I started working on [the characters in If You Leave Me] during my MFA. At first, I thought I was writing an interconnected short story collection that would span three generations, but in my last semester my teacher convinced me that I should write a novel about the first generation. I’m so glad I heeded his advice!

  Rumpus: You tell stories from so many different points of view, how did you decide how much page time to give to each character?

  Kim: I’m partial to novels that have a lot of different voices. I just love it when you see a story unfold from multiple perspectives. It’s interesting to me how people can view the same event in very different ways depending on their personalities, their biases, their own fears, and desires… Deciding how much time everyone got was an organic process. With each new chapter, I considered what should come next and who would be the person to tell that story.

  Rumpus: And how was it writing from a man’s perspective?

  Kim: I enjoyed it.

  Rumpus: Was there anything different or is it just the role of the writer to inhabit different bodies?

  Kim: It was helpful for me because, at first, I felt more affinity towards some of my characters than others. By inhabiting everyone’s perspectives, I was forced to care about them all. It made me consider why their voice was important, why the readers should care, which I think strengthened the novel overall.

  Rumpus: Your sense of place is so rich—whether it’s landscape, foliage, food. How did it all find its way into your novel?

  Kim: My mother’s side of the family lives in Korea, so I visited them every summer. Those memories helped me a lot, as did the stories I heard from my parents and extended family growing up. But I also did a lot of research. Korea has changed so much since the 1950s, so it was important to read the history and understand the socio-political contexts. In addition to reading books, I looked at a lot of photographs. I’m interested in books that teach you something new without being didactic, and I think immersing the reader in specific, vivid details helps. Instead of me telling the reader that there was a stark difference in quality of life based on class hierarchy, I can help the reader see those class imbalances through different descriptions of peoples’ homes, what they eat, what they wear.

  Rumpus: Can you share one or two moments where, during your research, you happened upon something that was particularly gutting or moving?

  Kim: One thing that was gutting—this is a roundabout way to answer your question—is that I had a hard time finding research about women during the Korean War. That was heartbreaking because their voices had not been preserved. It was just so sad to me, especially because they were at home taking care of children and working to keep their family alive, which is equally as important as fighting in the war.

  Rumpus: Who would you say is the audience for your book?

  Kim: Since my book is written in English, I’m interested in reaching a broad audience of English-speakers, particularly Americans. The Korean War is called “The Forgotten War” here in America. There’s literature on World War II and even the Vietnam War, but not enough about the Korean War. Within the categorization of an American audience, I’d also love to reach Korean-American readers who don’t know as much about their history but want to know more. In the end though, I hope that my novel touches upon universal themes of love, motherhood, war, trauma, and societal expectations. I hope that anyone could read If You Leave Me and come away changed.

  Rumpus: Your characters cross a lot of borders—time and space. They have to adapt to different circumstances and reinvent themselves in a lot of ways. How does adaptation, reinvention, and erasure affect their identity and sense of belonging to each other?

  Kim: This period—the Korean War and the years right after—was a time of intense displacement for millions of people. So many were killed or lost or taken from their families. The nation was broken in half again, so many people were reinventing themselves out of necessity. I wanted to explore this in my novel, which is why there are so many characters who are constantly reckoning with who they are—whether it’s Kyunghwan grappling with his political loyalties, or Haemi taking on the role of motherhood, or Jisoo coming to terms with his lost family.

  Rumpus: Thinking about displacement, there is this epidemic of mental disorders that refugees end up living with, and Haemi’s character feels like she’s been affected in that kind of way.

  Kim: With Haemi, I considered how trauma would present itself in a woman who didn’t fight in the war, but who has still been severely affected by the violence. How does trauma present itself in the moment and in the years afterward? Mental health was not something discussed then in Korea and it’s still not talked about enough even here. So, it was definitely intentional, especially with Haemi. I wanted to explore how depression could manifest for a woman like her and what it would feel like to know something was wrong but not have the vocabulary to articulate it. What happens when no one listens, understands, or believes you?

  Rumpus: Who are some writers who have significantly influenced or informed your writing?

  Kim: I love Toni Morrison. I love sweeping novels about issues that are difficult to write about or have not been written about and she does that so well. Her sentences are stunning. I love Louise Erdrich. And Deborah Eisenberg, who is a former teacher of mine—the way she writes about class always startles me in the best way. I’ve admired sentence-level writers like Anthony Doerr and Colum McCann for years.

  Chang-rae Lee and Alexander Chee were some of the first Korean writers I ever read. I love Paul Yoon as well, who I discovered in college. I love Nami Mun and Min Jin Lee also; they were the first Korean-American woman writers I ever read. Representation is so important, and though I don’t think my writing style is necessarily similar to these writers, I am indebted to them because they showed me it was possible to be a Korean-American writer.

  Rumpus: What’s next for you?

  Kim: I’m working on a few essays and I’ve started my second novel. It’s very new. I can’t talk about it yet as I’m superstitious but this will also be about family and the ways in which we are bound to one another. This novel will be a bit more contemporary, too. Right now, the perspectives switch back and forth between a woman in present-day America and a Korean man in 1980s South Korea.

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  Amy Danzer manages several master’s programs at Northwestern University, including the MA/MFA in creative writing program. She directs NU’s Summer Writers’ Conference. On the side, she writes book reviews and interviews authors for Newcity. More from this author →

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/77133-life-during-wartime-pw-talks-with-crystal-hana-kim.html

  Life During Wartime: PW Talks with Crystal Hana Kim
  By Victoria Sandbrook Flynn | Jun 01, 2018
  Comments subscribe by the month
  In Kim’s debut novel, If You Leave Me (Morrow, July), a young woman’s choice between lovers changes the lives of those around her during the Korean War.

  What drew you to write the story of this family, and to tell it through five points of view?

  Photo by Nina Subin
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  I began with Haemi Lee, who is the central figure of the novel. However, as I delved into the intricacies of this family surviving the Korean War and the love triangle between Haemi, Kyunghwan, and Jisoo, I realized that multiple voices were necessary. By also giving voice to the two men in her life; her younger brother, Hyunki; and eventually her daughter, Solee, I could create multiple layers of meaning and a richer texture to the novel overall.

  How did your research into the novel’s setting change the story you set out to tell?

  I grew up hearing my grandmother’s stories about surviving the Korean War, so I quickly chose Korea in the 1950s as the starting point of my novel. Then, I did a lot of research—I read memoirs, pored over photos of refugee life during the war, and studied how South Korea was transformed afterward. The information I found was most often about the soldiers’ experiences. I was more interested in how the women left behind were affected—how these women were scarred in less visible ways. What I couldn’t find in research I made up for in imagination and by reading novels about complicated women growing up in wartime conditions.

  How do you think the tension between tradition and modernization that runs through the novel will resonate for modern readers?

  Haemi wants a college education and desires autonomy, and yet she rejects Seoul’s modernization after the war and clings to the comfort of her traditional clothes. Similarly, I think that people often have complex feelings about the traditions they’ve grown up with versus the modernization that surrounds us. Though the tradition and modernization in my novel is very different from what we face now, I think the core question of “how much should we embrace technological change and should we be skeptical?” remains the same.

  What do you hope readers come to understand about this era of Korean culture and history?

  I hope that by experiencing this story through Haemi, Kyunghwan, Jisoo, Hyunki, and Solee’s eyes, readers can imagine what it felt like to grow up during this tumultuous time in Korea’s history. I hope readers come away from the book considering the ways in which we have all been shaped by the social, cultural, and political expectations of our time.

  A version of this article appeared in the 06/04/2018 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Life During Wartime

• Hazlitt - https://hazlitt.net/feature/i-understand-best-through-writing-interview-crystal-hana-kim

  ‘I Understand Best Through Writing’: An Interview with Crystal Hana Kim
  BY NICOLE CHUNG
  The author of If You Leave Me on the Korean War, listening to your family stories, and the cost of survival.

  Related Books
  Interview
  AUGUST 7, 2018

  NICOLE CHUNG
  Nicole Chung’s memoir All You Can Ever Know will be published in...

  Follow @nicole_soojung
  RECENT ARTICLES
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  Author photo by Nina Subin
  In Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel If You Leave Me (William Morrow), sixteen-year-old refugee Haemi Lee finds herself caught between the affections of two men: Kyunghwan, her first love, and Jisoo, his wealthier cousin. She eventually marries Jisoo, sacrificing a life with Kyunghwan for what she believes will be the safety and security of her family—a choice that sows seeds of deep unhappiness not just for her, but for future generations. If You Leave Me is a powerful and timely story about the personal cost of survival—the cost to relationships; the cost to families; the cost for generations to come—as well as a vivid, beautifully rendered portrait of love, sacrifice, and tragedy in a country torn asunder by war.

  The book began as overlapping character-driven stories, and Kim gives all her main characters a voice: Haemi, Jisoo, and Kyunghwan take turns narrating throughout, along with Haemi’s brother Hyunki and, later, her daughter Solee. The agility with which these rich, distinctive voices interweave is one of many strengths in a book that never flags despite its heavy subject matter.

  Kim says she wanted to consider the effects of inherited trauma by telling the story of a spirited, complicated woman constrained by war and time and circumstance. For Kim, who grew up hearing stories about the Korean War from her family members, in particular her grandmother, the novel grew in part out of a desire to fill in gaps in her own understanding. “When I start writing, it’s nearly always because I am curious about something and want to learn more,” she says. “When writing this book, I wanted to know more about this war that is such a big part of my family’s history.”

  Nicole Chung: The Korean War and its realities are deep in the marrow of this book, and we follow the characters beyond it. Why did you want to write about this particular era of Korean history and its aftermath?

  Crystal Hana Kim: It’s so interesting that it’s a timely story right now, because when I began writing it—and even when it went out on submission to publishers—a story about the Korean War didn’t seem as timely. It’s such a big part of Korean identity, and it is still ongoing. But I didn’t realize how little people in this country knew about it; about America’s involvement; about North and South Korea and the fact that they have been two separate countries for less than 100 years. I was so surprised to find that many people here didn’t know all these facts when I talked to them about it.

  Both my parents are Korean. My mom, who is the only one in her family who lives in America, is one of five daughters; the rest of the family is in Korea and we visit them often. So the war is something I grew up hearing a lot of stories about—which I think has not been the experience for some Korean Americans I know. Many people are hesitant to talk about the war and the trauma they experienced. But my grandmother is a storyteller, and she told me a lot of her stories.

  The war is part of our history, and I knew a little about it, but I wanted to understand it more fully. And I understand best through writing.

  “Solee,” a version of one of the chapters in this novel, was published as a short story by The Southern Review and then selected as one of PEN America’s 2017 Best Debut Short Stories. I loved that story when I first read it, and ever since I have been so eager to read this book. Can you talk a little about the evolution of the book, from interconnected stories about this family to the final novel? Where did it really begin for you?

  When I was an undergrad, I was writing a lot of stories about teenagers and young girls. I came up with this character, Solee—she might have had a different name at the time, but I focused on her because I wanted a way to write about and explore mother/daughter dynamics.

  Then, when I started my MFA, I really thought I wanted to write a collection of interconnected short stories. The idea of writing a novel was so daunting to me, and I thought connected stories might be more feasible. Solee was one of the first characters I created, and by writing her I realized I was interested in the character of her mother. I wanted to figure out her story, so I wrote a chapter from her perspective, and that led me to other characters. I just kept following my own curiosity about these different people; I didn’t quite know who they were yet. I knew they lived in Korea, but wasn’t sure when.

  At the time I was also talking a lot with my grandmother, trying to think about larger themes and ideas, and I knew I loved hearing her stories. I decided to write about the Korean War in order to understand it more deeply. I’m so interested in exploring family and this idea of generational trauma. So I started with Haemi, the main character, writing her life and her journey beginning with her teenaged years as a refugee. By then I knew her very well as a character, and I knew what her perspective would be.

  I felt so deeply for Haemi, I would’ve read about her forever. She seemed so strong in the beginning, and even later, in the depths of her unhappiness, she never quite felt like a victim to me. It was difficult but also powerful to read about this strong woman who cannot have what she wants—or even necessarily feel sure of what she wants all the time—because her life is so much about survival.

  I’m so glad you didn’t think Haemi seemed like a victim. It was really important to me to write a strong female character. I grew up around strong Korean women. My mom is one of five sisters, all very strong in their own ways, though they all have very different temperaments. My grandmother has always been very strong—my grandparents divorced, which is unusual in Korea, and I grew up hearing my mom tell stories about how my grandmother had to work hard to provide for the family, because my grandfather wasn’t really providing any financial support. She was a single woman running a hotel, raising five children. One time when I was young, I asked her how come she wasn’t like all the other halmeonis I saw when I visited Korea, and she said, “It’s because I have to make money!”

  Can you talk more about Haemi, and some of the challenges of writing a strong character whose options are so limited because of the time and place she lives in? She’s so smart and determined—you want her to have so many more choices than she does. She has to flee with her mother and brother to a refugee camp. She tries to seize some happiness for herself, but doesn’t get to keep the man she loves. She gets backed into this very hard decision, trading love for what she thinks will be security for her family, and by then the choice feels inevitable.

  I really wanted this book to feel realistic. Haemi is a character with an impoverished background. She doesn’t have a high school education—that was common for a lot of people back then. She’s also a refugee, living in a country at war, so she is going to be very limited in her choices. So I wanted her to make choices and not be a victim, but also, as you say, she can’t help but be constrained in those choices. She needed to be a realistic person given the time period.

  That said, sometimes I felt it was important to push back against people’s perceptions of women in different time periods. Once I workshopped a chapter about Haemi, and one of the comments was: “I don’t know that a woman of this time would have these sexual desires.” And I just remember thinking, “What?” I wanted people to understand that women in these circumstances would have the same desires, the same wants, maybe some of the same ambivalence about becoming a mother that many women today experience.

  I wanted to make Haemi a woman who struggles with motherhood because the cost of survival was so high for her. And that is something her children will notice. Because they’re young, they can’t always articulate it, but they know that something is wrong. At the same time, they also have this kind of unreserved love for her.

  I thought it was so well done, the way you explored the far-reaching consequences of Haemi’s choice to marry Jisoo and how her resulting unhappiness—and that generational trauma you mentioned before—echoes through the lives of her children. Can you talk a little about that, and also how you wrote the relationship between Haemi and her daughter Solee?

  I really wanted to write about Haemi and her daughter, and spend time exploring that relationship, because I have always been interested in mother/daughter stories. To me, growing up, my mom always seemed like someone who was louder and more outspoken than a lot of the Korean women I saw when I visited Korea, and I was always very curious about that. My mother and I have a good relationship, but you know, the mother/daughter relationship can just be so complicated. It’s something I have thought and written about for so long. I want to be a mother one day; I grew up around all these strong women; I also have a younger sister—these relationships between women are fascinating to me.

  What sort of research did you have to do to write this book?

  Oh, it was so much more than I thought when I started writing! I was mostly following my writerly whims in grad school, and I didn’t realize how much research would be involved. But then I realized my workshopmates didn’t know much about the Korean war, and that would be true of many of my readers, so I needed to provide a lot more background information. And also I just wanted to read and understand more for myself. So I read a lot of historical and political texts about the Korean War. I interviewed my grandmother. I interviewed some of my dad’s siblings, who were alive during the war. I watched documentaries and movies. And I also looked at a lot of photographs, to get a sense of what everyday life was like for people at the time. I wanted to create a visual and sensory experience for the reader, especially because I knew it might be a foreign place for them.

  What was the most surprising thing you learned in your research?

  One thing that was surprising but shouldn’t have been was just how difficult it was to find accounts of women’s experiences during and after the war. That was hard and frustrating. I had to get creative with my research, because I was specifically interested in women’s lives during the war, and there was not much information. So I read a lot of sociological studies about women and war and trauma.

  And let’s see…one of the more interesting things I learned was that, in the years after the war, there were a lot of government campaigns to promote smaller families. They actually had a van go around and provide free IUDs to people. I’m so curious about what those were even like, and how effective they were.

  Sometimes I wonder if we’re finally seeing more Korean and Korean American stories because of South Korea’s increased cultural influence. In more cynical moments, I think our country is also fascinated by North Korean suffering. Did you feel any additional pressure writing a book set during and after the Korean War for a largely non-Korean audience?

  When I started writing this, I was really just driven by my interest and my own need to write it. I felt like it was something I had to do. I wasn’t thinking about any readers in particular. But later on, when I had a draft I was revising and I was starting to think beyond the characters, I did start to think about that kind of pressure. I had a conversation about the book with my parents and my uncle, and showed them all of these photos I had gathered over the years. My uncle made a comment like, “Make sure you represent us well and make Koreans proud, show us in a good light.”

  Wow, that’s so much.

  It is! I didn’t know how to articulate to them that that’s not my role as a writer. I’m not trying to represent all of Korea. I want to write these characters who have particular experiences. Though I think it’s wonderful if the American reader, or English-speaking reader, learns more about the Korean War or thinks more about what one woman’s experience during that time might have been.

  So what’s been your family’s reaction since you finished the novel? Have any of them read it.

  They are all so excited for me. My parents can read English, and they speak English, but it would be hard for them to read a whole novel in English. They’re not going to be able to read this book easily. So they’re hoping it’ll get translated into Korean, and I really hope it will, too. They joked that if it doesn’t, they’ll read one line a day, and it’ll take them the rest of their lives. My mom has been trying to read the essays I’ve written, like the recent one about my grandmother.

  I really loved that essay. In it, you wrote about the realization that you are more than your own self—your body, your bones, as you put it—you are also your family, and what they lived through. What are some things you learned about your family while talking with them for this book? And did any of their stories come into the novel, or just influence it in some surprising way?

  I learned a lot more about my grandmother when I interviewed her. Working on this novel also allowed me to hear more stories from my parents. My dad is kind of a silent guy … but nowadays he talks more and shares more stories.

  When I started this book, I asked a lot of questions about his childhood, and he’d give such interesting tidbits. When he was little, the kids would go around chasing grasshoppers. They’d pluck their wings, and fry and eat them. They’d catch tadpoles and fish and eat those, too. It was because they were hungry, and it was protein, but as a child he didn’t think about that; he thought it was fun. He also told me about living near a woman whose child was half-white, and there was all this discrimination against them; that’s something I remembered, and wanted to include in my book. And my father vividly remembers the candy and cookies American soldiers would give out. So many of his memories rotated around food, because they didn’t have enough.

  His life is so different now. Before, I hadn’t consciously thought about just how different it is. Growing up, I didn’t think about my parents being that poor or hungry—I mean I knew, but I just couldn’t imagine it fully. Writing this book helped me to ask more questions about them, about my family, and I became closer to them because I listened to their stories.

  Have you started to hear from readers? Any reactions that have really meant a lot to you?

  I’ve heard from readers who’ve said I’m portraying a really complicated woman who they did not hate in the end, even though they didn’t always agree with her. And I’m happy to hear that—I really wanted to write about someone complicated, and have people care for her. I’m really excited to hear from Korean American readers.

  I didn’t grow up reading Korean American authors, and now I read every one I can find. I feel like it’s been kind of a banner year for Asian American women writers in particular. Is that something you’ve noticed, too?

  Yes, and I’m so excited! This is a big year for Asian women writers. I also didn’t grow up reading many Asian women writers, or Asian American writers in general, but I think it’s something I desperately wanted. I distinctly remember when I was in Kindergarten, I picked up this book about a Chinese adoptee just because it had a girl like me on the cover. I really wanted to read more books about Asian characters, more books by Asian writers. And maybe that’s represented in the years I spent in college writing these white or raceless characters because I didn’t want to write Asian characters—I just hadn’t read about many growing up, and so I thought that wasn’t literature. I’m so happy and proud about all the Asian American women writing today. It fills me with such joy.

  Do you think you’ll write more stories set in Korea, during this time period or a different one?

  I think so, yes. I started working on a novel, and it is half in America, present-day, and half in Korea in the ’80s. Earlier I mentioned being surprised by the amount of research that went into If You Leave Me, but I did enjoy that process, and how informed I felt creating the world of the book. So I think I will keep doing research and writing about Korea. I’m also eager to write about Korean Americans—who knows, it’s early and could still change, but with the second book, I’m trying to do both.

  Find us on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

  NICOLE CHUNG
  Nicole Chung’s memoir All You Can Ever Know will be published in October 2018. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, the Times Magazine, GQ, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Shondaland, and Vulture, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast.

  Follow @nicole_soojung
  RECENT ARTICLES
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Print Marked Items
Kim, Crystal Hana: IF YOU LEAVE ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kim, Crystal Hana IF YOU LEAVE ME Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 8, 7 ISBN: 978-0-
06-264517-3
In this debut novel, a love triangle is complicated by temperament, circumstance, and history: Korea, 1951-
1967.
We meet Haemi Lee at 16, in a refugee camp. The war between North and South has forced what is left of
her family--her mother and her invalid younger brother--from their village. In her boredom, she's begun
going out at night with a boy named Kyunghwan--they ride a bicycle into town and find ways to drink
makgeolli and have some fun. The problem is that by day, she's being courted by this boy's wealthier,
orphaned cousin, Jisoo. Jisoo wants to marry Haemi before he enlists, mainly so that he can have the sense
that there's a family waiting for him at home when he returns. Haemi's decision plays out over the next 16
years, a time of great upheaval in the lives of all Koreans. The perspective on the action is split among five
first-person narrators--the three already mentioned, Haemi's younger brother, and one of her daughters--and
leaps over years at a time. This both expands the scope of the story and muffles its emotional power. Most
interesting is the character of Haemi, who knows something is wrong with her, something that manifests as
irritability, dissatisfaction, impulsivity, and an inability to connect deeply with those closest to her. In a
world without diagnoses, therapists, or antidepressants, she will face a challenge even greater than the
romantic one--becoming a mother. The character of Haemi is fascinating, her predicament a kind of Korean
Virginia Woolf situation.
Though this bulky saga is not as compelling as it could be, Kim's portrayal of the effects of mental illness
on a family at a psychologically naive time is perceptive and moving.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kim, Crystal Hana: IF YOU LEAVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4d0dfd11.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
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If You Leave Me
Publishers Weekly.
265.23 (June 4, 2018): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* If You Leave Me
Crystal Hana Kim. Morrow, $26.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-264517-3
A family struggles to balance tradition and change in Kim's marvelous debut. Sixteen years old and living
in a refugee camp in 1951 Busan, South Korea, Lee Haemi is not interested in marrying but knows the
plight of her situation might necessitate it. War has put everything on hold except starving, dying, and
desperation. Her decision to find a husband--borne partially out of hope for finding help for her ailing little
brother, Hyunki--ripples through the lives of those around her, especially the cousins who compete for her
affections: quiet, studious Yun Kyunghwan and loyal, clever Yun Jisoo. Kyunghwan and Jisoo are both
conscripted and go off to war, where the former is injured and the latter becomes inured to the staggering
violence and cruelty he witnesses. After the fighting, Jisoo asks Haemi to marry him, and she agrees,
feeling he is the best option to guarantee the safety of her family. After they move to a small town and start
a family of their own, Kyunghwan tries to get into college and fails; instead, he lands several demeaning
jobs before eventually working his way up the ladder through a series of factory jobs. In a crucible of
political upheaval, modernization, and tumultuous love, Haemi is faced with choosing between safety and
her own passions when Kyunghwan reenters her life. Kim's lyrical intergenerational saga resonates deeply
and will appeal to readers who enjoyed The Orphan Master's Son. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"If You Leave Me." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 31. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eeac151a.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242830
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Six new authors you need to know
BookPage.
(Aug. 2018): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Become a fan from the very beginning, as these six outstanding new novelists make their debuts with
deeply emotional narratives peopled with tremendous characters that will leave you aching for more.
IF YOU LEAVE ME By Crystal Hana Kim Morrow, $26.99, 432 pages ISBN 9780062645173, audio,
eBook available
For fans of: Lisa See, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison and Jesmyn Ward.
First line: "Kyunghwan and I met where the farm fields ended and our refugee village began."
The book: In war-torn Korea, Haemi and Kyunghwan find love in a refugee village, but honor and duty take
precedence when a wealthy man begins courting the spirited Haemi.
The author: Winner of the PEN America's Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Crystal Hana Kim is a
contributing editor for Apogee Journal and lives in Brooklyn.
BABY TEETH By Zoje Stage St. Martin's, $26.99, 320 pages ISBN 9781250170750, audio, eBook
available
For fans of: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver and movies like The Babadook, The Bad Seed
and The Ring.
First line: "Maybe the machine could see the words she never spoke."
The book: Upscale parents grapple with an inexplicable and unremitting evil--in the form of their 7-year-old
daughter.
The author: Zoje Stage is a former filmmaker and screenwriter who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Read it for: One more book to talk you out of procreating.
FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE By Ingrid Rojas Contreras Doubleday, $26.95, 320 pages ISBN
9780385542722, audio, eBook available
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For fans of: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The House of the Spirits by
Isabel Allende.
First line: "She sits in a plastic chair in front of a brick wall, slouching."
The book: Two coming-of-age stories--that of rich city girl Chula and her maid, Petrona--overlap during
Colombia's violent 1990s.
The author: A Bogota native, Ingrid Rojas Contreras and her family fled to Los Angeles when she was 14.
She now writes for HuffPost and NPR, and teaches writing to immigrant high schoolers in San Francisco.
Read it for: A first-hand glimpse into the plight of vulnerable Colombian children in the recent past.
THE SHORTEST WAY HOME By Miriam Parker Dutton, $26, 320 pages ISBN 9781524741860, audio,
eBook available
For fans of: Camille Perri, Elin Hilderbrand and Stephanie Danler.
First line: "I would have never predicted that a winery could change my life."
The book: A business school graduate lands a coveted New York investment job, but her heart is set on a
path less traveled (quite literally) in the wine country.
The author: Miriam Parker has worked in publishing for more than 17 years and is currently an associate
publisher at Ecco. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Leopold Bloom.
Read it for: The love of wine, and the inspiring tale of taking chances and dreaming of a life more
rewarding than a nine-to-five job.
LET ME BE LIKE WATER By S.K. Perry Melville House, $16.99, 224 pages ISBN 9781612197265,
eBook available
For fans of: Mitch Albom, Anne Tyler and Rachel Khong.
First line: "I was sitting on a bench at the beach when Frank told me I'd dropped my keys."
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The book: After the death of her boyfriend, 20-something Holly finds solitude and hope at the seaside in
Brighton, in particular through a new friendship with an elderly, retired magician.
The author: The author of the poetry collection Curious Hands: 24 Hours in Soho, S.K. Perry was longlisted
for London's youth poet laureate in 2013.
Read it for: A sense of comfort, and for a reading experience as soothing and cathartic as ocean waves
lapping at your toes.
BROTHER By David Chariandy Bloomsbury, $22, 192 pages ISBN 9781635572049, audio, eBook
available
For fans of: Zadie Smith, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn.
First line: "Once he showed me his place in the sky."
The book: The lives of two Canadian brothers are forever changed after a violent shooting draws additional
police scrutiny to their neighborhood.
The author: David Chariandy grew up in the same Toronto public housing as the family in Brother. He
currently teaches English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He has been previously published in his
native Canada (the critically acclaimed novel Soucouyant), but this is his first novel to be published in the
United States.
Read it for: A poignant and timely look at community, family and race in a setting that will be new to many
American readers.
Find full reviews of these debuts on BookPage.com.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Six new authors you need to know." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 12. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9de9ba14.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547988055

"Kim, Crystal Hana: IF YOU LEAVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018. "If You Leave Me." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018. "Six new authors you need to know." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Sept. 2018.

• Newsday
  https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/if-you-leave-me-crystal-kim-review-1.20252052
  Word count: 777

  ENTERTAINMENTBOOKS
  'If You Leave Me' review: Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel explores ravages of Korean War
  Crystal Hana Kim, who grew up in Jericho,
  Crystal Hana Kim, who grew up in Jericho, has written a novel set during the Korean War. Photo Credit: Nina Subin

  By Michael Schaub
  Special to Newsday
  Updated August 7, 2018 6:00 AM
  PRINT SHARE
  IF YOU LEAVE ME, by Crystal Hana Kim. William Morrow, 417 pp., $26.99.

  On the first page of “If You Leave Me,” a teenage girl named Haemi sneaks out of the modest home she shares with her mother and ailing younger brother, heading to a rendezvous with her longtime friend Kyunghwan. “He and I were celebrating,” she explains. “We celebrated every night.”

  They don’t have much to celebrate. The characters in this debut novel, set after the start of the Korean War, are refugees, forced out of their town to a village in the southeast edge of their country by the invading Communist army from the north. “If You Leave Me” is an uneven novel, but one that does a good job exploring the ravages of war, poverty and mental illness. The 31-year-old author, Crystal Hana Kim, was born in Queens and grew up in Jericho.

  Haemi and Kyunghwan aren’t lovers, although they have strong feelings toward one another. They meet as often as possible, sneaking into bars, Haemi flirting with the boy with whom she wants to be more than friends. Kyunghwan rejects his friend’s advances, but is still annoyed when his cosmopolitan cousin, Jisoo, starts courting the girl: “I didn’t understand him,” Haemi muses. “He acted jealous of Jisoo, and still he refused me.”

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  Frustrated by Kyunghwan’s tentativeness, Haemi decides to marry Jisoo. She’s still in love with his cousin, but her mother, taken by Jisoo’s social standing and charisma, urges her to compromise: “Affection grows between a woman and a man. You can’t expect it from the beginning.”

  Kyunghwan and Jisoo eventually join the South Korean army; both survive the war, but Jisoo loses the use of one of his arms. The rest of the novel plays out over the ensuing several years, as Haemi and Jisoo raise a family, with the former battling depression and the latter trying to drink and philander his post-war trauma away. Kyunghwan, meanwhile, works a series of jobs in Seoul, pining after Haemi the whole time.

  Kim’s novel switches points of view among the main and supporting characters; it’s a technique that can be effective in fiction but doesn’t work here — all the characters narrate with the same voice, and the only one who feels fully fleshed out is Haemi.

  That’s a shame, because she’s fascinating; Kim depicts her struggle with depression, and her stormy relationship with her husband, beautifully. In one stark passage, Haemi describes coming to terms with the marriage she never really wanted: “So I fell in love with Jisoo. I didn’t run away. When his nightmares turned him around, I didn’t imagine covering his face with a heavy buckwheat pillow. I stopped all that and loved him.”

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  But the chapters that take the focus off Haemi seem extraneous, a distraction from the real heart of the story, and they result in a book that’s a bit longer than it needs to be.

  It’s difficult to pull off a novel with a love triangle at its center; it’s well-worn territory, and to keep readers interested, authors have to bring something new to the table. Kim doesn’t quite do that — Haemi and Kyunghwan are star-crossed in familiar ways, and their longing for each other frequently comes across as maudlin. Kim’s prose, while often pretty, turns florid a bit too often; it’s a novel that needs more restraint and more editing.

  Still, Kim is a gifted storyteller, even if the story she’s telling doesn’t break new ground — she has a great instinct for pacing, and her dialogue mostly rings true to life. “If You Leave Me” isn’t perfect by any means, but nevertheless, there’s much to admire in it. It’s a promising, if flawed, debut from a clearly gifted author.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/if-you-leave-me-a-novel
  Word count: 836

  Book Review in Fiction
  If You Leave Me: A Novel
  By Crystal Hana Kim William Morrow 432 pp.
  Reviewed by Felicity Long
  August 22, 2018
  A riveting story of star-crossed love set against the turbulence of the Korean War and its aftermath.

  Although If You Leave Me is set in war-torn Korea, the novel mainly concerns itself with love — romantic love, love of country, love of family, and, ultimately, the inability to love on command.

  We first meet two of the three protagonists — for this is a love triangle that frequently morphs into other shapes before snapping back into place — as teenagers waiting in uneasy stasis for the war to reach them.

  Haemi Lee is a feisty young girl who risks scandal by dressing as a boy for frequent, clandestine outings with her childhood friend, the mysterious and handsome Kyunghwan. They ride bikes to bars at night; they get drunk; they flirt; and they play mind games with one another — stupid, thoughtless mind games that will come back to haunt them throughout their lives.

  Poverty, hunger, disease, and, most of all, the relentless miasma of fear, permeate the atmosphere — so much so that after a while they become the new normal. But humor, kindness, and acts of generosity also bubble up amid the daily grind as the war looms closer and the friends struggle to make decisions whose repercussions they are too young to foresee.

  Should they stay or should they go? Should they fight or should they keep their heads down and wait for peace? Most notably, should Haemi, who must choose a husband, accept Kyunghwan as her fate, or should she say yes to her other suitor, Jisoo, who offers a life of security and comfort?

  These are weighty decisions in any time of conflict, but they are especially tricky with only gossip as a source of information about the war, as Haemi recalls:

  I remembered it too clearly. The day we learned of Seoul’s fall, Hyunki and I had been catching grasshoppers. Mother ran to us with her hanbok skirt clutched in one hand…The Northerners had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel two days before. The Chinese were with them. No, the Soviets. No, both. Whoever they were, they were Reds. Seoul had fallen in less than an hour. Our country would be reunited. We would be killed. The hysteria was contagious, congested with too many emotions. I didn’t want to catch their panic, didn’t want to understand.

  As sometimes happens, once the drama of the war recedes and life in a newly divided Korea takes on a semblance of normalcy, the trauma in the main characters’ lives moves inward. Haemi struggles to be satisfied with the life she has chosen. Her innate feistiness resurfaces, much to the irritation of her domineering husband, who seeks to impose his notion of a proper woman’s role on her:

  “My fickle wife. ‘You can’t do whatever you want. We don’t live in a world of your making.’
  “‘Oh, but we live in your world?’
  “‘You don’t get to choose how many children we have.’
  “‘That’s all I have to choose.’”

  Despite the sympathy the reader is likely to feel for Haemi’s situation, she is also a difficult character to like, and the author makes no apology for that. Haemi doesn’t behave. She breaks the “mommy rule” by putting her happiness ahead of that of her children. She is spiteful to passersby.

  In short, she sidesteps the stereotype of the spunky heroine who overcomes her circumstances to find happiness in the face of overwhelming odds. Instead, the author relies on lyrical and nuanced storytelling to avoid these tropes in favor of the portrait of a complicated woman.

  Meanwhile, Kyunghwan’s story is compelling in its own right, as he struggles to grasp even the slippery lowest rung of economic stability. Will his clandestine studies win him a place at university? Will he succeed in keeping Haemi’s beloved little brother away from political demonstrations and out of harm’s way, and, most of all, will he allow himself to find love with someone new?

  Or, somehow and against all probability, will these two star-crossed lovers finally find each other across the universe, and will their reunion set their tilted world aright? Or will they, like their new country, be forced to stumble into an uncertain future?

  Felicity Long is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, USA Today, AOL Travel, Travel Weekly, Child magazine, Parents.com, Porthole magazine, Global Traveler, Bloomberg magazine, the L.A. Times, Shermans Travel, Northshore magazine, South Shore Living, and a host of other publications. She is also the author of Great Escapes: New England, published by the Countryman Press.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-if-you-leave-me-by-crystal-hana-kim/489926421/
  Word count: 594

  BOOKS 489926421
  Review: 'If You Leave Me,' by Crystal Hana Kim
  FICTION: Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel boldly explores personal and national turmoil.
  By JACKIE THOMAS-KENNEDY Special to the Star Tribune AUGUST 3, 2018 — 5:43PM
  If You Leave by Crystal Hana Kim
  If You Leave by Crystal Hana Kim
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  Crystal Hana Kim’s debut is a bold mashup of wartime novel and love-triangle romance.

  Two distant cousins — Jisoo, raised in a wealthy enclave of Seoul, and Kyunghwan, a better student, but one of lesser means — long for the same girl: the rebellious, outspoken Haemi, who lives with her widowed mother and sickly brother Hyunki. Between 1951 and 1967, Kim charts personal and national turmoil with equal interest, offering exquisite scenes of marital discord as adeptly as the inner workings of a refugee village or field hospital.

  Although the war is inescapable for her characters, Kim gives Haemi and Kyunghwan an adolescence with elements of timelessness: They sneak out in the evenings on a bicycle to drink in bars; Haemi tints her fingernails; they argue and flirt. When Haemi agrees to marry Jisoo — who courts her by providing medicine for tubercular Hyunki — Kyunghwan never quite recovers.

  Their eventual reunion, as well as the brief affair it engenders, feels somewhat inevitable, and raises a question about the paternity of Haemi’s fourth child.

  The story urges its readers to sympathize by making Jisoo unworthy of Haemi — violent, jealous, frequently drunk — although the complexity of these relationships could thrive without leaning on objective flaws.

  Kyunghwan entrusts a letter of great import — his request that Haemi leave Jisoo to be with him — in the hands of her eldest daughter, Solee, who suffers her own infatuation with Kyunghwan. Solee decides to shred the message instead of delivering it.

  (C) NINA SUBIN
  Crystal Hana Kim author photo (c) Nina Subin
  Kim’s prose is most potent and visceral in its depictions of literal hunger. She allows hunger to seep into conversations about other subjects, giving it its rightful omnipresent quality. Kyunghwan recalls days “when we used to strip pine trees as children to get to their edible inner bark”; later, dining with a much younger woman, he notes, “[w]hen she found an ox bone, she didn’t wrest off the meat but sucked on it whole.” Haemi describes hunger so great “we’d eat the lees from the distillery.”

  Later, when her four daughters complain about the lackluster meal she prepares, she tells them, “ ‘Food is for nourishment, to keep you from going hungry. Taste is second.’ ” The differences among the generations — those born before, during and after the wars — are vividly described and are the source of small tensions (strict landlords, horrified in-laws) that enhance the novel’s authority.

  When Hyunki, a college student, attends a protest against Haemi’s advice, the novel’s tone shifts and becomes increasingly ominous. Hyunki dies. Jisoo leaves. Upon realizing that Solee destroyed Kyunghwan’s letter, Haemi initiates a disturbing confrontation. Sorrows compile at an increasing pace as the novel closes, but its finest moments are in its everyday troubles in a landscape wracked by war.

  Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, Narrative, Crazyhorse, the Millions, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-16 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

  If You Leave Me
  By: Crystal Hana Kim.
  Publisher: William Morrow, 417 pages, $26.99.

• Book Page
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22951-crystal-hana-kim-if-you-leave-me
  Word count: 323

  BOOK REVIEWS

  If You Leave Me
  Crystal Hana Kim
  BookPage review by Jessica Bates

  Web Exclusive – August 01, 2018

  Crystal Hana Kim’s sensual debut novel doesn’t feel like a debut at all. Set in South Korea in the 1950s and ’60s, If You Leave Me is a delicately woven story of love, family, war and isolation.

  Haemi and Kyunghwan, two old friends and almost lovers, meet at night while their refugee village sleeps. They get drunk on makgeolli, a milky rice wine, to forget the misery of war. When Kyunghwan’s cousin Jisoo begins to court Haemi, Haemi’s mother urges her to think of what Jisoo can provide for their family—food, wealth and honor. Haemi and Jisoo marry soon after he brings back medicine that saves her sick brother’s life.

  When both Jisoo and Kyunghwan leave for war, Haemi finds work in a local hospital. Jisoo returns with a lame arm, and Kyunghwan heads for the metropolis of Seoul. Haemi learns to care for Jisoo, and together they have several daughters. Each birth and the haze afterward leave Haemi scarred, more ghostlike and less human. This is a life she would never have chosen for herself, and daydreams of Kyunghwan become her escape. Amid rice paddies, mountains and vivid flowers, Haemi lives in her memories. Her daughters tell stories of their goddess mommy who exists in the ether.

  Through the lyrical, surprising and chilling prose of If You Leave Me, Kim forces readers to examine the pressure put on women by societies that demand they adhere to one kind of life. Under different circumstances, Haemi may have been able to choose her own life. Instead, she does the best with what she has.

  This is a story worth weeping over, with a fiery and complex heroine that earns the reader’s love.

• Booklist
  https://www.booklistonline.com/If-You-Leave-Me-Crystal-Hana-Kim/pid=9349891?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
  Word count: 277

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  Adult Books - Fiction - Historical Fiction
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  If You Leave Me.
  Kim, Crystal Hana (author).
  Aug. 2018. 432p. Morrow, $26.99 (9780062645173).
  REVIEW. First published July, 2018 (Booklist).

  Hunger, both physical and emotional, haunts the lives of the extended Lee-Yun family during the tumultuous, violent decades that define modern South Korea in the latter twentieth century. Haemi and Kyunghwan are childhood playmates in the final years of Japan’s brutal colonization, then become desperate, hard-drinking refugee teens in the midst of falling in love when the country is cleaved in two, only to regretfully separate in the final years of the Korean War. To satisfy her family’s needs for food, respect, and status, Haemi marries Kyunghwan’s second cousin, Jisoo, and seems to lose them both to the conflagration. Jisoo, damaged but alive, returns to Haemi to join her survivalist mother and her sickly younger brother. Through postwar industrialization, political upheaval, and civilian protests, Haemi struggles with loss after loss, giving birth to four daughters, falling more and more into despair with each. Her inevitable reunion with Kyunghwan sets in motion unavoidable devastation. New York born, Columbia MFA-holding Kim won a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in 2017 for “Solee,” part of an interconnected story collection that became this, her debut novel. Kim renders her multivoiced, multilayered ancestral and cultural history into stupendous testimony and indelible storytelling.

  — Terry Hong

• Historical Novel Society
  https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/if-you-leave-me/
  Word count: 352

  If You Leave Me
  BY CRYSTAL HANA KIM

  Find & buy on
  Five narrators tell the story of Korea in the 1950s and 1960s in a quiet but dramatic tone. Everyone has been affected by the Korean War, from those who were called to serve in the ROK military to citizens suffering from physically painful starvation. Haemi is a sixteen-year-old young woman when this story begins and best friends with Kyunghwan. They sneak out at night, ride to town on one bicycle, and get drunk at a cheap club whose staff neglect to question their age. Soon Kyunghwan introduces Haemi to his friend, Jisoo. The next quarter of the novel dwells on whether Haemi truly loves one of these young men. Do love and having fun make for a good marriage, or are kindness, compassion, and financial stability the grounds for a successful union? Jisoo is also kind to Hyunki, Haemi’s brother, who suffers from consumption. Eventually, Jisoo marries Haemi, but the remainder of the story is far from predictable.

  Two aspects focus this novel, keeping it from being simplistic. One is the weight of choices during a time of war. Day-to-day living carries the reality of intimacy but is overlaid by the responsibility of providing food for children and working a secure job. Jisoo is proud of his success but knows his weaknesses (not just physical) affect everyone around him. Haemi’s evolution as a person and character is the other theme that compels us to continue reading and caring. Her mindless love for play eventually changes to concern for her future but gets all mixed up when eventually she questions her so-called “wise” choices. What happens develops into an unexpected climax and resolution. Fine historical fiction.

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  Details
  PUBLISHER
  Morrow

  PUBLISHED
  2018

  CENTURY
  20th Century

  ISBN
  (US) 9780062645173

  FORMAT
  Hardback

  PAGES
  432

  Review
  APPEARED IN
  HNR Issue 85 (August 2018)

  REVIEWED BY
  Viviane Crystal

Word Count