This Part Is Silent

A searing essay collection that explores displacement and loss, creativity and change, institutional power and progress Born in Korea, raised in the American South and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, a scholar and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world. With curiosity and sensitivity, she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her, intimate accounts of immigration and interrogations of rising anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations—especially within the Asian diaspora in the West—as she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown. Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. For readers of Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, This Part Is Silent introduces a fierce new voice to our most urgent contemporary conversations.