Sung Yim Quotes

My father learned to drink and hide. I'm learning all kinds of things.

It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages.
It's like, don't touch my shit.
It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-pf

I won't let myself know it yet, but I want to say yes and there are reasons I can't seem to understand while we're both this fucked up. These reasons will seem wholly clear afterwards, revealing in a slow bloom as I drag myself to twelve-step meetings, support groups, to therapy, as I erase my rapist's number from my phone and get back in school, as I wake shaking from a nightmare and Bryan holds me, saying, "I'm here," "I won't go," and "I promise." Each time he says I'm sorry for things he didn't do to me.

Trauma doesn't occur in a vacuum. You don't outgrow it with time. It grows with you, even if the growing goes all wrong. It's like breaking an arm and never putting it in a cast. You're bigger, but the bone is still broken. Maybe there's a throb of pain once in a while. You can't just stop using the arm. The more you use it the more it tears and contorts. You get clumsy. You break more limbs. Even if you see a doctor now, there's no going back to the beginning.

Safety and innocence don't exist in nature. Childhood is a social construct, an ideological fever dream afforded by those whose mothers call miracles rather than eye from an ambivalent distance, fists clenched in hopes that we don't cry, for god's sake, again.

Love is not a white lie. It doesn't fill the cracks and make bad things beautiful or okay. Love is allowing ourselves to be fooled, not being fooled. Leaving ourselves open to hurt, not the hurt itself. Leaving ourselves open to delusion, not delusion itself. It's not a guarantee, it's the act of promising. The breathtaking act of hope. It's the stupid high-stakes gamble that pays off. It's a whisper of a touch. It's a window flung open and naked to the day.