By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Tribune and other outlets
July 18, 2023
For her upcoming novel “The Apology” (Little, Brown and Company) – which releases on Aug. 1 – Jimin Han culled on years of memories for parts of her book. “I’ve had fragments of it written out on my laptop for years but never knew what to do with them,” said Han, who resides with her family outside of New York City. “I thought they’d be part of a creative memoir about my grandparents on both sides of my family – part mythology, part verified facts. Some of those facts led me to chat with the writer Alexander Chee to see if we were related. Turned out we weren’t, but he encouraged me to write about it anyway, which got me thinking about fiction.”
When a good friend was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, Han said they had weekly Zoom chats to talk about the books they wanted to write. “Those early days of COVID-19 were really terrifying, so we started writing with more urgency in spite of our fears,” she said. “I was [also] still grieving my mother’s death from 2016, so I put a lot of what she’d told me when I was growing up into the novel.” For more information about Han’s work, check out her website and follow her on Instagram and Twitter (username: @jiminhanwriter).
Q: Have any of the places you visited made it into your book(s)?
A: My two trips to South Korea in 2016 made their way into this novel for sure. I couldn’t have written about characters living in Seoul as easily if I hadn’t gone there. I was able to visit my mother in the summer and then return for her funeral in the fall, so I put a lot of those details about Seoul into the novel. Seoul has changed so much since my trip when I was a teenager and certainly was totally different from the time we’d lived there when I was a young child.
Q: How have your travels impacted how you view the world and also how you create your characters?
A: There’s nothing like actually being in a place. Size and scale always surprise me. I never know how close something is to somewhere else or how long it takes to walk from one place to another. Going to visit the cemetery, for example, took longer than I would have imagined. South Korea is a small country, but it still takes time to drive to places. And there’s nothing like standing and breathing in the air, taking in the smell and listening to people talk. And the way they respond to me affects my understanding of a place. I’m reminded of who I am when I travel, in good and bad ways. Even going to a place a few minutes from where I live is helpful when I’m writing. When I’m stuck, going to a different place to write shakes things up for me, gives me a new kind of energy [and] my head feels clearer.
Q: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from your travels?
A: I experience time differently. I feel like it’s less linear the way we go through our days. There are layers of it all existing at once. Sort of like the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” – that multiverse. All the things that could have been. And returning to a place I lived in once brings the past to the surface … brings back memories. And new places make me think of what I’ve read about them, what people have said about them, where I was when they told me and the future comes faster at me in new places than when I’m at home.
Q: When you travel, do you read during your trips?
A: I always bring two books that are very different from each other so I can read depending on the mood I’m in. One that stands out from a trip many years ago – just because it was so beautiful and on the top of my list of where I want to return someday – one of my closest friends rented a house in Aix-en-Provence one summer and invited us as a family to join her and her family. I took Alexander Chee’s novel “Edinburgh” with me and it was such a glorious experience to read it on a bench in an apricot orchard. My last trip this past spring was to Italy to visit my daughter who was studying abroad. In Florence, I hardly had time to read because our days and nights were packed with her showing us around. But when we went to Rome for a few days before we flew home, I had a chance to read Rebecca Makkai’s “I Have Some Questions for You.” I remember starting [it] while I waited for my seafood pizza in a restaurant in the Piazza Della Rotonda. It suddenly started to rain and one of the umbrellas over the table next to me suddenly collapsed from the rain and ruined the food on the table. I was lucky to be spared.
Q: What are your five favorite cities?
A: New York and Seoul. If I were to think about where I’d like to go outside the United States, then definitely I’d add Paris, Tokyo and Rome to that list.
Q: When you go away, what are some of your must-have items?
A: A notebook and a couple of pens, books, two pairs of sneakers [which] might seem excessive, but the sole of my sneaker actually broke when I was in Florence and I had to find another pair to buy when there were so many other better things to do.
Q: What is your best vacation memory?
A: This most recent trip to Italy because we hadn’t seen our daughter in three months and it was a great reason to travel again since Covid began. We’d visited before when she was a child but now she had made it her own in the time she’d lived there so she was really able to give us an insider’s view. Later during that same trip we rented a car and drove to Caprarola to visit the Villa Farnese. We went so early that no one was there. Eventually one school group arrived, but for most of the day we got to take our time experiencing those stunningly beautiful frescoed rooms in light blue, yellow and orange and other vivid colors.
© 2023 JAE-HA KIM
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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