Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Sun Mee Chomet

Small dinner, big questions

by

Dinner for One skillfully mixes comedy with some poignant topics | Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Fall 2024)

Sun Mee Chomet (Miss Sophie), Jim Lichtscheidl (James) and Sun Mee Chomet (Miss Sophie) in Dinner for One. Photos by Lauren B. Photography

Dinner for One Co-created by Christina Baldwin, Sun Mee Chomet, and Jim Lichtscheidl
(Directed by Christina Baldwin, Music directed by Emilia Mettenbrink, Jungle Theater, Minneapolis ~ November 30- January 5)

As the elderly but still spry Miss Sophie descends the regal staircase of her house on her birthday, her butler offers his hand to escort her to the dining room, where the table has been lovingly set with place cards for five guests. But as James begins to serve the first course of mulligatawny soup, it’s clear that Miss Sophie’s guests will not be arriving, and that she will be dining alone. Are they running late? Have they sent their regrets?

Dinner for One was originally produced in Germany in 1962 as an 18-minute black-and-white video recording,  written and performed in English by two British actors. Since then, it has become a kind of cult hit, broadcast every New Year’s Eve on television in several European countries, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden.

In June 2023, Jungle Theater Artistic Director Christina Baldwin and actors Sun Mee Chomet and Jim Lichtscheidl sat down to brainstorm and workshop ideas which turned  Dinner for One into a full-length play. That production was a sold-out hit last winter, and Jungle Theater has brought it back for an encore run this holiday season.

This updated version is a poignant yet humorous portrayal of a relationship between an elderly employer and her faithful employee, and the tenderness that comes with decades of knowing each other’s tendencies, quirks, and personal losses. As Miss Sophie and James, actors Chomet and Lichtscheidl portray that knowing comfort with each other. Chomet embues Miss Sophie with quiet dignity along with a Lucille Ball-like hilarity with her subtle facial expressions and body language. As the butler in constant motion, serving the food and drinks, Lichtscheidl is a master of physical comedy, tripping over a bump in the rug and pouring refills in an exaggerated manner, all the while demonstrating his deep loyalty and affection for Miss Sophie.

Dinner for One might seem like a simple show with only two actors, but there are complex elements to this production. In Miss Sophie’s home, there are lots of beautiful vintage frames, but they are all empty. Were they once filled with photos of her loved ones, or has she always been alone?

There is also a large, framed stage where Musical Director Emilia Mettenbrink and fellow musicians seamlessly and cleverly weave music into each scene. Unlike many shows where the musicians are unseen, the musicians in this production are active participants in the story, challenging James and Miss Sophie with their notes.

One of the most creative elements of the show was the audience participation. Audience members were asked to write answers to a few pointed questions on a card in the lobby before entering, and some of the answers were read by the actors during the dinner. This could be risky as an improvisation, but it worked in this production, often resulting in laugh-out-loud comedy during the show.

Despite the humorous moments, Dinner for One is tinged with sadness throughout its 80-minute run time. When the dinner is over and the curtain closes, we are left with many questions about ourselves, our relationships, and our futures. We also leave with some topics for a good dinner party conversation.

Dinner for One runs until January 5, 2025 at Jungle Theater. 

Holding up a mirror to Shakespeare

by

Emilia celebrates women artists in history who struggled to be heard | By Anne Holzman (Spring 2023)

Marisa Tejeda, Sun Mee Chomet, Greta Ogelsby in Emilia. Photo by Alvan Washington

Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Ten Thousand Things, producer
(Directed by Marcela Lorca, Open Book, Minneapolis, and other community locations, through June 11, 2023)

What’s that, you say? An evening of storytelling with some of the Twin Cities’ finest actors, in this case all women, in a vintage high school gymnasium with an appreciative crowd that got in for free?

Yes, please!

Even better: A clever script yanking on memories of well-worn plays, twisting them like so much laundry and wringing out laughter and tears, and the amazement of sitting four feet from Greta Oglesby as she narrates this story in a voice that bounces off the basketball backboards with ease.

Not to mention the side-eye from actor (and Korean adoptee) Sun Mee Chomet as she grunts and strides and transforms her small frame with hockey-player braggadocio; and the hilarity of Kimberley Richardson in her role, high kicking, squealing and mugging in every direction at once.  There is also Mo Perry puffing out her cheeks and snorting the lines of an aging sexist aristocrat, and Marisa Tejeda’s divine chanting and regal bearing as the younger Emilia.

There is also George Keller’s quick transformations of manner and voice, Sophina Saggau doing body bumps off her teammates, and Maggie Chestovich contorting a comic face that must be made of Silly Putty, then holding the room’s whole collective breath through a brave woman’s silent suffering.

Yes, to Emilia, produced byTen Thousand Things, and directed with characteristic brilliance by Marcela Lorca with a star-studded cast.  The brilliant cast is all women (to make up for all those years when the Globe Theater, where Shakespeare staged his plays,  could only allow men to be actors). Yes to a theater company that gives us this fresh new look at where our theater traditions come from and the many that this tradition has left behind.

Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Emilia tells the story – with considerable imaginative embroidery – of Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (or Lanier), a poet of early 17th century England who, in spite of many headwinds as a woman of modest means, managed to publish a book of poetry and prose. The play picks up on the unproven theory that she became Shakespeare’s lover and inspired his references in sonnets to a “Dark Lady.” This reference is thought to be about Lanyer because the Bassano family was of southern European origin and likely Jewish.  

Three of Shakespeare’s plays have characters named Emilia, and there is a Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, but the evidence for more than a passing connection between Lanyer and Shakespeare is scant. That said, there’s no denying the achievements of Lanyer’s surviving work and the historical barriers for women to publish literature using their own names. Emilia is fiction, but it’s also a whopping load of truth.

Emilia premiered in London in 2018 and won three Olivier awards in 2019, including Best Comedy.

In this script, the playwright exploits  language differences across the centuries not only for comic effect, but to remind us that Emilia’s voice can be heard now in a way that was not possible during her lifetime. The actors deliver many lines in Elizabethan language but break to a line like Alfonso’s exit shot: “That would’ve been a massive drag, hmm?”

Echoing across the centuries are the many references to the ongoing struggles of women (“We merely ask for them to let us join”) and controversies over intellectual property (“No one owns words”). Beneath all the hilarity and fury of this script lie carefully constructed themes of authorship and authority that should keep the story fresh for generations.

The play follows conventions familiar in Shakespeare plays, including the use of a few actors to cover multiple roles and the nudging and winking that comes with actors impersonating the opposite sex. There is even a scene set at the Globe Theatre, the original venue for most of Shakespeare’s work, in which Emilia recognizes her own words in the mouths of actors and begins to shout over them, producing a strangely operatic effect of layered voices.

Audiences of Ten Thousand Things productions can count on becoming part of the action. The company sets up each performance space with a stage area surrounded by about a hundred folding chairs, arranged two rows deep around a square; actors enter and exit at the square’s corners and get their costumes from racks at the edges of the room. Occasionally an actor will briefly take a seat in the audience. Two characters in conflict sometimes circle the stage as in a boxing ring, using hand gestures to gin up excitement in the crowd. Toward the end of Emilia as the poet’s work finally begins to be published, the actors distribute poetry broadsides to the audience bearing lines by Aemilia Lanyer in a cursive font. Throughout the play, characters seek allies and start debates with audience members, adding to the fun and keeping us alert lest we be their next target.

Ten Thousand Things performs for paying audiences at Open Book in Minneapolis, where the show runs through June 11. The company also performs in community locations including parks, schools and prisons, some of them open to the public. The show at Patrick Henry High School was hosted by Project Success, which connects high school students with theater and other opportunities.

More info on Aemilia Bassano Lanyer can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aemilia-lanyer

Power dynamics, then and now

by

Play on a famous relationship contrasts with modern racial tensions in Sally & Tom | By Joanne Rhim Lee (Fall 2023)

Luke Robertson, as Thomas Jefferson; Sun Mee Chomet, as Polly; Suzan-Lori Parks as Sally in Sally & Tom.

Sally & Tom By Suzan-Lori Parks
(Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, October 7 – November 6, 2022)

The opening scene of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Sally & Tom predictably features Thomas Jefferson and his mistress/slave Sally Hemings, with other characters including Sally’s sister and Jefferson’s daughters listening in the background. 

However, when the scene ends, it quickly becomes apparent that the characters on stage are not only playing Jefferson and Hemings, but actors who are in last minute rehearsals for a play about them.  Luce who plays Sally, is also the playwright of the play within a play. When she is introduced, she is making last minute changes to the dialogue during the rehearsal.  This is quite disconcerting to the rest of the cast, including Luce’s boyfriend and creative partner Mike, who plays Jefferson.  There is a simmering tension between them, hinting at troubles in their relationship. 

This is the meaty meta-premise of Parks’ world premiere of Sally & Tom at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.  

Luce struggles to find the right balance of historical accuracy and contemporary commentary on this story of race and class.  Did Thomas Jefferson really love Sally Hemings, his slave?  More importantly, did she love him?  Is it possible to love someone who owns you?  How do relationships navigate a power imbalance?

Even amidst the chaos on the set and behind the scenes, the show must go on, and it’s thrilling to watch Luce’s creative process unfold, and to bear witness to Parks’ singular brilliance as a playwright writing for a playwright.  During the rehearsals, there is a feeling of excitement and creativity in the air, as if everyone understands that they are a part of something wonderful and important unfolding. 

Luke Robertson, as Thomas Jefferson and Suzan-Lori Parks as Sally in the Guthrie’s presentation of Sally & Tom.

As Luce/Sally, Kristen Ariza perfectly captures the intelligence, strength, and vulnerability of both characters.  As Sally, she obeys Jefferson and plays the role of devoted slave/lover.  On stage as the playwright and director, she is able to pull rank with Mike, but at home, things are more complicated.  They try to separate the personal from the professional, but it’s difficult.   

As Mike/Thomas Jefferson, Luke Robertson has a difficult, thankless role, but he pulls it off, showing a humble yet complicated devotion to the woman he loves.

The other six actors in the production double up as stagehands, costume directors, and prop managers. They are also Luce and Mike’s friends, which makes everything even more emmeshed.  Originally, Luce writes a searing monologue for Kwame, who plays James, another of Jefferson’s slaves.  Amari Cheatom shines in this dual role, delivering the most powerful scene in the play.  But when playwright Luce considers cutting the scene, her friendship with actor Kwame is put to the test. 

Another standout in the cast is Sun Mee Chomet, who plays Jefferson’s younger daughter Polly, as well as actor Scout, who assists Luce with scheduling and direction.  As a Korean American, Scout understands that the opportunity to play Jefferson’s daughter in such an important production is a gift, an example of color-blind casting.  Though she is grateful, she’s also tired of being the token Asian.  Scout says she has more to offer than being a sidekick; there are things she wants to say, and roles she wants to play.  Credit goes to Parks for creating this rich, layered role, and for Chomet for imbuing Scout/Polly with a deep and genuine pathos. 

Against all odds, Luce and her cast make it to opening night.  The audience might think they’ve seen everything in the rehearsals, but Parks has saved the best for last.

Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, which is now playing on Broadway, was called recently called “the greatest American play of the past 25 years” by the New York Times.  She has created her own competition for this title with her new work Sally & Tom.

Performances continue through November 7 ~ to get tickets, visit: guthrietheater.org

Writers at a turning point in history

by

Author Interview: In We Are Meant to Rise, BIPOC Minnesotans write about being at ground zero of a racial reckoning | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2022)

We Are Meant to Rise co-editor David Mura speaks at the book launch at Next Chapter Booksellers in Minneapolis. Photo by Heather Skinner

In the pre-pandemic days of 2019, Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura, longtime friends, writers, writing instructors, and collaborators in conducting community conversations about race, put out a call to writers of color in the Twin Cities.

The initial goal was to assemble an anthology some of the life stories shared in the panel conversations held through a community program dubbed More Than a Single Story.  However, after the topic was all decided, history unfolded in Minneapolis. Everything changed, including the trajectory of the planned anthology.

As 2019 turned into 2020, the two co-editors revised their call for stories twice; once to invite the writers to tell stories about the pandemic, and a second time, in the weeks following May 2020, to invite them to write of their thoughts about the George Floyd murder, the demonstrations in the Twin Cities afterwards, and the effect of these events on their lives.

This turning point in history from the point of view of writers living in that place and time is captured in We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, an anthology of 34 stories that launched at the end of 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press.

We Are Meant to Rise co-editor Carolyn Holbrook and contributor Sun Yung Shin.

In mid-2019, Holbrook and Mura were well prepared to embark on collecting the stories gleaned from a wealth of community conversations.  There were five years of stories from Holbrook’s ongoing panel discussion series More Than a Single Story, originally designed as a panel series for black women of various ethnic backgrounds, which expanded to include other women of color. The program later added a writing component.

This ongoing program collaborates with public libraries, the Loft Literary Center, and other venues.  Mura joined the program three years in, designing cross-cultural discussions for men of color, as he has done for other programs in the past.

Inviting the would-be anthology writers to write on the topics of pandemic and racial justice, particularly because many of the participants were Twin Cities writers of color, was instinctive.

Holbrook, a Hamline University creative writing professor, explained that the trauma of the times meant assembling the anthology would take longer than original calendar called for.  “There were several people… they were just unable to write for awhile,” she said.  “The pandemic affected people in such so many different ways.  Many people who just write all the time were just flattened and couldn’t write anything.” 

To encourage the writers, she said, “we had a Zoom meeting with several of those people and just had a really nice conversation with them, so that they could try to release whatever was holding them back.”  After that conversation, she said “the pieces began to flow.”  The editors also personally invited some well-known Twin Cities writers of color to contribute.

The collection in We Are Meant to Rise contains both prose and poetry.  It includes first-person accounts of those who witnessed and/or participated in demonstrations following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police.  It also takes in reflections of writers with Minnesota connections, contributing their perspectives of how the moment of racial reckoning reverberated with them.

Some writers recall events that happened during the demonstrations, in that neighborhood, such as Melissa Olson, who writes a journalistic account of how she and family members saved a radio archive, 1200 reels of audiotape from 15 years of interviews by the Minneapolis Native American media organization Migizi Communications, by taking them home in her van, while the buildings on either side of the Migizi headquarters were burning.  Two days after moving the archives, the Migizi building also burned to the ground.  She writes that fire trucks never came.

Other writers submitted first person accounts of how the pandemic and the racial violence have affected them personally.  Author/activist Shannon Gibney describes seeing play out before her a version of what James Baldwin wrote in 1962 about “the fire next time,” describing how as black Americans move out of what white society sees as their prescribed place “heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” 

Minneapolis poet and writer Bao Phi reflects on living in and bringing up his young daughter in the place where George Floyd was killed.  He and his daughter lay a teddy bear on the memorial for Floyd, and he describes in his essay how the traumas have penetrated her.  He writes that she is afraid of police, and asks him often when she hears a sound at night if someone is breaking in.

Korean Minnesotan poet/playwright Ed Bok Lee’s 23-part prose poem Pandemic Love observes the pandemic loneliness and the impossibility of understanding the moment even as an eyewitness, as he walks around in South Minneapolis in the summer after the George Floyd murder and demonstrations.  Holbrook described Lee’s work as “an invocation,” and said she wanted it to be the first piece in the collection, after the introductory essays.

Lee was quarantined with his then three-year-old daughter in summer 2020 in their third-floor apartment, just blocks away from Cup Foods, where George Floyd was killed. Cut off from friends and other family, and many of the usual ways of amusing his daughter, the two of them took a lot of walks, he said, listening to constant sirens, observing what was happening in the neighborhood.  Her ability to express herself with words grew fast that summer, and she asked a lot of questions.  Amid a lot of confusion, external and internal, he treasures the one-on-one time he spent with his child at a critical time, noticed how their relationship deepened, and how she kept him grounded.

He attaches the word “alone-ness” to how he and others experienced the pandemic amid other new and unfolding traumas.  He searched for what was just below the surface of consciousness during the summer 2020 events, trying to get at that level in his poem.  “Not a lot of people had the language to process what was going on — it was all coming so fast,” he said, with pandemic confusion, racial uprising, jobs and events cancelled, with parents and kids suddenly at home together.  “People were sitting with all these questions, in alone-ness.”

At that moment, Lee said, he was trying to record what happened internally, and it spilled onto the page with what words he could gather up at the time.  In five years, he said, he would be able to do a better job, but he felt a duty to write what he could. 

Creative writers are “journalists of the interior life as they’re experiencing things — on the streets but also deep within them and within the psyche,” he said.  “And not just their own individual psyche but the psyche of society.  That is the poet’s and the creative writer’s job.”  He describes himself in Pandemic Love as cynical, but writes that “at your core, it’s hope more than habit that gets you up in the morning.”

Minneapolis poet/racial justice activist (and Korean adoptee) Sun Yung Shin penned a first-person self-interview entitled A Tangent to a Story About the Smith & Wesson .38, or Attempts to be Fully Assimilated into the White American Project Have Failed Miserably, in the Form of a Self-Questionnaire, in which she is the interviewee, a Korean adoptee who has little information about her origins, and apparently also asking the questions, in the voice of an interviewer who is frustrated that the interviewee seems not to be able to provide the simplest information.  With some dark humor, she brings out many questions that Korean adoptees cannot answer about themselves, even “when were you born?”

Shin, who was the editor of the 2016 anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, a collection of stories of Minnesotans with racialized prejudice, oppression and violence, said her creative piece for We Are Meant to Rise was freeing in that she could just write on a topic from a Korean adoptee perspective.  It was good not to be the editor.

Issues of belonging echo in the Korean adoptee experience, Shin said, and broadly in the community of Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) “in terms of white supremacy and the society that is created and sustained, saying some people belong some places, some people belong in other places, some people don’t belong at all, and some people don’t deserve to live, some people don’t deserve safety.”

This is the paradigm that led to George Floyd’s murder, she said, “which is that an alleged counterfeit $20 bill is more important than a human being’s life,” and that police authorities and other hierarchies get to make those calls. 

As an activist, Shin said, her work to educate about racist policies and heal racism has also been through “cross-racial” efforts to do work to “understand, repair, and transform” relationships.  She notes that racialization is bigger than just Black and white; it is part of a bigger system that takes in Asian Americans and others of many races.  Participating in the anthology was one way to be in discussion with others.  She seeks out such discussions, whether virtual, digital, or in person.  In-person gatherings are the best, she said, because of the sensitive nature of the topic. Shin will speak at some in-person events for We Were Meant to Rise later in 2022.

Mura describes the collection as a moment of history observed from many angles.  The rainbow of perspectives, from people of different ages and generations, he said, as well as the perspectives of people who grew up in the neighborhood or who live in the neighborhood now, make the collection unique. Including descriptions of the racial reckoning by indigenous Twin Citians puts the moment into a broad historical context of white oppression and genocide in Minnesota, he added.

Korean adoptee artists and writers like Sun Yung Shin and actor Sun Mee Chomet are examples of artists who have also become activists in the Twin Cities.  Mura credits Theater Mu for showcasing adoptee stories and encouraging adoptee playwrights and actors since the 1990s.

The anthology also showcases the maturity of the literary community of color in the Twin Cities.  “It is a very activist and politically-engaged community, also a very diverse community and one that has produced incredibly excellent art.”  At the same time, he said, this diverse community is very personally interconnected, even within families.  He related how comedian/storyteller Tou Xiong, addressing an local audience, asked how many Hmong folks in the audience had a black family member, and watched many hands shoot up, amid knowing chuckles.

As a Twin Cities resident since 1970, Mura said the notion of who Twin Citians are has undergone some shifts, but that it needs to continue to change in order to reflect reality.  South High School in South Minneapolis, Mura said, where his kids went to high school, is now 30 percent white, with the rest indigenous, black, East African, Asian American and Latinex.  This indicates that the diversity reflected in the anthology is a realistic demographic mix of the present and future Twin Cities.

“The traditional viewpoint of what Minnesota is comes from Mary Tyler Moore and Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, and that’s not what this area is any more,” he said.

Lee recalled that after the Obama election, there was mainstream talk that the U.S. had entered an era of a “post-racial America” which meant that ongoing racial tensions got much less attention in popular culture.  People of color never bought the “post-racial” notion, he added. Although the same kinds of police brutality and racial tensions have been happening for many years, Lee observed, the George Floyd moment gave it a kind of identity and attention it never had before.  Contributors to this collection, and many other artists of color, he said, have grabbed the moment to advocate for greater recognition of longstanding and systemic racial injustice issues.

Lee said the anthology captures a moment in time that is not available to those who did not experience the aftermath of the George Floyd murder as it unfolded in Minneapolis.  It is also a testament to democratic ideals that writers of all different backgrounds and walks of life added their voices to this collection.  “They are all BIPOC writers, but that’s almost the only thing they have in common,” he said, “that’s why it’s such a good microcosm of the democratization of whose story gets told.” 

Events for We Are Meant to Rise will be held later in 2022, and are listed on the website of More than a Single Story, at: www.morethanasinglestory.com.  Events are also listed at the website of the University of Minnesota Press, at: www.umnpress.edu.

A girl’s priorities

by

A play about the tragedy of war for kids and adults | Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Winter 2022 issue)

Olivia Lampert and Sun Mee Chomet in Bina’s Six Apples. Photo by Glen Stubbe

Bina’s Six Apples by Lloyd Suh
(Directed by Eric Ting, Children’s Theatre, Minneapolis ~ January 9 – February 13, 2022)

In Lloyd Suh’s new work Bina’s Six Apples, premiering at the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis, the title character is a 10-year-old girl who lives with her family in a peaceful apple orchard in Geochang, South Korea.  As the youngest child, she seems to spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming under an apple tree, often being excused from the more taxing chores of her older siblings. 

But along with everyone in Korea, Bina’s life is changed forever on June 25, 1950.  Her father wakes her from her reverie and urges her to get ready for their long journey on foot to Busan; a city on the southeastern tip of Korea.  Like a typical child, she is confused and resistant to leaving her beloved home, complaining that she doesn’t like Busan, the ocean, or war itself.

Rather than snap at his daughter, her father gently commiserates with her, saying that he doesn’t like war either.  Regardless, he urges her to make herself useful, instructing her to pack her little backpack with some apples from the orchard for their three-day journey.

Bina’s face brightens at the prospect of having an important role, and goes about carefully choosing six bright red, juicy apples in her tiny backpack, one for each member of her family.  She imagines that when they arrive in Busan, they will all celebrate with her specially-chosen apples.

War it is a difficult subject for a children’s play, but Suh manages to write on two levels:  one for adults who understand the deep tragedy of the Korean War and the grief that resulted from millions of deaths and family separations; and another for kids who will react with wide-eyed surprise to the physical and moral challenges that Bina faces.  The play is a heartwarming one both for these groups. Bina makes wise choices and touches many lives; both adults and children can perceive this in the play’s thoughtful delivery.  

Kudos to Suh and director Eric Ting for not glossing over the violence of the war.  In fact, perhaps Bina’s Six Apples should come with a trigger warning, as an early scene includes the sound of deafening bombs which go on for quite some time.  In the ensuing chaos, Bina is separated from the rest of her family, alone in a dangerous war zone.  She fends for herself from then on, while trying to make her way south to Busan without a compass or a map.

The prospect of such a challenge would make most adults want to curl into a ball and give up, but Bina keeps moving no matter what.  Along the way, she encounters a number of colorful individuals, including a soldier, a merchant, and a fishing boat captain.  Each of them is also alone in their own way, trying to find their way home just like she is.

In addition to being lost, Bina is also hungry, and has no money.  However, she has one very valuable commodity: Her six apples.  She is determined not to eat or trade them, because she is saving them for what she knows will be a joyful reunion with her family in Busan. But strangers continue to inquire about the curious lumps in her backpack. 

Olivia Lampert as Bina. Photo by Glen Stubbe

In her Children’s Theatre debut, Olivia Lampert plays Bina with innocent joy, wonder, and grit.  Immediately after being separated from her family, her movements and voice are a bit shaky and frightened, but they slowly become steadier and more determined.   The rest of the cast does an excellent job of showing the depth of a family’s love, as well as the quiet strength of the individuals displaced by the war. 

In particular, Twin Cities theater veteran Sun Mee Chomet shines in her dual roles as Bina’s mother and a merchant who encounters Bina on her way south, as does Joseph Pendergrast as Bina’s older brother and a soldier who lends her a hand.

For many years, playwright Lloyd Suh had been holding onto a story his father told of a memory about his family during the Korean War.  When the war broke out in 1950, his father was age five, but remembered all his life how his family was forced to flee south to Busan during the war, along with hundreds of thousands of other Koreans.  His father carried a backpack of apples, and remembered feeling that it was a very important job. 

When Suh’s previous work, The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra, Go! premiered at the Children’s Theatre several years ago, the playwright told his story to one of the directors at Children’s Theatre, who suggested to Suh that it would be a good starting point for his next play. 

Though the Twin Cities has a relatively small Korean American population compared to other large cities in the U.S., it has become home to thousands of refugees from around the world during the past few decades, so the topic of internally displaced and stateless people is a relatable one for many children and adults.

In the midst of theatre cancellations and continuing bad news because of the pandemic, Bina’s Six Apples is a beautiful piece of art, a welcome island of joy at a time when daily life is often a sea of uncertainty.  

Albert Park, Olivia Lampert in Bina’s Six Apples. Photo by Glen Stubbe

The year of loss and lessons

by

Korean Quarterly’s snippets and snapshots of 2020, the weird year that was | Editor’s Note by Martha Vickery (Winter 2021 issue)

Korean Quarterly Winter 2021 cover of the print edition.

Toilet paper. That is what comes to mind about the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. It was a silly and selfish beginning phase of what became a horrifying challenge for our country.  The ridiculous specter of shoppers fighting over toilet paper in big box stores was emblematic. Toilet paper wars stood in for how our normal lives were, in fact, going down the toilet.

We learned quickly how important the many small things in life really are – going to the library, hanging at the coffee shop, hugging our loved ones, seeing our coworkers, going to a play or concert, because those things were suddenly impossible.  We complained.  We looked at our own four walls way too many times. We grieved the small things.  Some grieved the big things, like the loss of a career, or the biggest – loss of loved ones from a disease that left them dying alone.

For all of us our small and large disasters, they all seemed to shrink in importance because so many were happening to others all around us.  It was a shared year of loss.

It may be too soon even to have much historical perspective on 2020, or to draw many meaningful lessons from having gotten through it.  Right now, it’s more a sense of “What just happened?” like being hit by a truck, and watching it lumber away into the distance.

But this year in review is a chance to look back, on some of the good, bad, and ugly of a very weird year, as seen through the work of KQ’s reportage and its very perceptive contributors.

Winter 2020, before toilet paper weirdness
At the time we published the winter 2020 issue, the toilet paper mania was yet to come.  The new virus as something in China, too distant from our reality to worry about yet.   Was it sort of like the flu? We weren’t sure, and as we would learn many months later, Chinese authorities were deliberately tamping down release of information they knew about coronavirus at that time.

As South Korea competently ramped up to fight the virus, Americans were told by their fearless leader not to worry,  that it would one day disappear like magic.   Impeachment was ongoing. Columnist John Feffer wondered in his winter 2020 KQ column whether impeachment would even harm Trump’s chances for reelection, opining that it would really depend on whether the economy would hold steady through the election year. That prediction was partially fulfilled. The economy has tanked, but the reason Trump was not reelected was way more complex than the economy. It was not something anyone could have foreseen.

Taiko HERbeat

Also in February, KQ covered a once-in-a-lifetime get-together and concert HerBeat: Taiko Women All-Stars. Held at the Ordway Theater on February 29 to a packed house, the event took a year for local taiko artist/instructor (and Korean adoptee) Jennifer Weir to put together with funding, partners, timing, and invitations to 18 of the world’s most elite women taiko drummers. They had to be persuaded to come to Minnesota “in the dead of winter,” Weir remarked.  No event like it had ever been held.  Documentary filmmaker Dawn Mikkelson recorded the concert and other related events for a documentary film to be premiered sometime this year.

Weir spoke later about how the concert took place, serendipitously and luckily, just weeks before all performance venues had to shut down. If it had been two or three weeks later, it probably would not have happened at all. There is now a trailer for the film in which Weir says something like “This is the biggest thing I have done, ever, and it makes me very happy and slightly ill.” The trailer and other info about the film is available at a new website:  www.herbeatfilm.com

Illustration by Emma Wunrow

Pandemic uncertainty
The spring 2020 issue of KQ had a graphic of three Korean faces wearing masks imprinted with U.S. and Korean flags.  By then, the pandemic had arrived in the U.S. but it had arrived in Korea first.  Some columnists felt we were headed for a drastic change in our own country, while others observed how Koreans were intelligently beating back the coronavirus through infection control methods (story here), contact tracing, testing, and plain old common sense.

Frequent KQ contributor and artist Lora Vahlsing described how there was uncertainty and change in the air during her trip to New York in early March to take a yoga instructors’ workshop and have some fun with her daughter (story here).  One of the visits they made was to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two went through many of the rooms of objects “from guitars to teapots,” enjoying the feeling of being around so much creative beauty.  That night, they found out that the Met had closed its doors indefinitely that day, due to pandemic restrictions. She writes that is encouraged that a pandemic cannot take her creative spirit from her. “Art is necessary precisely because it allows us agency: It both grounds and elevates us, and it can even keep our hearts from breaking during these uncertain times.”

Vahlsing was busy creating during the pandemic year. Some new creations, made of paper, thread and canvas are in an exhibit entitled What the Paper Reveals, at a gallery in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin through March 28. 

Columnist Seth Mountain, who writes from the perspective of an American living and working in South Korea delivered the bare truth that so many Americans hate, don’t want to hear and are still struggling with, that coronavirus is a “test for all of us”: 

Coronavirus doesn’t care how we respond. But in a democracy, this contagion can only be subdued by people who understand that freedom requires self-restraint and caring for neighbors. The curve can only be flattened by collective effort.

Columnist Christine Heimann, a Korean adoptee from the Twin Cities, works with children through a service organization for adoptees she co-founded, Adoptee Bridge.  After seeing Korean adoptee kids be the subject of racist remarks related to coronavirus, a beautiful, spare essay poured out of her that has enough food for thought for a year’s worth of podcasts or perhaps a Ph.D. thesis.

The jist of the essay is that through the ages, there were always racist or homophobic theories as to the origin of pandemics.  In the 1300s, Jews got the blame for the bubonic plague, in the 1980s, gay men got the blame for AIDS, and in 2014, West Africans got the blame for Ebola.  The flames of racism in the 2020 pandemic were further fanned by Trump as he continued to call COVID-19 “the Chinese virus.” 

Heimann wrote with hard-headed commonsense about realities that became clouded by the speculation, suspicion and rumor that was the daily news cycle around coronavirus.  “New diseases have been and will always be a part of our lives. We cannot let new diseases (or any new unknown) cause mass hysteria, and most importantly, we cannot permit new and unknown diseases to be an excuse for hate and racism.”

Teachers, actors, restaurateurs, and others who come into daily contact with the public had to either suspend their activities or retool to cope with new structures needed for a COVID reality in 2020. KQ checked in with friends and resource people around the Twin Cities about how coronavirus has affected their lives (story here).  One group we spoke with were several people engaged in education, from kindergarten to college.

Laura Sharp getting “assistance” from her dogs and two of her four children while working at home.

Laura Sharp, a music teacher and Korean adoptee who works for a school in Roseville, observed how teachers re-tooled a whole system in about three weeks to provide online education, child care for essential workers, and breakfast and lunch delivery to students in their homes.  The really tricky part, however, was persuading students to participate in their on-line education. 

Some students take to online like a duck to water.  Others drop out, and teachers don’t even see them again. Others are just too young. Teachers have a duty to make the online education as accessible and equitable as possible, but they can’t do much about the inequitable living situations some students experience. “That’s the powerful thing about teaching,” she said, “is that you do care about every single one of them.” 

KQ also checked in with the Minnesota Theater Alliance, which reported that an estimated 2,933 Asian Minnesotans’ jobs were affected by theater closures that happened in mid-March – they are coming up on a year of closure in March. Katie Bradley, a Twin Cities actor, said in March that her future was uncertain. “Our job is to get in front of a lot of people crowded into one room. We won’t be able to do that now, but for how long? That is the terror, of not knowing.”

Actor Sun Mee Chomet had almost a year’s worth of performances scheduled when all her contracts were cancelled in March, and she was wondering what was next.  In the midst of the uncertainty, she was trying to stay grounded and work on positive activities, like learning Korean.  “Life is more important than art …and there are things more important than plays.  We will come back, but this is one of those times.”

Photo by Tiffany Pauling.

Minnesotan George Floyd, and how it happened in our neighborhood
A couple days after George Floyd was killed on Memorial Day, KQ’s board chair Phil Lee got in touch and asked if he could submit an essay. Because our new online edition had been launched a couple weeks before, we planned to put it on the website because his topic — Asian Americans in a moment of racial reckoning — was so timely, and the shock was still so new.

Lee wrote his essay from the point of view of a Korean American whose north Minneapolis church was mobilized to distribute food, water, and basic supplies to people whose neighborhood stores were burned down in the violence and anger that spilled out after the videotaped murder of George Floyd went viral. While packing and hauling groceries, he had a lot of conversations in early June with people of many races and economic classes.

As a 1.5-generation Korean American, Lee wrote, he has been the subjected to both racism and privilege.  Reflecting on how people have asked him “why are Black people looting, rioting, and burning buildings?” he said if police did nothing about a crime committed against his family, such as a child getting murdered, he might burn down a building or do something else to get attention. “For the Black community, it’s not just one child, it’s generations.”

KQ contributor/volunteer Tiffany Pauling wrote an essay from ground zero of the movement to demand justice for George Floyd – her own neighborhood. She also contributed photos of some of the early George Floyd and Black Lives Matter mural artwork in the neighborhood.  Pauling wrote that she got nervous when there was violence at the Lake Street Target and the Third Precinct police station (which was later burned down). But when she heard glass shatter in the window of the convenience store across the street from her home, she grabbed her car keys and went to stay at a friend’s house.

Photo by Tiffany Pauling.

Later she attended the George Floyd memorial, spoke to the volunteers, and watched some of the now-iconic murals in the making.

After the memorial, after the crowds left, and she wandered the now quiet, beat-up, boarded-up  neighborhood, she was left with conflicted feelings, and in her essay, she described them. “Korean adoptees and other interracial adoptee often experience a strange intersection of being the target of racism while also having their own internalized prejudices.” Understanding that intersection was, for her, a personal racial reckoning in a year of national racial reckoning. Likewise, her neighborhood may have undergone a permanent change. “In fact, I may never see it in the same way again.”

Despite everything, moving forward
Between summer and fall there was a movement to a new normal, in part because of the urgency and the excitement of the general election. Emphasis was on the hard work to push forward initiatives like getting out the vote among Asian Americans in the Twin Cities, and the Reclaiming the Block initiative.  There was a sense of getting on with work that needed doing with or without a pandemic. 

Cover of the Fall edition of Korean Quarterly’s print edition.

On the cover of our fall edition were the faces of five Korean American candidates for the House of Representatives, the most that ever ran at one time (story here). Only one, Andy Kim (D-NJ 3rd District), was an incumbent, fighting to get reelected in his swing district where only a few percent are Korean Americans. Of those, four were elected, and will (when they have time) form a small, but presumably mighty, Korean American Caucus, the first in the history. They have now changed their notoriety from the most Korean Americans to run at one time to the most to serve at one time.

The Coalition for Asian American Leaders (CAAL) in the Twin Cities went after the Asian American vote in the Twin Cities with energy and a smart strategy.  The online session State of Asian Minnesotans: Fired Up and Ready to Go discussed the challenges of getting Asian Minnesotans to the polls, including language accessibility, and the large numbers of voting age that need to be reached in a variety of ethnic groups. Turnout for Asian Americans has been in the 50 percent range, and 75 percent for the overall population in Minnesota.

At the same session, activist Jae Hyun Shim discussed her work for the advocacy collective Reclaiming the Block.  Shim worked with the group over several years to propose ways to shift financial resources away from the huge Minneapolis police budget to other neighborhood initiatives like social services and mental health support.  The job took on more urgency post-George Floyd’s murder.  Nationwide, while the idea of defunding police has gathered strength in the last year, opposition to it has also intensified, Shim pointed out, as police response has become more violent.

Also, very much behind of the scenes, the lobbying group Adoptees for Justice has been working to get now 91 cosponsors for the bill that would make every inter-country adoptee a citizen with no exceptions (story here). An estimated 18,000 or more Korean adoptees may be without citizenship, according to South Korean statistics.  The bill needs only to get before Congress for a vote. A brand new short promotional video and letter of support to sign is now available at:  adopteesforjustice.com/supportletter

As Georgia led the way to stop voter suppression and find voters of color to go to the polls, turning the state from red to blue in the general election, it also sent its first-ever Black senator to Capitol Hill.  At the same time, Asian American participation has risen, mainly due to similar efforts to get out the vote, in Minnesota, Georgia and other states as well.

As a nation, there has been one reckoning after another. In dealing with white supremacy and the recent insurrection in the Capitol there have been contradictory cries of “America is not like this,” and  “no, this is exactly what America is like.”  At the same time, diverse candidates are stepping up and winning elections to show the rest of us exactly what democracy can look like.

It has been a year of turmoil, loss and lessons; it has also been a year of getting back to the most important basics of life.  Many Korean Americans have reckoned with their own racial identity in an environment of heightened racial tensions.  At the same time, there has been a new representation of Korean Americans in politics and advocacy.  It is an energy that can no longer stand on the sidelines. With more Korean American leaders and activists to get us through 2021 and beyond, despite everything, the future is looking bright.

Black Lives Matter

by

Author Interview: In We Are Meant to Rise, BIPOC Minnesotans write about being at ground zero of a racial reckoning | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2022)

We Are Meant to Rise co-editor David Mura speaks at the book launch at Next Chapter Booksellers in Minneapolis. Photo by Heather Skinner

In the pre-pandemic days of 2019, Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura, longtime friends, writers, writing instructors, and collaborators in conducting community conversations about race, put out a call to writers of color in the Twin Cities.

The initial goal was to assemble an anthology some of the life stories shared in the panel conversations held through a community program dubbed More Than a Single Story.  However, after the topic was all decided, history unfolded in Minneapolis. Everything changed, including the trajectory of the planned anthology.

As 2019 turned into 2020, the two co-editors revised their call for stories twice; once to invite the writers to tell stories about the pandemic, and a second time, in the weeks following May 2020, to invite them to write of their thoughts about the George Floyd murder, the demonstrations in the Twin Cities afterwards, and the effect of these events on their lives.

This turning point in history from the point of view of writers living in that place and time is captured in We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, an anthology of 34 stories that launched at the end of 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press.

We Are Meant to Rise co-editor Carolyn Holbrook and contributor Sun Yung Shin.

In mid-2019, Holbrook and Mura were well prepared to embark on collecting the stories gleaned from a wealth of community conversations.  There were five years of stories from Holbrook’s ongoing panel discussion series More Than a Single Story, originally designed as a panel series for black women of various ethnic backgrounds, which expanded to include other women of color. The program later added a writing component.

This ongoing program collaborates with public libraries, the Loft Literary Center, and other venues.  Mura joined the program three years in, designing cross-cultural discussions for men of color, as he has done for other programs in the past.

Inviting the would-be anthology writers to write on the topics of pandemic and racial justice, particularly because many of the participants were Twin Cities writers of color, was instinctive.

Holbrook, a Hamline University creative writing professor, explained that the trauma of the times meant assembling the anthology would take longer than original calendar called for.  “There were several people… they were just unable to write for awhile,” she said.  “The pandemic affected people in such so many different ways.  Many people who just write all the time were just flattened and couldn’t write anything.” 

To encourage the writers, she said, “we had a Zoom meeting with several of those people and just had a really nice conversation with them, so that they could try to release whatever was holding them back.”  After that conversation, she said “the pieces began to flow.”  The editors also personally invited some well-known Twin Cities writers of color to contribute.

The collection in We Are Meant to Rise contains both prose and poetry.  It includes first-person accounts of those who witnessed and/or participated in demonstrations following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police.  It also takes in reflections of writers with Minnesota connections, contributing their perspectives of how the moment of racial reckoning reverberated with them.

Some writers recall events that happened during the demonstrations, in that neighborhood, such as Melissa Olson, who writes a journalistic account of how she and family members saved a radio archive, 1200 reels of audiotape from 15 years of interviews by the Minneapolis Native American media organization Migizi Communications, by taking them home in her van, while the buildings on either side of the Migizi headquarters were burning.  Two days after moving the archives, the Migizi building also burned to the ground.  She writes that fire trucks never came.

Other writers submitted first person accounts of how the pandemic and the racial violence have affected them personally.  Author/activist Shannon Gibney describes seeing play out before her a version of what James Baldwin wrote in 1962 about “the fire next time,” describing how as black Americans move out of what white society sees as their prescribed place “heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.” 

Minneapolis poet and writer Bao Phi reflects on living in and bringing up his young daughter in the place where George Floyd was killed.  He and his daughter lay a teddy bear on the memorial for Floyd, and he describes in his essay how the traumas have penetrated her.  He writes that she is afraid of police, and asks him often when she hears a sound at night if someone is breaking in.

Korean Minnesotan poet/playwright Ed Bok Lee’s 23-part prose poem Pandemic Love observes the pandemic loneliness and the impossibility of understanding the moment even as an eyewitness, as he walks around in South Minneapolis in the summer after the George Floyd murder and demonstrations.  Holbrook described Lee’s work as “an invocation,” and said she wanted it to be the first piece in the collection, after the introductory essays.

Lee was quarantined with his then three-year-old daughter in summer 2020 in their third-floor apartment, just blocks away from Cup Foods, where George Floyd was killed. Cut off from friends and other family, and many of the usual ways of amusing his daughter, the two of them took a lot of walks, he said, listening to constant sirens, observing what was happening in the neighborhood.  Her ability to express herself with words grew fast that summer, and she asked a lot of questions.  Amid a lot of confusion, external and internal, he treasures the one-on-one time he spent with his child at a critical time, noticed how their relationship deepened, and how she kept him grounded.

He attaches the word “alone-ness” to how he and others experienced the pandemic amid other new and unfolding traumas.  He searched for what was just below the surface of consciousness during the summer 2020 events, trying to get at that level in his poem.  “Not a lot of people had the language to process what was going on — it was all coming so fast,” he said, with pandemic confusion, racial uprising, jobs and events cancelled, with parents and kids suddenly at home together.  “People were sitting with all these questions, in alone-ness.”

At that moment, Lee said, he was trying to record what happened internally, and it spilled onto the page with what words he could gather up at the time.  In five years, he said, he would be able to do a better job, but he felt a duty to write what he could. 

Creative writers are “journalists of the interior life as they’re experiencing things — on the streets but also deep within them and within the psyche,” he said.  “And not just their own individual psyche but the psyche of society.  That is the poet’s and the creative writer’s job.”  He describes himself in Pandemic Love as cynical, but writes that “at your core, it’s hope more than habit that gets you up in the morning.”

Minneapolis poet/racial justice activist (and Korean adoptee) Sun Yung Shin penned a first-person self-interview entitled A Tangent to a Story About the Smith & Wesson .38, or Attempts to be Fully Assimilated into the White American Project Have Failed Miserably, in the Form of a Self-Questionnaire, in which she is the interviewee, a Korean adoptee who has little information about her origins, and apparently also asking the questions, in the voice of an interviewer who is frustrated that the interviewee seems not to be able to provide the simplest information.  With some dark humor, she brings out many questions that Korean adoptees cannot answer about themselves, even “when were you born?”

Shin, who was the editor of the 2016 anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, a collection of stories of Minnesotans with racialized prejudice, oppression and violence, said her creative piece for We Are Meant to Rise was freeing in that she could just write on a topic from a Korean adoptee perspective.  It was good not to be the editor.

Issues of belonging echo in the Korean adoptee experience, Shin said, and broadly in the community of Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) “in terms of white supremacy and the society that is created and sustained, saying some people belong some places, some people belong in other places, some people don’t belong at all, and some people don’t deserve to live, some people don’t deserve safety.”

This is the paradigm that led to George Floyd’s murder, she said, “which is that an alleged counterfeit $20 bill is more important than a human being’s life,” and that police authorities and other hierarchies get to make those calls. 

As an activist, Shin said, her work to educate about racist policies and heal racism has also been through “cross-racial” efforts to do work to “understand, repair, and transform” relationships.  She notes that racialization is bigger than just Black and white; it is part of a bigger system that takes in Asian Americans and others of many races.  Participating in the anthology was one way to be in discussion with others.  She seeks out such discussions, whether virtual, digital, or in person.  In-person gatherings are the best, she said, because of the sensitive nature of the topic. Shin will speak at some in-person events for We Were Meant to Rise later in 2022.

Mura describes the collection as a moment of history observed from many angles.  The rainbow of perspectives, from people of different ages and generations, he said, as well as the perspectives of people who grew up in the neighborhood or who live in the neighborhood now, make the collection unique. Including descriptions of the racial reckoning by indigenous Twin Citians puts the moment into a broad historical context of white oppression and genocide in Minnesota, he added.

Korean adoptee artists and writers like Sun Yung Shin and actor Sun Mee Chomet are examples of artists who have also become activists in the Twin Cities.  Mura credits Theater Mu for showcasing adoptee stories and encouraging adoptee playwrights and actors since the 1990s.

The anthology also showcases the maturity of the literary community of color in the Twin Cities.  “It is a very activist and politically-engaged community, also a very diverse community and one that has produced incredibly excellent art.”  At the same time, he said, this diverse community is very personally interconnected, even within families.  He related how comedian/storyteller Tou Xiong, addressing an local audience, asked how many Hmong folks in the audience had a black family member, and watched many hands shoot up, amid knowing chuckles.

As a Twin Cities resident since 1970, Mura said the notion of who Twin Citians are has undergone some shifts, but that it needs to continue to change in order to reflect reality.  South High School in South Minneapolis, Mura said, where his kids went to high school, is now 30 percent white, with the rest indigenous, black, East African, Asian American and Latinex.  This indicates that the diversity reflected in the anthology is a realistic demographic mix of the present and future Twin Cities.

“The traditional viewpoint of what Minnesota is comes from Mary Tyler Moore and Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, and that’s not what this area is any more,” he said.

Lee recalled that after the Obama election, there was mainstream talk that the U.S. had entered an era of a “post-racial America” which meant that ongoing racial tensions got much less attention in popular culture.  People of color never bought the “post-racial” notion, he added. Although the same kinds of police brutality and racial tensions have been happening for many years, Lee observed, the George Floyd moment gave it a kind of identity and attention it never had before.  Contributors to this collection, and many other artists of color, he said, have grabbed the moment to advocate for greater recognition of longstanding and systemic racial injustice issues.

Lee said the anthology captures a moment in time that is not available to those who did not experience the aftermath of the George Floyd murder as it unfolded in Minneapolis.  It is also a testament to democratic ideals that writers of all different backgrounds and walks of life added their voices to this collection.  “They are all BIPOC writers, but that’s almost the only thing they have in common,” he said, “that’s why it’s such a good microcosm of the democratization of whose story gets told.” 

Events for We Are Meant to Rise will be held later in 2022, and are listed on the website of More than a Single Story, at: www.morethanasinglestory.com.  Events are also listed at the website of the University of Minnesota Press, at: www.umnpress.edu.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

My Father’s Family

by

In honor of Passover | Poetry by Sun Mee Chomet (Spring 2020 issue)

“Walking through the concentration camps,

I thought of your father’s family,” he said. 

My

father’s

family.

These words spoken.

These words spoken after months

of conversations

with my lover,

explaining how connected I felt to Judaism.

“I always think it odd when adoptees claim their

American family’s religion as their own,”

he said.

These comments struck me odd.

The unspoken-

between-the-lines

suggested

somehow

that

my father’s family

was not my own.

Baruch Ato Ado-noi Elo-heinu Melech Ho-olom,

boray paree agohen…

See,

I digested matzo ball soup before kimchee jigae. 

I lit candles for Passover before incense for ancestors. 

Dipped parsley in salt before kimbap in sauce.

I watched my father put on his yarmulke

before I put on my first hanbok.

My father’s family.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

On this night, for as long as I can remember,

After Every Passover Seder, I Listened.

I listened ~

hours of talk about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,

about right and wrong,

politicking and compassion,

the value of land before life.

It’s brick houses in Chicago, menorahs,

It’s social justice, it is remembering,

It’s my tendency toward humor, sarcasm

It’s my draw towards intellect, music

It’s the joy I feel knowing that the rabbi at my brother’s school

does stand-up comedy on the side.

It’s the tenderness of watching my brother carry the Torah up the aisle.

It’s knowing my father can’t fix a thing in the house.

It’s watching my brother’s plane take off for Vienna,

a gift-trip given by U.S. Jews to grandchildren

of Holocaust survivors as an act of remembering,

wishing that I could go with him.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

My grandfather said,

“I know what it is to be other. 

I know what it is to be discriminated against. 

The sadness I feel when I think of Austria. 

It’s the same that you feel for Korea. 

It is the land of my home

and the land my estrangement

in the same breath.”

We sat, as my Opa held my hand. 

I listened

as he compared the branches of the trees

to the limbs of ballet dancers,

as any great Viennese painter would do.

I listened

as he spoke to me tenderly~

“My dear Sun Mee,”

he said.

“In 1945, Austria was dubbed Europe’s Korea. 

Vienna is my Seoul.”

On this night,

my grandmother shares her escape from the concentration camp,

an expensively smuggled fake i.d.,

the blessing-curse of being a Jew born

with blonde-blue features,

and years living in hiding in Holland,

the only one of her family to escape dying. 

On this night, I am drenched

in my grandfather’s stories of

the bombing of his beloved Austria. 

A short while later, bombs were dropped

on Korea as well~

a wealth of cold war that

paved

our parallel roads

to the United States.

On this night,

I remember my 4 year old brother

insisting that he play a violin

solo

at my grandfather’s funeral

because he knew how much

Opa

loved music.

Inside my walls,

the heavy heart of Judaism

entwines

with the han of Korea~

echoing complexities of culture and war and survival.

Tonight, I see

the impact of history

in the eyes of my relatives

and no walls exist between us. 

Our history is the same.

“Walking through

the concentration camps,

I thought of

your father’s family,”

my lover said.

I would think

silently

as I walked away

from him,

“Walking through the concentration camps,

I would know that my father’s family

was my own.”

By Sun Mee Chomet

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

Send your poetry, essays, photos, artwork, or other creative material to publisher@koreanquarterly.org

A Victorian Christmas romp

by

Sun Mee Chomet conducts comedy in Jungle Theater’s Miss Bennet  | Theater Review by Anne Holzman (Winter 2020 issue)

Jungle Theater presents "Miss Bennet" with Sun Mee Chomet.
Left to right: Jane Bennet Bingley (Roshni Desai), Mary Bennet (Christine Bardin), Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bennet Darcy (Sun Mee Chomet) and Lydia Bennet Wickham (Andrea San Miguel)

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberly, Scripted by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, Jungle Theater, Minneapolis ~ November 20 through December 29, 2019

The plush, ornate Jungle Theater offered the perfect setting for the Christmas comedy cocktail Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, at once a literary tribute to the enduring charms of Jane Austen and a hilarious interrogation of the many Christmas behaviors we Americans have inherited from Victorian England.

Let’s start with the poor pine/ spruce looming at center stage, introduced by Lizzy Bennet (played by the versatile Sun Mee Chomet) as the latest fashion in Christmas decorations from Germany, and endlessly remarked upon throughout the play.  Lizzy, the Elizabeth Bennet protagonist from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, feels she must establish herself as mistress of her husband’s estate, a question of setting fashions as well as managing servants.

The opening pushback from her husband concerning whether a tree belongs in a living room continues to plague her all evening in Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s clever, insightful script.  Staging under director Christina Baldwin doesn’t miss an opportunity to react with shock at the strange sight.

Seasonal irony abounds. The title character in the play just happens to be named Mary, but she’s not the one giving birth.  Rather, she is the bookish sister, socially awkward to say the least, not at all in search of a husband but longing to see the world.  “Can one live a large life in mind alone?”  Mary asks at the beginning of the play.  The question seems comically irrelevant, as largeness of life clearly surrounds a family as wealthy —- not to say ostentatious —- as the Bennets.

Though an unpregnant virgin, our Mary does have a pregnant sister —- the eldest of the five Bennet sisters, Jane, who, as she lumbers onstage, will clearly be going into labor any minute now.  Apart from a subplot-resolving arrangement to have the youngest sister, Lydia, become the baby’s nanny at some future time, the pregnancy and birth stay amusingly on the margins of the Bennet family drama.  If Christmas was ever about the birth of Christ, you certainly wouldn’t know it from watching this play.

What it’s really about, which we always knew in our hearts, is sibling rivalry.  Lizzy, the newly-married mistress of Pemberley, must manage her warring sisters and their all-too-human spouses, plus the perennially peripheral Anne DeBourgh (Anna Hickey), who is about to get jilted for the second time in her fictional career as she competes with Mary for the devotion (and the inheritance by marriage) of her cousin Arthur DeBourgh (Reese Britts).

Lizzy’s husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy (James Rodriguez) is no help at all, a straight man throwing curveballs as he spills secrets, misses nuances, and dismisses the excitement of impending parenthood as “common” —- each time leaving Lizzy behind to clean up the mess.

For sheer comic panache, young Lydia (Andrea San Miguel) outdoes all her rivals, throwing herself at the clueless DeBourgh and cleverly savaging her sisters.  San Miguel’s wide, devilish grin seems to be everywhere as she flits about the stage, getting into the faces, and sometimes the laps, of characters who are rather more comfortable with a little refined personal space.

The male leads, too, revel in one-dimensional comic roles.  So Chomet’s role as Lizzy requires knitting together these disparate characters, her reactions on stage subtly guiding our reactions as viewers to make the wacko plot add up in the end.  Her affectionate relationship with the giant Christmas tree at center stage somehow explains her ability to keep her family from tearing itself apart.  And Chomet has perfected the frozen-face timing that allows the audience an interval of laughter before the clever language resumes on stage.

The script by Gunderson and Melcon mimics Austen’s language while allowing flexible character development.  American actors must resort to a few Britishisms in order for the jokes to make sense, but the Jungle cast didn’t get too wrapped up in accents for their Minnesota audience.  The delivery of the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice, concerning the necessity of marriage, blossomed with deadly perfume as the play reached its climax, sort of, in a slant-told Victorian manner.

It is to be hoped that, like indoor trees and sibling rivalry, the Jungle’s Austen tributes will become an enduring Christmas tradition. 

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

Identity crisis

by

Comedy and great acting saves this new play, despite a twist to dramatic tragedy at the end  | Theater Review by Joanne Rhim Lee  (Fall 2019 issue)

Mixed Blood Theater and Theater Mu present "Hot Asian Doctor Husband, featuring Eric Sharp.
The cast of Hot Asian Doctor Husband, from left to right: Danielle Troiano, Mikell Sapp, Eric Sharp, Meghan Kreidler and Damian Leverett.

Hot Asian Doctor Husband by Leah Nanako Winkler

Mixed Blood Theatre, Minneapolis/Theater Mu Production ~ August 16 through September 1, 2019

The title of Leah Nanako Winkler’s new work, which had a limited run this fall at the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis, is a winking reference to what a certain segment of the female Asian population is purportedly looking for: A “hot Asian doctor husband.”  Could this really be true?

As the play opens, Emi, a 20-something half-Asian woman, is breaking up with Colin, her longtime white boyfriend.  They have been together for several happy years, so he is completely caught off guard when Emi launches into a long soliloquy about how she wants to “de-colonize her vagina.” When he questions her reasoning, she admits that it is because he is white.  Her Japanese mother has just recently passed away in a tragic accident, and she can’t bear the thought of someday having children who might not look Asian.  Instead, she wants to meet a “Hot Asian Doctor Husband” so that she can bear unambiguously Asian children.

At this point, most rational people would walk away, but Collin is a Seemingly Perfect (White) Boyfriend, so although he still loves her, he agrees to break up so that she can focus on her identity issues.  To do this, Emi turns to her best friend, Leonard, who it seems will drop anything to be a shoulder for her to cry on.

Leonard is a great friend, but he clearly has some issues of his own.  His girlfriend-of-the-month Veronica is lovely —- open, honest, not to mention beautiful, but he is keeping her at an arm’s distance, and doesn’t ask her any questions about herself, such what she does for a living, or where she is from.  Veronica longs to know more about Leonard and take their relationship deeper, but she is so enamored with him that she is willing to take whatever she can get.  Newcomer Danielle Troiano imbues Veronica with freshness and vulnerability, and one wonders why Leonard cannot see what an amazing catch she is.  Mikell Sapp is funny and endlessly charming as Leonard, so he somehow gets a pass.

Newly single and laser focused on her goal, Emi promptly goes out and meets a Hot Asian Doctor who she hopes will become her husband someday.  As the man of her dreams, Eric Sharp commands the stage, speaking in a dreamy baritone voice and moving with the confidence and swagger of a man who knows his stock is high.  In a karaoke bar, he sings and dances with aplomb, covering every inch of the stage with his pseudo-sexy moves.  The million-dollar question is, would he hold the same status in Emi’s eyes if he were not a doctor?  Probably not.  But the fact that he wears a white lab coat and a stethoscope makes her go weak in the knees.  She is smitten, and so are we, because of Sharp’s campy performance. 

Meanwhile, Collin is still pining away for Emi, the love of his life.  In plaid flannel shirts and jeans, strumming a guitar and singing sad songs about his broken heart, he is the quintessential Seemingly Perfect (White) Ex-Boyfriend.  Boyishly handsome Damian Leverett plays it straight as Collin, and we cannot help but root for him, even if he is a little milquetoast.

Halfway through the play, things are going along swimmingly, with the laughs coming a mile a minute.  However, at this point the tone of the play takes a sudden shift.  Emi learns that the Hot Asian Doctor Husband is not what he seemed, and she is forced by Leonard to confront her mother’s recent death and why it caused her to break up with Collin and seek out a stereotyped ideal. 

As Emi, Meghan Kreidler tackles the transition well, moving from comedically pathetic to frighteningly depressed, even summoning her dead mother to ask for guidance.  As her ghost mother, Theater Mu veteran actor Sun Mee Chomet makes a short but powerful cameo, basically giving Emi the smackdown that she needs.

The playwright seems to have lost her way in this last act, leaving the audience feeling confused and unsatisfied.  What began as a light, funny commentary on ethnic identity and interracial relationships morphs into a dark statement about death, with dark props and monologues about “standing between love and death.”  Like Emi, Hot Asian Doctor Husband seems to be suffering from an identity crisis, and could use a rewrite.

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

Copyright ©2025 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Show Buttons
Hide Buttons