“My debut poetry collection, PlayHouse: Poems, positions music as a dwelling that people, from Billie Holiday to members of my family, can inhabit and shape.”
“No literary homage to Kpop would be complete without the OG of Kpop songs, and ‘Gangnam Style’ will forever occupy that seat with swagger, style, and an irrepressible beat.”
“Because I don’t listen to music when I write, it’s hard to think of a playlist of songs that might make sense with this book. Instead I offer an assortment of sound pieces that seem to me to be thinking about spaces and their noises the way I was sometimes thinking about the spaces in/of this book . . .”
“When I’m working on a novel, the rhythm of the sentences are essential to me. It’s not about music for music’s sake, but rather a way of tapping into the movement of a particular mind, a particular way of being.”
“The Best That You Can Do is my love letter to Generation X— to those of us who grew up with latchkeys and had to make do till our parents and guardians came home…”
“I’ve written a book about teeth. My teeth. Their decline and fall and costly rebirth.”
“For years now, I’ve said that when I finally settle down and find somewhere I want to live, the first thing I’m going to do is buy a nice hi-fi system, procure Walter Wegmüller’s 1973 double Krautrock LP Tarot, and just spend an afternoon in a comfortable chair in front of the speakers.”
“Because Spring on the Peninsula follows Seoul’s millennials and Generation X, much of its envisioned soundtrack has to do with K-pop before it became a globally recognized term…”
“At heart, the novel is not only about the hardship of becoming a refugee, and the imbalance of power between the privileged and the destitute, it is about love.”
“The playlist below makes me think not only of the book and the terrain it covers, but also my journey of writing it.”