This story is part of The Stranger’s Art + Performance Quarterly, Winter Edition, which is on stands now.
“There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most,” E.J. Koh writes in her new memoir, The Magical Language of Others. “I was revenge when I was born in 1988 at O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, California.”
This is the logic that drives Koh’s narrative, a cinematic and multigenerational saga about the hard work of repairing past transgressions through present action so that the future can be, hopefully, maybe—so long as we keep working at it—more joyful.
At 15 years old, Koh and her brother were left in the United States when Koh’s father took a lucrative, high-powered job in South Korea, and her mom went with him. The parents moved Koh and her 19-year old brother, along with a husky dog and a parakeet named Mieko, into a small house in Davis, California, where they more or less raised each other. At a recent reading from the memoir, someone approached Koh and quipped, “It’s like you wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Korean Genius“—riffing on the title of Dave Eggers’s 2000 memoir about a couple of siblings basically raising each other.
