An Interview with Jiwon Choi
By: Naziyah Rahman and Anne Ming
Jiwon Choi is a gardener of both botanical and literary qualities. She is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons (Hanging Loose Press, 2017), I USED TO BE KOREAN (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). During this interview, we discussed her most recent book, A Temporary Dwelling (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), which is characterized strongly through themes of inheritance, grief, and the body. In her poetry, these ideas find particular focus in both broader societal struggles and deeply personal relationships with the self and others. We spoke to her about her approach to writing, heritage, and where the two intersect.
A: To start off with kind of a softball question—which poem or poems in the collection took the longest to write?
J: There’s one poem in there—it might be the Vincent Chin poem—and that might have taken probably more than ten, maybe up to twenty drafts. That doesn’t mean that I rewrote the whole thing twenty times, it just means that there were certain changes. Even if they were taking out a word or adding a word, that’s all part of the process of writing the piece. So there are pieces that I will keep drafting. And other pieces that don’t require the same amount of editing.
A: Is there anything you find particularly difficult in writing or editing?
J: I think a lot of it is not to over-edit. I think it’s a fine line. You don’t want to be constantly going back and whittling it down. But that can also be part of the process. So knowing when to stop can be tricky at times. But every poem has its own different relationship with you. You never know when you’ll feel that you really need to work on something over and over again. But again, you don’t want it to overtake you. So I think I work on finding the balance in that process.
I think it’s definitely important to be truthful to yourself, and honor yourself, and understand what compelled you to create the poem, but you want to bring in the reader as much as possible. And the editing process is really respectful. It’s our responsibility obviously to keep the crux of the poem alive. But our responsibility is also to create a dialogue with the outside world. You’re sharing something with the person reading your poem, and if they connect with it, I think it’s such a wonderful way to be in the community with each other.
N: Which poem was the most enjoyable to write, or your favorite, if you have one?
J: That is an interesting question. I don’t know if I have a favorite per se, but there are poems that I feel are…successful in a way? The poem that I wrote about my mother—“The Moth In Your Kitchen”—cause that actually had a different title before I settled on “The Moth In Your Kitchen.” And that was a poem that I wrote in my head while I was walking in Greenwood Cemetery. This was right around when she had died, so you know my boyfriend and I go to the cemetery to do a lot of birdwatching, and their ashes are also interred there—my mom and my aunt. But this poem I wrote in my head as we were walking and birdwatching. So that felt like a different process for me, and it felt successful in that way, cause I don’t normally write in that fashion.
N: Yeah, I feel like most of the time I say I have a favorite poem, it comes from the perspective of the poet, and not the readers. It’s more like the experience of creating the poem, as you described.
J: Yeah. Sometimes it’s not pleasurable. Sometimes it’s very uncomfortable. Necessary but you know, uncomfortable. It’s not always a happy situation.
N: For us who experience very niche sorts of immigrant experiences, I feel like I often struggle to translate that in a way that lets my readers understand. So for example, in our class, the demographic is skewed towards non-immigrant students, which is sometimes tough to get my experiences onto paper in a way that they can really feel. What’s been your experience with that, and how were you able to do that in your own work?
J: I think the immigrant story is actually an American story. I think we all have to remember that really everyone is an immigrant here. Unless you’re Native American, you are an immigrant. Even if your family came off the Mayflower, sorry. I know people may not like to think of themselves that way, but I am a proud immigrant myself. My family came over from Korea when I was two or three. I mean, I’m proudly New York, I’ve lived in New York all my life, but I’m definitely an immigrant in my mind and in my heart, because that’s the story of my family. And I have to honor my family by keeping those stories alive. I don’t think that it is a niche experience at all. I think everyone in your class needs to understand that their families—even if they’ve been here for hundreds of years—they made the journey from somewhere. And that is a story that binds us all together, whether your family came to the U.S. two years ago versus fifty years ago. It’s a story that is really the common thread of people, is the stories that we have from making the journey into this country.
Even though we call these “immigrant stories,” I think your story, if you tell it with enough detail and truth, is something that anyone can really relate to. I definitely think that poets need to put themselves into their poetry, cause that’s how we connect to each other. So I would definitely encourage you to put in as much of yourself into your work, because I think it’s really important to share our stories with each other.
N: For sure. I’ve been trying to do that more, just being a little more transparent and raw with my emotion and my experiences. Especially as a second-gen immigrant. That’s sort of what was holding me back, but you’ve definitely shed a lot of light on that, so thank you for that.
J: But of course, you’re going to fashion out your voice. You’re going to create your voice, and that’s going to come out in a way that’s very specific to you, which I think is what’s so important about art and poetry in general, is you’re going to decide for yourself how you’re going to be a poet in the world. I don’t know if you’ve read Denise Levertov in your class, but she has a great book called The Poet In The World, where she writes about our responsibility as artists and poets to really tell what’s going on in the world. And she wrote it at the time of the Vietnam War, so she was really active, and really talking against the war and how also as artists we have a responsibility to also be political as much as we can. Because we are still citizens of the world, and our poetry really can influence and make change.
I mean, that whole stuff going on at Columbia University, it’s just mind-boggling. I mean, it’s a place of institution and they’re expelling students, I just can’t wrap my mind around that. It’s just shameful to me.
I don’t want to say that this country isn’t an important symbol. Obviously it’s an important symbol, because that’s why my mom wanted to come here from Korea. But there’s no acknowledgement, really, of the violence of its history. You know, this was a plantation system for over 400 years, and it’s still a plantation system for many people of color. If we’re not able to have these conversations with one another, we’re not going to progress as much as we think we’ve progressed. I’m not saying we haven’t progressed, but I think those difficult conversations have to happen. And they can happen through art. Obviously they do happen through art. But you know, if you can’t even talk about your past, and your present, how can you talk about your future? You have to be able to talk about difficult, uncomfortable things.
A: Yeah, absolutely. On a much more individual level, I was really interested in how you dealt with these kinds of issues on a very, very personal scale, especially in poems like “Harbinger” and “Body Mass Index,” this connection between food and body—especially through this double entendre of “processed trauma.” I guess I’m wondering what your inspiration for this metaphor was, and how that relates back to the epigraph of the book.
J: Yeah, so “Our worldly flesh is nothing more than a temporary dwelling.” That’s from Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I love that book. I’ve reread it twice already. For me, I don’t really read a lot of fiction, but I do love him. I love his work.
I think the body—I also, because I watch 600-lb Life a lot. I don’t know whether I should reveal that part of myself to you (laughs), but I watch a lot of those crazy reality shows, and 600-lb Life is one that I’m sort of drawn to, because there’s stories of these people who are trying to overcome this addiction with eating. And so they are at a point where they are almost going to die because their bodies are going to completely flatline, because the heart cannot maintain a six-hundred pound body for too long.
So for me, you think of food as comfort obviously, because when I think of my mom’s cooking I’m very comforted. I have these beautiful images of her. But it’s also peril, right? How food can also become this other symbol of destruction, this symbol of vice. And so you think of those two things. And if you don’t have enough food, that’s going to put you in danger. So there’s all of these roles that food has in our lives. Most of it is obviously positive in my mind, but there’s also this dark side of how we can use really anything almost to destroy ourselves. Something as innocuous as a Twinkie, right? If you like 3000 of them, it just becomes this danger.
I mean, I don’t have my family anymore. The only connection I have to my family is my mother’s cooking, and the recipes I retain in my head of her cooking. Also, because the body does have a memory. I think it’s important to remember that it’s not just our minds and our brains, our body also has this memory of our lives. As young children, as—you know, our body holds all these feelings and these thoughts. So food and the body are very linked together by default, but it makes sense that your body would also have its own relationship with food and with eating. So yeah, I mean I do think about those things quite a bit.
A: Yeah, and I think your poetry explores this relationship of the body as both the consumer and the consumed really thoroughly. There’s this very apparent generational heritage that chains everything together, from the speaker’s mom’s cooking to the speaker’s own womb.
J: So, I guess because I’m reading Haunting the Korean Diaspora by Grace Cho—she writes a lot about how the body is a vector for ghosts from the past. And so in a way, I think about the body as—even though the body is here now, like my body in 2024, I also feel that my body has the remnants of my family history stored within me. And that’s an interesting symbol of the womb as well, having something growing within you, or housed within your body. But yeah, there is a sense that we carry within us secrets and stories and experiences that even though we weren’t there to experience them, those things have all been ingested by us. Because we consume whatever sadness our parents have dealt with. That definitely is born within us. And that again relates back to the body memory aspect of it. So even though I didn’t live that situation, I inherited that within my own body, and it becomes my own experience that I have to sort of deal with.
N: To add onto that, and this is just sort of an interesting science perspective on this — I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the field of epigenetics. Essentially, your DNA can physically be changed based on the stresses your parents or grandparents went through. So while it’s not the exact coding of your DNA itself—based on how much stress your parents went through for example, you can genetically become more or less susceptible to that stress, even if this happened within their lifetime. Previously it was thought that whatever DNA was going to be passed onto you was whatever your parents were born with, but that’s actually not true. Essentially, the way that they have responded to stress from the trauma they went through in their life can be patterned. I know that’s more of a literal and scientific perspective on this, but it’s interesting to think about when it comes to how we are vessels of the histories of our ancestors.
J: Yeah, no, that makes really good sense. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the adversity—childhood adversity, there’s sort of a gauge. As a child, if you’ve dealt with difficult situations, it’s this rubric which basically says, as a grown-up your likelihood of having a really bad adulthood is higher. You know, like your likelihood of going to jail, or being an alcoholic, or being a drug addict, all of these things increase depending on how many childhood adversities you’ve dealt with. And that I think is more common sense than science, really. It is nurture and nature. It’s not just, you know, our parents have brown hair and now we have brown hair. There’s a lot that we inherit from our environment, in addition to who our parents are. If they have dealt with a lot of stress, of course we’re going to inherit that in some way, in some form.
There’s this idea in Korea, this idea of han, which is really this nationwide sorrow that all Koreans feel, because it’s definitely passed down to us from our families, because they’ve experienced so much trauma with colonialism and the war, all of that stuff. That’s something that’s still pervasive now in that country. I don’t think there’s anything really in the U.S. that’s similar to that idea, but the idea of things being passed down to us is true in a lot of cultures. Maybe not so in the Western, but you know, other cultures.
Naziyah Rahman and Anne Ming conducted this interview as part of a project in Joanna Fuhrman’s poetry course in which students talk with poets about their new poetry collections.