Post #29 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
I’ve just finished reading Jid Lee’s new memoir To Kill A Tiger: A Memoir of Korea, and now I’m eagerly awaiting our Author Conversation this Thursday. Any writer who within two pages sets me down in a land I’ve never visited and completely envelopes me in the culture is someone I want to talk with. Ms. Lee has written a memoir that’s larger than herself or even her extended
family. It’s a memoir of her country, and it’s not without contradictions, challenges, regrets, and nostalgia.
When was the last time you started a memoir and learned right off that the author’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother sacrificed herself at the tender age of 20 to be eaten by a tiger in order to secure her family’s success for generations to come? For that matter, when was the last time you met someone who could even tell you something that vivid about an ancestor so many generations removed? But in the space of a few pages, you get an image of the young Lee listening to her grandmother’s tale for the ump-teenth time. Lee shows us her youthful impatience subdued by a respect for her elders that is as old as the Korean culture. In this one story, you see how this book is going to artfully entwine Lee’s own thoughts and memories with those of her family history, placed firmly within the context of her homeland.
The book review comes next week, so I’m not going to say any more about To Kill A Tiger. Let me, instead, introduce you to our author who came to the United States as an international student, attended SUNY Albany and the University of Kansas, became a US citizen in 1989 and is a tenured professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Lee has become the woman of letters that her grandmother always believed would be her accomplishment. To Kill A Tiger is her second book. But that’s just her resume. What I find most interesting about the bio that her publisher provided is that it tells me more about her mother’s heartbreak than it tells me about Lee.
Jid Lee’s mother’s brother and sister traveled to North Korea in 1956, never to be seen again. Today, more than 50 years later, her mother still waits…for word, for news, for anything that will tell her of their fate. She has never given up on them and maintains the family home and a separate bank account for them…just in case. In some ways, this one story is the story of To Kill A Tiger in microcosm.
Matilda and I hope you will join us for our call with Ms. Lee. You are invited to listen in live or wait for the recording, which we’ll post here on Women’s Memoirs next Monday. Either way, I hope you’ll read Lee’s story below and be inspired to leave a question for her in the form of a Comment. We’ll use your questions to direct our interview. Here are the details for getting on the call:
Date/Time: Thursday, January 14, 2009, 8:00 PM EST (5:00 PM Pacific)
Phone Number: 712-432-0600 (access code: 998458#)
You can learn more about To Kill A Tiger by visiting the Overlook Press blog. And now, Ms. Lee shares her story with our Women’s Memoirs readers:
Coming to Terms with Family, Culture and the Past
By Jid Lee
The first draft of my new book To Kill A Tiger: A Memoir of Korea was over 230,000 words, and now the finished version is less than 130,000 words. I went through three different editors and a dozen drastic revisions to come up with what is left.
I felt I had to write every single thing that happened to me because I was haunted with guilt and anxiety. “How can I be so shameless?” I thought. “I am selling the secrets of my family. I am betraying my loved ones.” I felt overwhelmed by the need to describe how I resented and yet cherished my family.
My family mirrors the contradictions in human beings that can be exacerbated during turbulent times. My mother, a typical Confucian woman whose entire life was defined by subservience to the men in her life, is also a brave warrior. She would have jumped into a fire to save her husband and children—and her country. On a day in the summer of 1950, she risked her physical safety to save the lives of two straggling North Korean soldiers who walked in on her grass-roof house, where she, her mother-in-law (my grandmother), and my older sister and brother, a toddler and infant, were staying. The soldiers were on their way back to North Korea in stolen civilian clothes, nearly dead from hunger and exhaustion. “I don’t know if they made it back to North Korea,” my mother would tell me. “But the meal I cooked for them, I’m sure, kept them alive for a couple more days at least.”
Like this subservient yet courageous woman, my father was full of the contradictions of his time. As a member of the socialist grass roots republic in the Korean Peninsula that existed prior to the Americans’ arrival, he was dedicated to justice and equality for all. He even endured being physically tortured by the secret police of the right-wing dictator, Syngman Rhee, who was handpicked by the American government in 1945. And yet, this man—this man who not only preached but also practiced his belief in justice and equality for all—turned a blind eye to the same privileges for the second sex. How sad he was that I was not a boy! How grief-stricken he was that my little sister was a girl! When I was sixteen, he handpicked my older sister’s husband and forced her, an obedient Confucian daughter, into marriage with a man she cared nothing for. He was no different from the vast majority of the men of his generation who believed in democracy for men and dictatorship for women. And yet, it is this man to whom my memoir is dedicated.
I wrote my memoir for myself, to reconcile my guilt, my hatred, and my love for these people, to reconcile myself with my past. But in writing it, I found I was commemorating them, too, offering them respect by telling their stories, helping my adopted country achieve greater understanding of the country where I was born, its brave people, and their battle throughout the very difficult Twentieth Century. When I decided to leave my guilt and anxiety aside, I could be more focused and less repetitive. My editors helped me to be succinct—to encapsulate into a much shorter space all the spectrum of facts in my personal life mirroring the collective history of modern Korea.
Writing Prompt
Memoir is a popular genre because it illustrates a universal human conflict: all societies, wherever they are in the world or in whichever period of history, have rigid rules for accepted conduct. And every person, to some extent, will chafe against these rules for one reason or another. For me, the rigid gender definition of the Confucian hierarchy of my childhood was the struggle that shaped me as a person, and what I needed to explore in writing my memoir. But every person who has been inspired to write a memoir is someone like me—who has suffered rules or norms that don’t make sense for them, and whose personality, or internal self, has been shaped by their reaction to these rules.
To write your own memoir, this is a very good place to start. Recall the incidents in your life that trained you to separate your internal self from external societal forces. Did you ever have a breaking point where you realized that you were not like everyone else? Or at least, not the way everyone else seemed to want you to be? Describe these incidents specifically. Show how you refused to internalize the dictates from the outside and learned to foster a stronger inside.
Brainstorm on a piece of paper or on your computer for as long as you need to. While brainstorming, let the incidents write themselves. Let them write you. Then, select a couple from among all these incidents, ones that show your self-definition most clearly and dramatically. Remember: some things have to go.
When you make your choices, please remember to present yourself as a good—and bad—person at once to earn your authorial credibility. One is shaped by mistakes as well as good deeds.
*******************
And one note from Women’s Memoirs: Ms. Lee tells us that she “went through” three editors to get her book into a manageable package. Using an editor is not a reflection of her writing ability. In truth, I didn’t have to touch a word or so much as a comma to get this blog ready for posting. Lee’s editors gave her the second, third and fourth sets of eyes and objectivity she needed to craft a focused, well-organized story. Every good writer can benefit from a good editor. If you think you’re ready for some editorial assistance, check out Story Circle Network’s Editorial Service.
memoir writing prompt
writing tip
memoir of Korea
memoir
