What About the Rest of Your Life Quotes

“Trauma doesn't occur in a vacuum. You don't outgrow it with time. It grows with you, even if the growing goes all wrong. It's like breaking an arm and never putting it in a cast. You're bigger, but the bone is still broken. Maybe there's a throb of pain once in a while. You can't just stop using the arm. The more you use it the more it tears and contorts. You get clumsy. You break more limbs. Even if you see a doctor now, there's no going back to the beginning.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“I'm always mistaking need for want and love.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages.
It's like, don't touch my shit.
It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-pff-a-hickory-switch mode.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“You need your mother. Your mother beats you. Translation: You need your mother to beat you. Your mother loves you. Your mother beats you. Translation: Sometimes love looks like this. You look for a love that looks like this. You love your mother. Your mother hurts you. Translation: Pain becomes a beautiful thing.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“Love is not a white lie. It doesn't fill the cracks and make bad things beautiful or okay. Love is allowing ourselves to be fooled, not being fooled. Leaving ourselves open to hurt, not the hurt itself. Leaving ourselves open to delusion, not delusion itself. It's not a guarantee, it's the act of promising. The breathtaking act of hope. It's the stupid high-stakes gamble that pays off. It's a whisper of a touch. It's a window flung open and naked to the day.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“My father learned to drink and hide. I'm learning all kinds of things.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“I won't let myself know it yet, but I want to say yes and there are reasons I can't seem to understand while we're both this fucked up. These reasons will seem wholly clear afterwards, revealing in a slow bloom as I drag myself to twelve-step meetings, support groups, to therapy, as I erase my rapist's number from my phone and get back in school, as I wake shaking from a nightmare and Bryan holds me, saying, "I'm here," "I won't go," and "I promise." Each time he says I'm sorry for things he didn't do to me.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“When I set a dish in front of someone, when I take somebody by the hand and walk them through the plaza of a Korean supermarket or restaurant or my mother's kitchen, I'm not there to feed them something new. Our recipes are not party tricks. I'm trying to share something rich, and old, and long-simmered. Something beyond the names for things. Something about comfort and tenderness, something familiar, save for perhaps in another language.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“Safety and innocence don't exist in nature. Childhood is a social construct, an ideological fever dream afforded by those whose mothers call miracles rather than eye from an ambivalent distance, fists clenched in hopes that we don't cry, for god's sake, again.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“I think about the last time he picked up a paintbrush and all the effort it took for him to crawl out from under the crushing weight of a world that won't value its strokes.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“I'm sorry. I know I'm not a good person.

I'm sorry. But I don't believe in bad people either.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages.
It's like, don't touch my shit.
It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-off-a-hickory-switch mode.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“One could say rice is almost as important as water. Yet like the taste of water, my deep reverence for rice is ineffable. I understand why Bryan doesn't get it. I can explain and explain the cultural significance of rice until he concedes its importance, but he'll never be more than a tourist. He'll never be more than a voyeur, an audience. He wasn't there when my mother stirred rice flour and water into glue to affix old photographs to the pages of a scrapbook. He wasn't there then she showed me how it's done and proclaimed what wonders live inside a single grain of rice. He wasn't there when she mixed that same slurry into chili paste for the kimchi or tamed peeling wallpaper with it. He wasn't there when she used it to fix a punctured paper screen. Rice taught me imagination. Rice taught me wonder and nostalgia. But he wasn't there.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“Xenophobia doesn't always look like a monument of shame. It doesn't always look like ridicule and jeering. It looks like a room full of people and nobody to sit with. It looks like conversations buzzing all around me with no way in. It looks like one person at a time, taking notice of the ways in which I differ, and expressing quiet disinterest and revulsion. No one, big public humiliation. Many small, private disappointments.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“Some workshop professors will say you can write the same essay a hundred times because there's no such thing as a single objective narrative in real life. Truth doesn't come in shades so much as numerous specks of one indisputable, collective experience that no one has the distance to see.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“She will sit there and ask, "Why you do like this?" She will ask, "Why you do this drug?" She will ask, "Why you always?" I will remember the heat of her hands across my face, the threats she spat at me in anger, the quiet house with no adults. She will say, "That's Korean way," and neither of us will buy the excuse, but we will both swallow its grave necessity.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life