I am writing a novel. I am writing diligently so that by Eastertide or Summer 2028 at the latest, I can submit a manuscript to an independent press in New York (and many other publishers, too). I chose this press because it was the only one who would publish the small, quiet, unknown book called Clay Walls in 1986 that is today a landmark in Korean-American literature.
I aspire to write a bildungsroman about a Korean-American girl who matures into proper Christian and Korean womanhood despite facing tests and challenges. It will be based on my lived experience because I think it would articulate the experiences and issues a lot of other daughters of Asian immigrants growing up in Diaspora face, but my focus is within the United States of America. I had no role models growing up in the late 1990s and 2000s of proper Korean-American womanhood!
I want to tell a story of a little girl and young woman who experiences things no little girl should experience and feels she is locked out of being pure and a future wife and mother in the Church and her Korean community. It is about how she discovers that by exercising her uniquely human attributes of searching for meaning, turning to God and having faith in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, she can be what she has always longed to be: a Proverbs 31 woman!
