For Joan Sung, feeling seen only takes a pair of tweezers and a mention of Asian kids being tasked with plucking their mother’s gray hairs. As a debut author, fostering that sense of cultural belonging and connection, all through the lens of personal anecdotes, is what excites her about her forthcoming memoir “Kinda Korean: Stories From an American Life.” That, and the hope that her work captures the experiences of Asian Americans and uncovers the taboos that permeate our communities.

“It’s these little things that you don’t know are shared experiences,” says Sung, referencing inside jokes that Asian American readers would get — plucking your mother’s hairs with a tweezer, struggling through rigorous Korean school, or the lack of conversation around periods and sex. “If I had to visualize a moment that I think I would treasure, it would be a reader coming up to me and being, like, ‘I feel so seen.’”

Ironically, Sung’s writing role model was someone who couldn’t be more different from her. “I started reading David Sedaris in college, and a girlfriend had pointed out how similar his [writing] style was to mine,” Sung says. “He’s a queer, white, cisgendered male author, but has the sense of otherness and finding humor and levity in things that are actually inherently dark. Also, I’m Korean, so we tend to not shy away from dark death conversations.”

Sedaris’ writing had a profound impact on Sung, showing her that there was a market for a voice like his — and hers. Sung initially modeled her book after Sedaris’ style of compiling personal essays, but that changed as her book progressed. However, one section that remained was an essay written by Sung as an 18-year-old college student in her dorm room at Western Washington University.

“At the time, I wanted to capture what otherness meant — though I didn’t know it — in terms of my Asian American identity,” Sung explains. “I just knew I didn’t fit in. I knew that I was treated differently. I knew that I was discriminated against, but I didn’t understand, really, the root cause of why. … I was so young, I couldn’t tie that in with the fact that it very much had to do with being a child of immigrants.”

Writing in Quarantine

This sense of otherness and discrimination peaked in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian violence and sentiment. 

“Everything was amplified in the way our communities were treated, and I remember being angry at this narrative that this was very new,” Sung recalls. “So I kind of became fearful for how [my son] Jacob would be treated, and this fire was lit underneath me, because I felt so responsible to step in and make change for our children. I didn’t want them to go through what we were going through during the pandemic, and I sure as hell didn’t want Jacob to go through the same things that I went through as a kid.”

Sung, who has a Bachelor of Arts in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing, a Master of Arts in English, and a doctorate in Education, left her job as a high school English Language Arts teacher and began speaking at conferences and conducting professional development trainings around racial equity. This developed into full-time positions doing work promoting advocacy and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), with Sung currently serving as DEI project director for a community college in Auburn, Washington.

Sung’s renewed fire to spotlight the experiences of Asian Americans — including her own — came to a head during the pandemic when her family was quarantining, leaving her with little else to do but write.

“During the pandemic, I gave myself this tough-love talk that was like, if not now, then when,” recalls Sung. “I was, like, no excuses — it has to start now. So I wrote my first draft in a week. It was summertime, I was sitting in a pool of my own sweat in front of the laptop, and I just purged it out.”

Sung pitched her compilation of essays, only to be rejected and told by dozens of agents that her story didn’t resonate with them. “The thing is, they were all majority white, which I thought was mind-blowing because, of course, you don’t resonate with it,” Sung says. “It’s difficult for me to say that there’s a wrong lens and a correct lens to read books, but if you don’t belong to a community and you’re reading a book expecting to be seen in it — I think you’re the problem. You should be reading it to be humble and to be a learner, and to want to have insight on an experience that is vastly different from your own.”

Sung put a hold on pitching her book and enrolled in a writing course, which taught her to refine the craft of writing a memoir. During the class, Sung’s writing coach told her that the story wasn’t successful as a series of essays. “I had to rewrite the whole thing to make it flow, and she was right,” Sung says. I think David Sedaris does something really special, but it did not work for my story.”

The pitching resumed, with no leads for almost a year. Then Sung entered her manuscript in a diversity in publishing contest run by She Writes Press, a publisher focused on women authors. Although Sung had lost the contest several years prior, this time, she won and received a publishing deal.

Writing to Heal

Each chapter of “Kinda Korean” touches on a stereotype or common experience of discrimination that many Asian Americans face, but from an anecdotal viewpoint. And because her memoir is so vulnerable, the writing process reopened wounds that she hadn’t thought of for decades.

“It really caught me off guard when I went to a very angry place,” Sung shares. “I struggled with that for almost a year after I finished writing it, and I was lashing out, snapping at people who loved me, who cared about me, and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t understand the correlation between that [and the book] because I had told myself that, ‘Oh, I’m over it. It was so many years ago, I’m fine.’ I had bought into that so fully, mentally and emotionally, that revisiting my trauma would actually trigger me wasn’t apparent to me.”

Sung dove into the healing process through nearly a year of therapy — what she describes as a “freaking challenge as an Asian American.” Even asking for help can be difficult, she said, due to the stigma surrounding people who seek therapy within a collectivist culture, who are often seen as too individualistic.

“It was 11 months of intensely looking at my anger and forgiving myself in order to forgive my mom — my tiger mom — and a lot of people who inflicted their own trauma onto me,” Sung says. “But I feel like I’ve been reborn, honestly, when I look back at my old self. I really don’t recognize it.”

Now, with multiple book readings scheduled and the anticipation of putting her life on display so vulnerably, Sung says she feels a bit like she wants to turtle, having poured her heart out in writing and sharing some aspects of her life that have never been revealed prior. But what pushes her out of her shell goes back to the tweezers and the knowing nod from other Asian Americans who have plucked their mother’s hairs.  

She wants her readers to know: “You’re not alone. My dedication said something along the lines of — to all Asian American women, you are not alone, I am here with you.”

“Kinda Korean: Stories From an American Life”, written by Joan Sung and published by She Writes Press, is available at your local bookstore on Feb. 25, 2025.