To Leave and Be Left: Isabel J. Kim’s Speculative Representation of the Immigrant Experience
Through a divided protagonist, “Sublimation” turns immigration into a physical split, revealing how culture, place, and choice shape parallel selves and unchosen lives.
Isabel J. Kim’s subversive debut novel “Sublimation” prompts you to think about how far you might go to live the choice you didn’t make, in an extended thought experiment on the immigrant experience. In the book, crossing a border doesn’t just change the trajectory of your life — it quite literally splits you into two versions of yourself. One version of you, your “instance,” is left behind, while the other enters a new country. This is possibly the most extreme imagining of the immigrant experience; but anyone who has ever left a home, a city, a country, or even a person, will recognize and resonate with the unique melancholy that comes with thinking about what could’ve been.
The novel follows Soyoung Rose Kang, whose family immigrated from Korea to America when she was 10 years old. But in this world, immigrating means she split into Rose, her American instance, and Soyoung, her Korean instance. For years, Rose and Soyoung had never spoken. With their grandfather’s passing, however, Rose returns to Korea for his funeral and discovers that, alarmingly, Soyoung plans to steal Rose’s body to reclaim the life that was taken from her.
The Road(s) Not Taken
“I was thinking a lot about the way that we live in a world now where it takes half a day to travel around half the globe, but it still takes an entire lifetime to become somebody who is from somewhere or somebody who is part of a certain culture,” Kim explains. This sentiment poignantly encapsulates the dissonance of having grown up in one culture, but being originally “from” another. In this case, the ease of physical travel can never make up for what it means to truly belong in a place or have an established history there.
The actual structure of the novel itself replicates this separation, in the way that readers are taken through scenes from Rose and Soyoung’s separate points of view. For example, Kim offers two vivid descriptions of the food hall in the basement of Shinsegae Department Store in Seoul, which share the same physical details. But Rose and Soyoung respectively see it through different lenses: As one experiences it with the naivety of having spent a lifetime away, the other reports on it as a regular participant in that culture.
Kim herself was born in the U.S. but raised in Korea for her formative years. She then attended international school before her family moved back to the States. “Every year it was kind of like seeing a parallel version of who I could have grown up to become had I stayed in Korea as the world changed around me,” she reflects, “so that was one of the big inspirations for the idea of instancing in the book.”
The separation of Rose’s and Soyoung’s points of views is a literal representation of how the same personality can diverge based on geography and culture. For Rose, this separation is somewhat hopeful; the possibilities for her and her life are endless the moment she crosses the border to the U.S. However, this is not the same for Soyoung, who is left behind to carry on the life that Rose was supposed to have. In the book, Kim writes about this:
The Asymmetry of Leaving
“The way that I thought about it was in this world, if you cross a border and you think you’re going to leave, one of you doesn’t get to do that. And that person is probably thinking, ‘God, I could have had this whole other life.’ And the other person who actually got to leave is thinking, ‘God, there’s someone who’s living that life I had that was behind me.’”
At the surface, it may seem better to be the one who leaves; this is not actually the case for Rose. On one hand, Soyoung looks at Rose’s life in the U.S. and sees all of the possibilities that she didn’t get to live out. On the other hand, Rose similarly looks at Soyoung’s life and is haunted by the past version of herself who got to live out all of her oldest dreams. (In the book, Rose wistfully lists, “Chuseok, stationery stores, Emart, and clean public transit, the ahjumma selling ginkgo nuts and roasted chestnuts at the foot of the hiking trails.”)
The more this extended metaphor is developed, and the more that is revealed about Rose’s and Soyoung’s respective motivations, the clearer it becomes that instancing isn’t just a metaphor here: It is, in itself, a form of immigration within oneself — a physical border, a bodily separation, and a psychological splitting all at once.
What We Owe Our Past Selves
Kim asks readers to consider how far we might go to live the choice we didn’t make. But the real question above all is, what do we owe our past selves — the lives we almost lived, the dreams we left behind?
Rose and Soyoung live out the most literal version of this scenario, but this isn’t so far off from the experience that immigrants do have on a psychological level. The act of instancing simply takes the abstract feeling of melancholy, like survivor’s guilt, and turns it into a physical embodiment of “what if” that confronts you head-on.
“I want them to reexamine their relationship with their life, and the ways in which where they have lived and left has changed them,” says Kim.
She also hopes to build more empathy for the immigrant experience. “If you’ve lived somewhere for your entire life or if you’ve never been a minority or part of a diaspora population, sometimes it’s hard to truly empathize with that experience,” she notes. But she hopes that readers will empathize more in the real world, “having been inside these characters’ heads and then seeing all of the considerations — emotional, logistical, financial — that come into play.”
“Sublimation” has already been picked up for TV adaptation by Universal Studios and Assemble Media, and audiences can expect the visual medium to bring to life the complicated tensions between Rose and Soyoung. According to Kim, that concrete doubling, seeing the same actor play two different characters on screen, may make the concept of instancing more clear for audiences than it is in prose.
It will also allow for more depth and breadth to the universe: While Kim wrote tightly about the Korean diaspora, a writers’ room could be “staffed with a bunch of people from different life experiences,” Kim says. After all, the calculations that happen at borders (i.e., weighing what could have been, looking forward to new opportunities that await, feeling guilty for leaving a past life behind) are universal experiences that go beyond country of origin or life stage.
“Sublimation” comes out on June 2, 2026, and is available online or at your local bookstore. Learn more about Isabel J. Kim at isabel.kim, or follow her on Instagram at @isabeljkim.