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Sat | January 21, 2006

Charles Kim

I had an English teacher in high school who one day handed out small notebooks to everyone, called them journals and told us we could write anything we wanted in them as long as it was more than one page and that we wrote something new every week. Like a diary? No. Couldn’t be too private or personal or pornographic because she was going to read it and grade it and for the length of the assignment we would be chosen at random to read an entry. I started doing it. Kept it up. On the day she called on me. I was ready. I wrote a story about a baseball player, standing in the outfield beneath a high fly ball at the bottom of the 9th inning at the World Series, bases loaded, two men out, deciding game. For twelve pages I described the thoughts running through his head as the ball plunged toward him. It began with the fear of letting the ball drop, which he had never let happen before in his dazzling career, but knew full well that there was always a first time. It ended with what he imagined he would be thinking at the end of his life, on his deathbed, as he looked back upon this day. Whether he actually caught the ball or not, I decided to leave out. The story was called “Pressure”. It was both personal and private because it expressed pressures in my own life at the time, straight A’s, perfect SAT scores, Ivy League schools, doctor or lawyer, dropping the ball. But, as instructed, it was not a diary entry. It was fiction. And writing it made me feel better about things. When the assignment ended, she encouraged us all to keep writing, not just for grades, for teachers, for money, for notoriety. But to keep writing for ourselves. More than 25 years later I still do. And will never stop. One of my favorite quotes is, “Learn as much by writing as by reading.” A quote by Lord Acton, the 19h century historian who was the same guy who said, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I also enjoy films, music, and books. Good books I’ve read recently: “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day” both by Richard Ford. “Atonement”, “Black Dog” and “Saturday” by Ian McEwen. “Underworld” by Don DeLillo. “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo. “Life of Pi” by Yan Martel. And I recently discovered Stephen Dixon by way of “Phone Rings”. I’m also a fan of Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. My favorite Asian American novel is “Face” by Aimee E. Liu.

Posted by Charles at January 21, 2006 01:04 AM