E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize, and co-translator of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today, among others. She earned her MFA in Literary Translation and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is completing the PhD program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a recipient of MacDowell and Kundiman fellowships.

E.J. KOH

These were my bedtime stories stories. I remember listening to them before I could speak. I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking at all and with learning and also just simply getting into school. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate.

Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. Once they immigrated to the States. And my grandmother, my father’s mother, who raised me was speaking Japanese, that was her private language. It was a remnant of the past and sort of the past of the occupation with Korea being occupied by Japan. My mother and father spoke in Korean, and this was a much more intimate language that I wanted to have access to but would also keep me away from the English that they hoped me to get. And all of this was compounded by my difficulty with speech. So there was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

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And yet somehow by magic we love. We fall in love. We teach each other. We care about each other. We have these emotional experiences together even if all of that seems impossible. By magic, we can do these things. And that always surprised me and delighted me.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer and Digital Media Coordinator on this podcast was Megan Hegenbarth. Additional Digital Media: Jacob A. Preisler.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).