Ej Koh The Magical Language Of Others



A memoir about E. J. Koh’s formative years, The Magical Language of Others is structured around forty-nine letters, all that remain of a one-way correspondence from her mother over the seven years that they lived apart. Functioning as translator and memoirist, Koh revisits these letters as an adult and uses them as scaffolding to answer questions about herself. Along the way, she discovers a heritage of complex, disjointed attachments between her family’s mothers and daughters, where bonds of love are strained by various separations and people claim each other by virtue of their heartache. Koh decodes these unexpected dynamics and discoveries in a memoir that’s sublime.

When Koh was fourteen, her father received a job offer to head the technology department of a company in Seoul. Her parents accepted the three-year contract and relocated, leaving both of their children behind in California. With the company covering college tuition, two flights a year, and all the parents’ living expenses, the separation eventually stretched to seven years: “it was better to pay for your children than to stay with them.”

“The Magical Language of Others,” a memoir by E.J. Photo: Tin House Books. Koh’s profound literary memoir of intergenerational wounds, she writes, “The present is the revenge of the past. There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most. Koh is the author of memoir The Magical Language of Others (2020) and poetry collection A Lesser Love (2017), winner of the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Academy of American Poets, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.Recipient of Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award for.

Although Koh doesn’t adhere to a strict chronology with the letters, she does allow her mother’s distinctive word choices, referents, and errors to stand. As both a translator and a recipient, she finds a depth of emotion, character, and voice in the letters’ limitations, and her shifts from letter to memoir capture the troubles of first love—a child’s for a mother—and the ways that love, like language, opens and closes a person.

When Koh’s mother speaks of her daughter’s work as a poet, she says, “My daughter teaches people how to let go.” In The Magical Language of Others, Koh uses a poet’s deftness to teach herself this lesson.

Others

Reviewed by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

Koh

Koh Tin House Books (Jan 6, 2020) Hardcover $22.95 978-1-947793-38-5 A memoir about E. Koh’s formative years, The Magical Language of Others is structured around forty-nine letters, all that remain of a one-way correspondence from her mother over the seven years that they lived apart. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others! Koh’s memoir will resonate for those caught between time and place, who seek an understanding between generations, and who look to words for answers. An engaging, literary take on language and its role in the diaspora of a scattered family, The Magical Language of Others speaks from—and to—the heart. Koh is 14, her father lands a lucrative three-year contract with a Korean company in Seoul.

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E j koh the magical language of others

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Though she was teaching at Hugo House and she’d finished an MFA in poetry and translation at Columbia University, E.J. Koh wasn’t sure she wanted to continue writing. “I was going through a really deep sense of depression,” she told me. “And I think I had taken writing to such an extent that it was no longer helping me with anything.” So she quit for six months.

Then late at night in 2016 she went on Twitter: “I’m writing a thousand love letters. Tell me about yourself, add a question/struggle & your mailing address.” The requests poured in from South Korea, the UK, Canada, “even someone who’s just across the street from me.”

Koh has since published a collection of poetry, A Lesser Love, and today she releases a memoir, The Magical Language of Others. Tonight, at Elliott Bay Book Company, she’ll hold a release party, talking with The Stranger’s Rich Smith. In the book, between chapters telling of her growing up, she translates letters that her mother sent her from Korea when Koh was young. Yet until recently, she hadn’t realized the parallels, both in form—Koh’s love letters (she’s done 103 so far) run about two pages, the same as her mother’s—and intent: Late in the book a teacher tells her, “You can say anything you want—with magnanimity.' That feels, by the time you reach it, like a guiding statement. This is a book, in part, about words as an offering.

E J Koh The Magical Language Of Others

The Magical Language of Others is only about 200 spare pages, but never feels slight. It skips through Koh’s life. She did not speak until around age five. When she was 15, her parents moved back to South Korea for work, leaving her in California with her older brother to raise her, which devastated her. The letters her mother sent her were from overseas, when Koh’s Korean was nascent enough that she had to read the letters aloud to understand them. Until this book, she had not responded. She went to Japan and studied Japanese, refusing to eat in a restaurant until she could order properly. “If I could not learn a language,” she writes, “why bother with a complete meal?” She competed as part of a hip-hop dance group in L.A. She stumbled from that into poetry as a form of therapy, then to translation.

But it reaches beyond those borders, detailing how her grandmother was caught between Japanese and Korean identity and how she had to flee the Jeju Island massacre in 1948. Koh explores the ways that the “present is the revenge of the past,” how pain echoes between generations and how this can manifest in languages. She spoke English and her father learned it. His mother spoke Japanese, while Koh's mother spoke Korean. “They sort of hated each other,” she says of her grandmother and mom, for reasons that she later discovered were rooted in violence between the two countries. At the University of Washington, she’s now working on her PhD, looking at the “untranslatability of certain words that represent either trauma or love.” Translation is political, she says, containing the history of the languages you're working with.

Growing up with that clear understanding of the power and pain of language—an instrument of animosity—seems a fine way to forge a writer of intensity. See how Koh deals with her own birth: “The crown of my head split a fissure, and when my shoulders passed through, I nearly killed her. Broad, swathed in muscle and green veins, I was hairless except for the faint whiskers of eyebrows.” But a teacher tells her late in the book, “If you want to be a good poet, write poetry. If you want to be a great poet, then translate.”

The Magical Language of Others shows Koh working a language that moves beyond the violence of the past, toward a generosity, in part through the translation of her mother’s words, which become her own. “To my limits, I do not see my translations as complete,” she writes in her introductory note. “If her letters could go to sleep, my translations would be their dreams.”

E.J. Koh with Rich Smith
Jan 7, Elliott Bay Book Company, Free

Recommended Reading, Poetry, Elliott Bay Book Company