David Hoon Kim: I needed a language that belonged to me

David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Stegner Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker as well as French-language publications including Brins d'éternité and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle, and he writes in both English and French.

We talk about growing up between English and Korean without fully belonging to either, and how he found French later, through Rimbaud, as a language that felt entirely his own choice. David talks about how French grammar suits the way he thinks better than English does, and about living in Paris, where he felt more visible as a minority than he does in the US. Finally, we get into the difficulty of being read as a bilingual writer, and David's recent decision to write more in French, partly as a way of holding onto the language from outside a French-speaking country.