Angela Mi Young Hur > Quotes

“To reject is easy; to be abandoned, terrifying.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Well, it’s not only Western countries who believe an orphan is lucky to grow up there. The fairy tale is used to console desperate birth mothers, but also serves to assuage the guilt of others—relatives who persuade the mother that this is best for her and her future, for the other children she already struggles to feed. It’s a story wielded by those who shape policy, who handle transactions with foreign agencies. It’s a fantasy for those not even involved—the ballad of the Korean orphan growing up in the exotic, romantic West—never mind the loss of identity, language, or the right to exist in a particular place. It is simply enough that the fairy tale happily ends with the baby delivered into the arms of a deserving white couple. But this is only the end to their story of childlessness. It’s the beginning of another for the one who’ll be a visible foreigner within his new family and throughout his youth.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Nothing is fresh, not the seas we cross to escape from one life to another. Most of Earth and its people are made of water, so some of me now, as I sweat and exhale, is shape-shifting.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“No wonder Swedish boys love high fantasy—it’s already written in their native language and they’re usually cast as the elvish heroes anyway.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Then I finally get what I want and it doesn’t change how I see myself.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Jeong, according to my mother, is more dangerous than love. “Attachment” is my closest translation. Jeong, insidious and inevitable, keeps you stuck, beholden. Jeong is more powerful than love because it doesn’t need affection or admiration to grow. Only time and proximity.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“I used to be embarrassed of my fascination with Korean folklore, thinking it childish, mawkish. But why should we venerate the myths and legends of only a few cultures, recognizing how they are foundational to classical literature, whereas those little stories from other cultures are considered—lesser, quaint and colorful?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“I am infinite because energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changes forms, or shape-shifts. After my body dies, my energy will continue as always. We’re made up of stardust from other galaxies, and a bit of our dead bodies will decay and form helium that’ll journey across space again. I’m grateful. I’m in”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“don’t tell him that I can’t be blamed for my gender or birth order or for taking advantage of these in our family, or that there was no way I could’ve taken him with me anyhow.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“It’d been a while since my mother last warned me about a dream. She often transcribed them in her journals and consulted her notes at a later date. Though she was a devout Christian most of the time, she also covered her bases. She noted dates murmured by ancestors, and after an earthquake, burglary, mugging, the LA Riots, or one of Chris’s more upsetting episodes, she’d consult this almanac of predetermined disaster and cluck her tongue. I asked her why she didn’t take extra care on those days if she knew something was going to happen. She explained, “We can’t live in fear, waiting for tragedy. I write these dates not to warn myself, but to console myself after the fact, that there was nothing I could do to prevent it.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Why bother trying to emulate her, when even my hair defied her ladylike expectations? That’s why I both envied and pitied my friend’s glossy-smooth hair—so lovely and compliant, with nary a single strand escaping its thick black”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“He never abandoned his family or started over with someone else. Even your mother appreciated that he didn’t ‘drink, whore, or gamble’ like his father. Your story, though, ends with you, Elsa. No one will suppress or reject the traits they inherit from you.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Another family classic, especially lethal from Mom: “Why are you crying? Did your mother die? What do you have to cry about then? Go blubber outside.” Actually, for that one, I never had a comeback, so I wailed in the backyard, snotting against the sliding glass doors.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“No, I don’t think the story was “a recruitment video for sacrificial virgins, serve your country, serve your father bullshit.” But Shim Cheong is certainly the exemplar for filial piety.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Most Swedes don’t like to discuss racism at all, believing it unnecessary since they are not racist, of course. They fear talking about it might make them complicit or guilty by association, or that saying anything more nuanced than “racism is bad” might reveal something untoward. Conflict avoidance, repression, and denial—such cultural characteristics make for calm dinner conversations and ineffectual discussions.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Am I letting others dictate my reality, or is racialized sexual jealousy a symptom of sleep deprivation?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“I pictured how Mom must’ve been less alone, how the other Korean wives were probably savvier at defusing the tempers of Korean husbands, especially if not their own. Or who could, at least, provide a hiding place until it was safe to emerge.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Doesn’t matter how kind the parents. I was adopted not only into a family, but also into a country, one with little history of immigration compared to others, even less of integration, with a culture valuing egalitarianism that is often misconstrued as conformity and homogeneity.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“The meticulous work and the discovery still thrill me, but ever since grad school, I’ve become more strategic, a careerist intent on job security with ample funding and a travel stipend. So why the sudden revolutionary zeal?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Plus, what’s more American than shitting on foreigners and new immigrants?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Please,” she said from her corner, “do not blame us for how our lives have turned out. Perhaps it’s not just the women in our family anyhow—our entire people have been telling the wrong stories, making a wretched mess of our history. As if anybody wants to be told that their ability to endure is their greatest virtue. No wonder we get invasions and occupations, war and asshole husbands. What kind of stories, I wonder, do the white countries tell of themselves?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Maybe this is why I don’t date Asian men. We’re too combustible, echoing each other’s rage, fearing we’ll rehash our parents’ bullshit, reenact their fucked up dynamics and raise kids who chase after approval and achievement rather than love.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Yeah, I got it. Boys and their bridges. I’m a fan of whatever depicts the Japanese as war criminals. Now that country knows how to spin PR—they’re like white people’s favorite Asian—talk about branding. At least the Germans own up to their history, actually teach it to their kids.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“Mom’s demands on my brother as a Korean son simply required him to be rich and successful, enough to redeem her suffering. Doctor or lawyer would do. Chris’s secret ambitions then were also equally nebulous. He justified to Mom that the path to law school required studies in philosophy, literature, and human nature. Even as a kid, I knew this was cover”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“I admire these cunning outcast women, for they risk their own souls becoming lost and trapped in the Underworld in order to feed their bellies and go on living. I only did so out of duty and obligation, which I mistook for love.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“You mean the books you ripped up in front of me because they provoked you? You who only got into college because of grandfather’s money? He gave you a factory too and it went bust, right? He even got Mom to marry you, turned her head with all his money and gifts and promises you’d be a grand success someday?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“see how my brother, so smart and cynical, can also believe in dreams of a holy father as well as curses and prophecies foretold by a once-loving mother. I see the effects of her redaction and erasure of her son. How much she hurt him when she demoted him from her champion and defender—to just another man who failed her.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“But if a bunch of foreigners barged into your world, dragged your men away on dangerous expeditions, studied you like you were some alien, and demanded you explain every word you had for snow—wouldn’t you also run naked and dive into the frozen sea?”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“We’re all foreigners, no matter how many flags are stuck in the snow. Like these plants, living here is an act of defiance, thriving in a place not meant for us.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn

“To them, he was something more familiar—at times histrionic and fanatically religious like their mothers, or depressive and suddenly violent like their fathers.”
― Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn