A. H. Kim can do it all. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school before attending Harvard College and then went on to law school at the University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a lawyer at a Fortune 200 company for 30 years. When she was only 39 years old, Kim was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatments while also raising her two young boys. She later served as the president of a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting young women with breast cancer. Now, she has just published her second novel.
As I sit down with her over lattes and matcha, I catch glimpses of the many lives she’s lived over the years. Kim carries herself with the confidence and ease of someone competent and capable. She’s articulate and comfortable, but also warm and genuine. I’m not surprised when she tells me she biked to the coffee shop to enjoy the sunshine, and she tears up when she mentions the friends she has lost from her cancer support group. She’s motherly and strong and excited to talk about her new book, “Relative Strangers.”
Kim’s path to becoming a writer was an unconventional one —it was more a testament to her own determination and self-efficacy than a supernatural calling. It all came down to a classic Toni Morrison quote — one that’s plastered on walls and frames but hardly dared to be taken seriously: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Safe to say, A. H. Kim was brave enough to believe it.
Her family first immigrated to the U.S. when she was just shy of two years old, and they spent many years bouncing around the Rust Belt — a young Korean family living in a time and place where there weren’t many other Asians around.
“I moved here in the ’60s,” she told me. “So there was this strong pressure to assimilate. So I don’t speak Korean. I had Korean food at home; that was like my main touchpoint to Korea. It’s not like it is now, with K-pop and K-dramas. Now, you can really be fluent and understand the culture. But back then, you really just assimilated.”
When John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” was first released in 2012, Kim loved it so much that she felt inspired to write a book of her own. She told me, “Right now there’s such an explosion of Korean American literature … but there weren’t that many YA books about Korean American girls (back then). Growing up I always felt like I didn’t see myself in books. So I loved ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ but I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I had a book that had a Korean American YA character?’” Kim mulled over the Toni Morrison quote and eventually said to herself, “I want to write that book.”
Of course, books don’t grow on trees. At the time, Kim was working a full-time job and raising two sons, but she wanted it badly enough that she made time to write, often when everyone else was asleep: “I’d be up until 1:00 in the morning. I was like a college student, pulling all-nighters, because I was so inspired to write.”
Nights turned into days, which turned into weeks and eventually months, until Kim finally finished her manuscript. She was so eager to get her book published, but she wound up hitting a dead end. “I was so disappointed,” she said. “But by that point, I had gotten bit by this writing bug, and I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna write another book now.’ And so I wrote another book, and that ended up being my first book that got published, ‘A Good Family.’”
Kim’s second book, “Relative Strangers,” was released on April 2 of this year and blends many aspects of her personal life: It’s loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” the 1995 film adaptation being Kim’s ultimate comfort movie. The protagonists Amelia and Eleanor are, like Kim’s own children, half-Korean and half-white. The story is set at a cancer retreat center in Northern California and is inspired by her own experience attending one while she had cancer. In “Relative Strangers,” the Bae-Wood daughters take refuge at the retreat center after being kicked out of their home by their newly discovered half-brother. Unlike the source material, the story is told from Amelia’s point of view and follows the vibrant younger sister’s journey through love, loss and her ultimate self-discovery.
When I ask her what she wants readers to get out of “Relative Strangers,” Kim clarifies that her book is meant to be popular fiction, not literary fiction: “The main purpose I have is to entertain people. But then, in between the entertainment … there (are) a lot of things that I (wove) into the story to make it richer.” And richer it is, as “Relative Strangers” is a story that blends cancer, sisterhood and the Korean American experience into a delightful foray into A. H. Kim’s world.
Daily Arts Writer Pauline Kim can be reached at kpauline@umich.edu.