E. J. Koh in Conversation with Diana Xin
E. J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), which won a Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. Koh is also the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State U. Press, 2017), a Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry Winner. She is a translator of Yi Won’s poetry collection The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Translation Grand Prize. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Her first novel, The Liberators, was published in November 2023, also at Tin House Books.
Diana Xin, a contributing editor with Moss, spoke to her by email.
When I first met you in 2015, in a class you taught at Hugo House, you were already writing a variety of genres—poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. In our class, we were perhaps most focused on non-fiction. What modes of expression do you find across these genres? What is the space that fiction allows you to inhabit?
We also worked on a love letter for the Massage Parlor Outreach Project to honor the victims of the mass shooting in Atlanta. Through the years I’ve witnessed your light-filled writing and community work in the Seattle area.
What non-fiction taught me was to look closer at fiction, and what fiction taught me was to care about poetry. In The Liberators, you can hear another story in the language, rhythm, and spaces.
On the surface level, The Liberators follows a family through several generations, beginning with recollections of the Korean War and ending in the Pacific Northwest. Between the more harrowing moments of political violence and unrest as well as domestic violence and conflict, we rest with these characters in quieter moments of reflection and resolution. Across the expansive scope of this novel, how did you land upon the moments you selected to capture the story of a character’s life?
These events underscore our human lineage—a braid of both destruction and restoration. Through multiple generations and characters across continents, we meet the testimonies from both the guards and the prisoners, the perpetrators and the liberators.
I’ve heard this novel referred to as symphonic. You’ve also mentioned before that you are drawn to writing in collective voices. The Liberators takes a form that is shaped by a multitude of perspectives. This is a central to the way the work is constructed, to its fabric. Why was important to approach the project in this way?
The novel came from questions I had during my doctoral work at the University of Washington. Is it the work of humanity to erase our troubling origins, or to reconcile with the urge to do so in the face of our deepest fears, suffering, and grief? What gives testimony and witness their liberating functions in human society? How do our efforts to liberate ourselves work without the expression of love?
After working on my memoir The Magical Language of Others, I returned to the stories of my mother’s parents and their tragic deaths in the novel. It surprised me that just as we can trace a lineage of tragedy through generations, we can see just as clearly a lineage of astounding care and love.
One expression of love within the novel is the grace and acceptance the characters extend to each other, offering the opportunity to heal and to begin anew despite their various grievances and shared loss.
Part of that care seems to be the effort to make room for empathy and understanding, to inhabit another’s perspective.
As you shift between characters throughout the book, you drop into a few surprising perspectives, once in a full chapter, and once at the end of another chapter. Did these perspectives surprise you, during the writing? Or did you plan to break those narrative rules that state who gets to tell the story (as in, not the dog)?
In March of 2022, I lost my fourteen-year-old puppy, a Manchester Jack Russell Terrier called Ari. He was with me since the time my parents moved to South Korea, so Ari had the trouble of being my family. Losing him, I couldn’t work on the novel, but I could write my dreams about him. Then came these pages—where love is not only between two people, but there is a love when a child must learn to say goodbye to their dog.
Grief is ever present in this novel, in all different shapes and weights, both private and public. In the opening scene, the narrator learns to name the world and write down those names. You write:
When one line touched another, my heart reached my fingertips to impart meaning. At five, it was for pleasure that I left words all over town: on a tree, I carved tree; in the river, I spelled river in pebbles; on my mother’s dress, I inked dress. At some point, my mother set me down and didn’t pick me up again. On my mother’s grave, I wrote grave.
As childhood ends and military service begins, the only word left to write is death.
As seen in that opening section, language is so important in this novel. This is true in your memoir as well, which uses the translation of your mother’s letters as a tool for empathy and understanding.
Unlike many common immigration narratives, the struggle with language in The Liberators as well as The Magical Language of Others is not to navigate or to be understood within a new culture. Instead, it seems to center around naming the world so that you make meaning of it yourself, as well as expressing your internal world to those you know most intimately.
How does the language of others—that of the past, that of your inheritance —impact the language you weave together in The Liberators?
Language is a bright thing Henry inherits from Yohan, even Jeha. My poetry teacher gave me language. In my first class, she said to me, “You’re good at starting a poem, but you have trouble at the end of the poem—the turn.” My teacher said my poems about my mother were missing magnanimity. She said, “It means you have to forgive your mother by the end of the poem, or the poem has to forgive you for not. Otherwise, it’s not a poem. It’s a journal or a diary entry but not a poem.” Looking for the turn in the novel now comes in the turn of a sentence, a chapter, even a character.
I can see several turns in the lives of the characters within The Liberators. Some of them seem to be a turn against fate or nature—by which I mean their inherited traits or the familiar patterns they expect to repeat. One character in particular seems so set in her ways that change seems impossible, yet clarity and epiphany arrive after her death. This is another moment with a strange perspective that I adore—a voice from the afterlife. There is a suggestion that even after death or even within grief, our memories may shift and our knowledge of each other can still grow and become something new or different.
The Liberators takes us through so many lives and transformations, of person and of place, and it does so in such a condensed space. Is there any character you would have liked to delve deeper into or spend more time with?
My sense is that all the characters will remain. My hope is for them to stay with the reader long after closing the book, after going to bed and lying in the darkness, after the everyday repetition, after the regular imposition of grief, and there is underneath the surface a way of being that makes life possible again.
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