Crystal Hana Kim, author of 'The Stone Home,' told us how she came to write a novel about South Korea under the Chun Doo-hwan regime.
she’s a writer.” The second: “is she still blonde?” She and I hadn’t spoken since 2005. Though we became strangers upon graduating, we orbited each other closely: she took a ceramics class across the street from my condo and, at different times, we both attended The Chicago Literary Salon. In 2021, a writing instructor suggested I readTop 5 Under 35 list. In the back, just above the author’s bio, was the Crystal Kim I remembered from French class.
BELL: The wrestling team, and when you bleached your hair. Those are my two big Crystal Kim memories.BELL: So you were writing then. How did the first book come about? KIM: Thank you. I have an excruciating approach to writing, which is that I start with the premise and some questions or themes I’m interested in, but I’m really just fumbling in the dark and writing to figure out who the characters are. So I did a lot of research, because I’m always compelled by the psychology of my characters.
BELL: Okay. This book is set in a prison and it’s terrible and the characters have no freedom, but all of the food descriptions were so lush and inviting. It made me miss things that I hadn’t eaten in a long time since I left New York. And there’s so much labor involved with the preparation of these traditional Korean foods and, from the context that I know them, it’s often a labor of love.
BELL: Because this book is about forces like colonialism and war, it made me ask a lot of questions about who we are, what we are doing. I actually really love a book that leaves me with a bunch of questions. But while you were writing and researching, did you ask yourself questions that you didn’t expect to be asking? And did you find answers that you weren’t expecting to find?
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