Suphil Lee Park’s story, Rooted Out, appears in the Spring 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here Park explores the nature of cultural exchange and lineage within one’s own family and how she established the distinct environment and folklore in her story.
Emilie Rodriguez, Editorial Assistant: There’s a comparison in your story that I found fascinating between nature and reserves in the US versus in Korea. How did you capture the unique setting of the Korean mountains?
Suphil Lee Park: I was born and spent most of the first two decades of my life in South Korea, during which time I went on hiking quite often with my family. Admittedly, many descriptive details in this story–mineral spring water carried in plastic jugs, burial sites along the trail–are not based on hearsay or research but are derived from my firsthand experience in the country.
ER: The narrator feels disapproval from all sides: her parents in the US, her uncle and aunt, even her cousin. How do you see the spooky atmosphere of the forest merge with that theme of disapproval?
SLP: With this kind of unanimous disapproval (real or perceived) comes a sense of helpless disorientation—a feeling of being lost and not belonging anywhere or with anyone. This sense of disorientation physically manifests when the narrator arrives in South Korea and later ventures into the woods. She literally gets lost and is left in the dark. In that sense, the forest becomes the embodiment of this disorientation the narrator constantly struggles with.
Interestingly, the forest happens to be the place where the narrator finally connects with her cousin, and all because they experience this extreme feeling of being lost and unable to find their footing, together.
So the woods also happens to be the place where the narrator is forced to confront her repressed fears and insecurities. It is here that she learns to accept herself and those around her. That’s what confronting your own fears and delusions under unexpected, extreme circumstances does. You’re forced to come face-to-face with your own weaknesses and biases, instead of finding them in others and judging them for that mirror reflection. And only then can others’ approval come.
ER: There’s an agreement between the narrator and her cousin that they’ll each grow in their fluency in Korean and English, respectively. In what ways does the language exchange influence their character development in the story?
SLP: I believe understanding the perspective of someone from another culture has much to do with the linguistic elements of that culture. Not that it’s impossible to understand someone from another culture without learning their language, but that it becomes exponentially easier to do so when you have some grasp of their language. I would even go so far as to say that each of us is born into a specific language—some of us more than one—because so much of society is built on and around these linguistic frameworks.
In our most intimate—and hence most complex—relationships, we often find language to be an incredibly versatile tool; it can soothe, tempt, confuse, assail, or mend, among many other things. However, the unchangeable fact is that words are always a choice, however they are used. And being human, we can always make unwise choices–by saying the wrong thing, leaving the wrong thing out, not saying enough or saying too much–intentionally or not. That’s what makes human relationships so fragile and complicated, especially in the context of fiction where these relationships are established, damaged, or transformed by far fewer words than in real life.
With each linguistic choice these characters make in the story, they either push each other away or pull each other in. So it’s significant when the characters stop faulting each other for their linguistic and cultural blunders and imperfections and instead choose to really communicate—instead of taunting or bantering—in the other’s most natural tongue. This is when they overcome their insecurities related to the other’s language and learn to become comfortably vulnerable in the other’s presence. It’s a verbal way of shaking hands on their final, reconciliatory moment.
ER: The Korean folktale of the young man lost in the wood adds an element of terror and fantasy to the story. Why choose this specific folktale to set that tone?
SLP: I had in mind a character who, having lived mostly abroad, has always fabricated and reimagined her home country through the folktales her mother told her at bedtime as a child. When you keep reimagining a place this way, it becomes fictional, almost mythical, in your head. And what better way to explore this nature of nostalgia and our tendency to fabricate when trying to make sense of “the little known and much fantasized about” than through folklore?
With the urban elements—in our global age, pretty generic around the world—removed, the narrator enters the forest, the territories of the truly unknown, where she’s soon left to her own devices, with only her cousin to rely on. She’s tempted (the berry wine and nap), put to the test (conflicts with her cousin, then the scrambling in the dark), and needs to find the truth of her situation (the goblin light and the hooting sound), which nicely parallels the structure of this particular folktale, although her story definitely ends in a happier place.
It also made sense because the protagonist would likely think up something that further exacerbates her situation instead of improving it; her mind would rush to a terrifying story set in the woods, I thought, instead of a comforting one. That’s how the human mind often works, especially under stress.
In Korean folktales, a mountain often serves as a place for spiritual and martial training, enlightenment, and encounters with divinities or mythical creatures. It’s where their protagonists often come face to face with difficult truths, their true potential, or their innermost desires and voices. Hence, many Korean folktales are set in the woods and often start with characters getting lost in the woods, usually only to meet mysterious, suspicious people, tigers, or goblins. So you could say “Rooted Out” itself follows the convention of how a Korean folktale is told and hints at an actual folktale coming into play from the very beginning.
ER: I know that you write in various disciplines; poetry, essays, fiction, and recently you translated the book, “If You Live To 100, You Might As Well Be Happy” by Rhee Kun Hoo. How does writing across genres influence how you wrote this piece?
SLP: Writing and working across genres keeps me open-minded about formal and other experiments with whatever I happen to be working on at any moment. But more than anything, I think my other writing commitments–including translating–have made me a better editor and critic of my own work. I used to be married to specific parts or sentences of my prose pieces–probably having something to do with my poetic, sentence-level attention–but I’ve now learned how to recognize the heart of each writing piece and detach myself from the fluff and fillers (unless it’s a stylistically-driven piece that’s all about the fluff and fillers). I no longer feel as much pain and resistance when parting with what doesn’t keep that heart beating.
ER: While the story focuses mainly on the narrator and her cousin, the uncle, the narrator’s parents, the aunt, they all loom in the border of the story without being super present. Why make the decision to not include them as much?
SLP: One of the central themes in this story is misunderstanding—cultural, generational, or otherwise. As you mentioned, there are allusions to the older generations echoing throughout the story, especially in the ending where the point of view switches to the uncle. However, most events revolve around the two young women. Many young Korean people of their generation end up studying or working abroad, more than any other generation before them. They are the perfect age group around which to center a story about this relatively new phenomenon of cultural misunderstanding and conflicts among those with Korean heritage.
ER: The theme of running, running to Korea for the narrator, her cousin wants to run to America, comes into a physical manifestation as they sprint away from what they perceive to be an unknown force in the woods. How does running, metaphorical and physical, work to amplify the emotional forces at play here?
SLP: I cannot find a better way to put this into words, so I’ll have to resort to quoting from a book: “Nearly every other task outside of honest conversation, writing, philosophy, art, self-expression and the like . . . is often an attempt to run from, not towards, one’s life and one’s self . . . [I]t’s obvious after a certain point that there is no escape.” It’s from The Notes of the End of Everything by Robert Pantano and rings truer than anything I’ve read or personally written on this topic of running.
When it comes down to it, I think whatever we run from often lies within, rather than outside. Even when we run from external forces and extreme circumstances, what we actually try to put behind us is our own fears or dissatisfaction; which is to say, even under the exact same circumstances, some do not choose to run (and importantly, even when they can afford to), if they don’t experience the same internal reality that urges them to run. This also resonates with some principal teachings of Buddhism: differentiating your internal reality from the external one and recognizing your capability to change the internal reality, if not the external.
I’ve always struggled with this desire to “run” myself; from a place, a language, commitments, emotions, and even people. So I wanted to depict two young women running from and towards what they don’t fully understand, and how this aimless running leads to the inevitable collision and hurt, but also reconciliation and a long look at themselves.
Running is crucial to survival when there’s a source of danger, but I feel it’s even more important to know where we’re running towards, if our destination truly grants us security and peace, or at least, a comparatively safer space, and why we keep running towards this or that. Life can often feel like an act of constantly debating and deciding where I can run toward, where I should run toward. I continue to find myself running toward books and writings, and so here I am.
ER: There’s this emphasis of tradition and lineage through cooking that we see with the uncle. Why add this element of cooking to the piece?
SLP: I believe cooking is central to many immigrant and culturally-saturated narratives. When you think about it, even common terms like “comfort food” or “soul food” convey a strong sense of nostalgia and the idea that specific foods bring back your most cherished memories and can make you feel at home.
Eating is also the very first form of social interaction for most animals, including humans. Even the fetus interacts with the external world as it consumes the result of its mother’s dietary intakes; it takes parts of the outside world, of another person (mother), and a nonverbal exchange takes place. Often, it is through sharing meals that we form and build relationships.
To the uncle (and the older hikers along the trail) in the story, food has an even stronger social importance as he’s from a generation that experienced a post-war famine on a national level. Hence the Korean way of greeting another by asking if they have eaten and the culture of a feast of side dishes that automatically come with the main menu in traditional Korean diners. Fascinatingly, this post-war famine also overlaps with parts of American military history, as many Koreans procured new food ingredients from U.S. army bases in the country. So, of course, I thought, this older character would see the act of cooking and eating together as the primary way of showing affection and socializing, especially with his loved ones whom he wants to be closer to.
Throughout the story, I tried to lend the narrative these echoes of Korean history where I could–the war and post-war ramifications–so that “Rooted Out” will be set against the subtle backdrop of a culture that was destroyed and then rebuilt, a place that’s still healing. But I was careful to keep the echoes muted so the readers can mostly follow the young women’s point of view and see how they experience the world, until the ending where they’ll have more insights into the uncle’s perspective.
ER: How do you see the change in POV to the uncle at the end of the story functioning in this piece?
SLP: One of the story’s central themes—misunderstanding—becomes more layered and interesting when you also consider the Korean generations beyond the two young women’s. It gives you more context, and, in terms of the narrative structure, hindsights; and I’m a big believer in the omnipotence of hindsight, which sometimes proves to be the only way to transform the past without altering or disregarding the facts of it. The same goes for a fictional story.
South Korea has such a complex modern history, marked by many national and global upheavals. The uncle’s voice is crucial to bringing the story to its twisty, comical, and nuanced ending, as he represents the generation that most vocally and gravely misunderstands the two young women’s generation. His generation often avidly endorsed or harshly criticized the younger generation’s desire to explore the world beyond South Korea or even to find a home outside it. By following the uncle’s point of view, you get glimpses into why his generation might have helped engender this modern phenomenon in South Korea and why some might still oppose it: the war, economic and political instability, and a need to find a better life for themselves and their families amid all the chaos, and a deep attachment to a home that was destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, quite literally.
Juxtaposing the uncle’s chapter at the end, while bringing the story into more perspective, also adds a subtly humorous tone (I hope) to what the story has to say about human nature: our fear of the dark, our tendency to blow things out of proportion and interpret the world from our limited perspectives, and the ways we misunderstand, trouble, dismiss, or embrace each other.
ER: What are you working on now?
SLP: I’m currently working on the translation of a feminist Korean thriller, A Twist of Fate, to be published by Bantam in March 2025. I was told it’s actually the first book in translation that Bantam has ever acquired, so I’m beyond thrilled.
I’ve also been juggling a few manuscripts of my own: my second poetry collection, All That’s in Bloom Is in Flames, which alternates between the voice of the marginalized prophet Cassandra and the voice of a beekeeper, and which explores the role of poetry amid global challenges such as wars, the climate crisis, and the mental health crisis. As for prose, I am working on my currently untitled short story collection that includes “Rooted Out” and my very first novel.
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is a multi-genre writer and translator born and raised in South Korea. She wrote the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize, and a poetry chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press 2023), winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She is also the translator of If I’m Going to Live to One Hundred, I May As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo, published by Ebury and Union Square & Co. She received fiction prizes from Indiana Review and Writer’s Digest and had a notable essay in the 2022 anthology of Best American Essays. She’s serving as the nonfiction mentor for the 2024 AWP mentorship program. You can find more about her at: www.suphil-lee-park.com
Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer from San Diego and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.