After they let me out, you ask, Hungry?
I nod. The waitress comes.
She waits for my order,
then smiles, writes down coffee,
two eggs, buttered toast.
You ask, Anything else?
I almost say, Everything.
Instead, I shake my head.

Outside, the rain asks
nothing of me.
You watch it gather itself
against the glass.
And I watch it
find its way home.

You say, You’ll always have me.
I hear, You’ll never leave.
You smile as though
you’ve said something kind,
and my ribs become parentheses,
with everything inside them
trying to escape.

The coffee arrives.
We thank her at the same time.
For a moment, our mouths agree.
Then yours goes home,
and mine keeps translating.

I was super excited to explore my newly gained freedom. I was born and brought up in a city and in a household where lying about my whereabouts was the easiest way to hang out with my friends (especially post-sunset). Therefore, I was really looking forward to less planning and plotting, fewer elaborate excuses, and finally being able to roam the streets without my family knowing.

However, amongst all the excitement, I secretly hoped I wouldn’t be assigned a roommate. It wasn’t because I was difficult to live with. I’ve shared a room with my sister my entire life, but that’s different. She’s five years younger than me, which means I’ve spent most of my life shamelessly bullying her into giving me the charging socket first, banning the white light from existence whenever I was in the room, and convincing her that my side of the room deserved a little more territory than hers. (I promise I’m not actually a brat.)

But a stranger would have rights, opinions, and preferences. As someone whose brain has always functioned best with a little too much order, the prospect of sharing a room with a stranger felt less like an exciting college experience and more like the forceful introduction of a variable into an otherwise stable equation.

But don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those people who spend entire afternoons tucked away in the library with noise-cancelling headphones on, nor did I eat alone at the mess while staring out of the window pretending to enjoy my own company. I had friends. Quite a lot of them, actually. I was quick to find a group with six girls and four guys, which, yes, does sound slightly excessive now that I’ve written it down.

If you’ve watched enough coming-of-age films or survived enough semesters of undergrad yourself, you’re probably expecting this to become one of those stories where ten people slowly become two because someone dates someone, someone gossips about someone else, and by the third year, everybody pretends the others don’t exist. Thankfully, this isn’t that story.

So anyway, because of a technical error by the administration, my roommate allotment was delayed for months, and I accepted this administrative incompetence with remarkable gratitude. Every time someone asked if I was still alone, I’d nod very carefully, so I wouldn’t be on the radar of any fighting roommates ready to split and hoping the empty bed in my room would harbour one of them.

216 slowly became mine. The fairy lights went up, and photographs appeared on the walls. I had a tiny duck-shaped pot with a money plant growing out of its head and a small seashell dish that held my jewellery with a collection of little objects that served no practical purpose except convincing me that 216 was home.

But a couple of months later, as the exchange students returned, the hostel ran out of rooms, and Pragya, one of the six girls in my group, had to move into mine.

I was immediately convinced we were about to ruin a perfectly good friendship. Living together seemed like the fastest way to discover all the things that make another person impossible to hang out with. What if my compulsive need to keep things arranged irritated her? What if my aggressively early bedtime became a personal inconvenience? What if she wanted the lights on when I wanted them off? I just kept thinking of all the reasons why it would never work. I eulogised a perfectly good relationship and buried the very living and alive friendship even before she opened her suitcase.

Pragya, thankfully, had no such imagination.

It became perfectly normal for Pragya and me to end up on the same bed, talking about absolutely everything until neither of us could remember how the conversation had started. I’d always imagined myself as someone who preferred a respectful amount of personal space. I wasn’t particularly fond of hugs that lasted too long or people who leaned on my shoulder for no reason. And yet there we were, somehow folded into the same blanket, arguing about professors, families, childhood memories, whether cereal counted as dinner, until sleep interrupted whichever one of us had been speaking.

I had found so much comfort and care in her. She filled my days with endless gossip and laughter. When I told her that I had applied for an exchange program and would be leaving in January, returning three months later, she was so excited that I was finally getting to live my dream of backpacking through Europe. But almost instantly, she hugged me and started crying about how lonely she’d be without me, and how incomplete 216 would feel in my absence.

As someone who has never been particularly good at expressing emotions, I simply hugged her back, letting my silence do what my words never could, while I swallowed the tears gathering like a rising tide in my throat. I couldn’t quite comprehend that someone could miss me so deeply.

Now that we’re seniors, and still sharing a room in our second year, I often find myself thinking about how little time we have left. Soon, we’ll graduate, take up high-cortisol adult jobs in different cities, and our lives will move in different directions. I won’t come back after class to find Pragya perched on the edge of her bed, waiting impatiently to tell me everything that happened that day before I’ve even had the chance to put my bag down.

So here I am, writing this while she’s lying on her bed watching Lock Up and telling me what a character Pam is. I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, and I don’t think I need to understand the plot to know how much I love to hear her ramble.

I don’t know how much of this I’ll remember when I’m in my fifties, but I hope I never forget that, for a little while, we were twenty-somethings who found our home in each other.

I have become deeply suspicious of modern medicine. Not because I don’t believe in it. Modern medicine has done some incredible things, and I am grateful for all of them. It’s just that after months of careful observation, I’ve discovered that my boyfriend appears to cure an alarming number of conditions, and frankly nobody seems interested in studying this phenomenon.

Whenever my thoughts get too loud (and they do, with remarkable dedication), I stop being a functioning member of society. I become a woman trapped inside a haunted house of her own construction, where every hallway leads to another catastrophic conclusion, which, statistically speaking, would never happen.

The strange thing is that these episodes always convince me they’re permanent. That this is it. I’ve finally reached the end of my ability to cope, and from now on I’ll simply exist like this forever, pacing around my room and staring dramatically at the walls.

And then I see him. Before we can have any profound conversation or he can give his miraculous insight, he stands there with open arms, and somehow that alone is enough to undo hours of damage.

I don’t know how to explain what happens next without sounding a little ridiculous.

The moment I fold myself into him, the world begins retreating. The noise loses its grip on me. The urgency evaporates. Everything that felt enormous only moments ago begins to shrink back to its actual size. I can breathe again, and for a while that feels like the greatest luxury a person can have.

My favourite place in the world is with my head resting against his chest.

I become aware of his heartbeat. Then his breathing. Then my own. And somewhere in the space between one inhale and the next, a border starts dissolving. I stop being entirely myself, and he stops being entirely himself, and suddenly there’s just this shared rhythm carrying us both forward. His chest rises. Mine follows. The distinction of where he begins and where I end grows blurrier and blurrier until trying to separate us feels like trying to identify where a river becomes the sea.

A while ago, I would’ve told you that every person belongs entirely to themselves, with clearly defined borders. Proper sovereignty and all that.

I don’t think that anymore.

There are moments when the people we love become woven so deeply into the fabric of our lives that they begin to exist inside us too. And mostly, not as an extension of ourselves, but as a place we can return to.

Anyway.

My boyfriend insists that deep breathing exercises are good for anxiety.
Which is true, technically.
I just happen to do mine through him.

• I leave the pot unattended on the stove to watch how quietly water learns the language of violence. It begins with a tremor too small to notice, with a handful of bubbles clinging politely to the bottom as though they are afraid of their own existence. I know that feeling. I feel it each time I read another headline that begins with a woman and ends with a warning. I feel it each time I calculate the route home before the evening has even begun, or when the keys subconsciously thread between my fingers after sunset. They tell me composure is a virtue, so I keep the lid firmly shut and wait for the whistle to finally arrive. My anger is like that steam. It has forgotten the shape of mercy. It burns the hand that lit the fire and the hand that came to extinguish it with equal devotion.

• I like to keep my front door bolted and play a game where I recognise love by the sound of its footsteps long before it reaches the porch. I draw the curtains and hold my breath until the one knocking mistakes my silence for absence. I will call it avoidance if someone insists on naming it, although I prefer words like timing, caution, or self-preservation. I leave the kettle warm, the lights on, the chair across from me neatly tucked beneath the table, as though I have been expecting company all along. I practice my almosts. Almost vulnerable. Almost known. Almost loved. Years later, when the paint will begin to peel from walls that have never echoed with another person’s laughter, I will swear loneliness arrived uninvited.

• I fold myself into the smallest shape that my body allows and press my forehead against my knees until my spine resembles a question mark. I count my breaths aloud. Then I lose the count. I begin again. I lie motionless as my heart strikes the walls of my chest like a bird trying to leave its cage. I like to catalogue every possible disaster before breakfast and leave glasses of water untouched beside the bed because standing up suddenly feels too ambitious. I convince myself that preparing for every ending is the same thing as surviving it. And so, I survive my anxiety patiently.

• I started keeping a hatbox because I wanted proof that I had lived. I imagined growing old, lifting its lid, and being greeted by a birthday candle wrapped in tissue paper and a note in a handwriting that has since learned to tremble. Instead, I fashioned my own Pandora’s box. Every time I open it, spills the afternoon I should have said yes, the apology that arrived too late, the person who loved me before I knew how to be loved. They scatter through the room until the present has nowhere left to stand. Every night I return to that hatbox like a pilgrim, kneeling before a shrine of my own making. I keep lifting the lid in search of the hope that was said to remain at the bottom. Instead, I find myself waiting there, alongside everything I refused to leave behind.

Dear Sal,
I am writing this poem to tell you that it hurts me
that I can no longer say your name,
when someone asks me who my male best friend is.

I wish I could tell them
how you gave up your batting turn,
(even though you had fought three seniors for that over)
the second you saw me crying on the grand staircase of our school.
How you sat beside me,
while carefully opening your water bottle,
and offered me your handkerchief.
I remember the silly jokes you made until I laughed,
and later told my boyfriend to get his act together.

I want to tell them
how you’ve spent hours texting me
on the days I felt alone,
and how you trusted me with everything,
more than life.

I have so much to tell you.
I want to text you.
I feel so lonely.

Dear Sal,
Please come, sit with me,
and playfully bully me until I laugh.
Why did you have to outgrow me?
I miss you.
I have cried rivers since losing you.

It is 1:43am, and I am reading about entropy again, and the universe is supposedly expanding in every direction at once. Yet, I have spent the better part of three years standing perfectly still, and the dying stars are scattering themselves across impossible distances, and I WANT TO ESCAPE MYSELF.

The asteroid does not ask permission of the vacuum. The photon does not grieve the sun that birthed it. Somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary sight, a black hole is swallowing entire histories, and I cannot even seem to swallow a single memory, and this is not how consciousness is supposed to feel, is it? IS IT?

I sat cross-legged beneath the window, watching Orion drag itself across the sky like an old prophecy. I think about the Ship of Theseus. I think about every cell that has died and every thought that has vanished and every version of me that should have disappeared with them. I have replaced every part. I have replaced every part. And thus spoke the comet: I SHOULD HAVE CHANGED BY NOW.

You know the rest. You know how the paradox goes. The self survives and survives and survives until survival itself becomes the prison. I keep waiting for some great rearrangement. I wait for the universe to make a clerical error and wake me up as someone lighter. Even light bends under sufficient pressure, and I have carried enough pressure to split worlds.

The first time I brush your hair,
you lean into my hand,
unthinking as a cat beneath a familiar touch.

The brush catches where your day has gathered itself:
the wind from the walk home,
the knot from twisting your strands around a pen while thinking about work,
and the place behind your ear where your perfume lingers longest.

You sit between my knees on the floor,
trusting me with the parts of yourself you cannot see,
and I learn the geography of you in reverse.
I trace the place where you always part it,
as faithfully as returning to the same page
of a favourite book.

The strands collect between my fingers.
as the traffic outside passes.
The world continues with its usual noise.
But in this room, I draw the brush
from tip to root, root to tip,
and discover that care is sometimes nothing grander
than untangling what your day has left behind.

Late in the afternoon, long after the groceries have been unpacked and the coriander has been rinsed and left drying beside the sink, long after the tea has gone cold because we forgot about it while discussing whether the neighbour’s new curtains are blue or grey, I find a butterfly trapped between the kitchen window and the mesh screen. It beats itself against the glass, unevenly, favouring one wing over the other. You stand beside me and watch it struggle for a moment before sliding the window open with two fingers.

I tell you, it would be such a shame for a creature that pretty to get stuck there and die. You laugh and tell me that butterfly wings are actually transparent and the blues and oranges and yellows come later, from the way light catches on thousands of microscopic scales. You explain this while the butterfly sits motionless on the edge of the frame, as though it too is listening. Then it lifts itself into the air, that same lopsided rhythm carrying it anyway, and disappears beyond the hibiscus bush. I keep thinking about what you said long after it has gone. How strange it is that beauty can depend so completely on the direction from which something is viewed, how a single beam of light can arrive whole and leave divided into colours. I wonder if love works the same way. Whether feelings arrive simple and transparent, and become complicated only after passing through the prism of another person’s mind.

There is a game I like to play when we’re together. Usually, when we’re lying in bed after a long day. The room is dark except for the streetlight slipping through the curtains, and the ceiling fan ticking faintly on its lowest setting is the only proof that time is still moving. I know what I am thinking at first, whether I remembered to send that email. Whether we need more milk. Whether it might rain tomorrow. Then I think about what you’re thinking. I imagine your thoughts moving quietly through your head while you stare at the ceiling beside me. Perhaps you’re remembering something from years ago. Perhaps you’re not thinking about anything. And from there, my mind naturally drifts further. I think about the arguments I have imagined, the endings I have prepared for. How often I have mistaken anticipation for wisdom. How many times I have received something whole and beautiful only to hold it up to a different light and mistake the change in colour for a change in substance. Perhaps when I sent you the butterfly, I sent it crooked.

What is it like,
being loved by everyone?”

It means you spend your whole life
disappearing carefully.
You learn early that people love the version
of you that never refuses them.
So you keep choosing them,
again and again, until one day you realize
you have lived an entire life
without ever choosing yourself.

I guess I chose myself too many times.

Do they still talk about you?

Sometimes.
Mostly when someone
need a villain for their story.
And you?

Less and less each year.
Love fades politely.
Hate, at least, lingers with teeth.

But do you think they know?

Know what?

How small the distance is between
being a monster and being a saint.

Probably not.
They need the distance to feel safe.
After all, we too spent our lives
thinking ignorance is bliss.

In life we never would have spoken.

No.

You were too good.

And you were too honest.

Look at us now.
Yes. Neighbours.

To anyone who doesn’t understand punctuations,
let me help you real quick.
A child runs into the parentheses of his mother’s arms
after the first day of school.
A man suffering from stage fear
delivers a speech with fumbling commas.
When you stare at your ceiling at 3 a.m,
you are trying to overcome the ellipses of your life.
Your state is similar to an exclamation mark
when you find your 5 year long boyfriend cheating.
You can use apostrophes in life to claim something quicker
but it’ll always end with a period.

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I have learned the geometry of rooms that were not built to include me,
the way two people make a wall with their bodies without meaning to,
the radius of a laugh that only opens for certain people.
I am still measuring.

I dreamed I walked into a room and became part of the furniture.
Someone set their coat across my shoulders and left a drink beside my hand.
The wallpaper merger across my spine
but nobody noticed anything strange.

By midnight I could tell which laugh belonged to whom
even from across the room.
I knew who would leave first.
Whose cigarette would burn untouched.
Which goodbye was a promise and which was already past keeping.

The chairs were stacked before I left. Someone switched off the lights.
In the dark, the room looked finished.
Only then did I fit inside.

I am the eldest child of the family, which meant every room found a way inside me.

My mother stored her unfinished life in the hollow behind my ribs. My father folded his fears into my school uniform pockets. My aunt tucked her regrets into the rice drum. As my uncle fed me sweets dense as wet cement, while I swallowed generations whole.

The house had a place for every burden.

The old mattresses grew mould in my loft. The steel trunk stored the wedding silks. The glass jars held mango pickle.

And me? I was to hold everything else.


Until I could no longer separate
my life from their luggage.

As grammar goes, you cannot make everything plural by adding an ‘s’. Man becomes men. Tooth becomes teeth. And a person, when murdered becomes people.

So when they ask me where the girl they knew has gone, I tell them she was divided carefully, like prasad after prayer. By the time everyone was fed, there was nothing left of her.

[Place a man in a room. Ensure the room is ordinary. A door, a chair, a window if budget permits. Give him nothing to fear.

Wait.

The man will provide his own.

Allow him to check the lock. Do not stop him. Let him return to it several times, each visit more devotional than the last. The lock should remain unchanged throughout the performance.

Introduce a loved one through absence. A delayed message will suffice. Observe as the man constructs a funeral from eight minutes of silence. Observe how quickly the body learns to mourn the living.

Wait.

Nothing bad should happen.

The phone should ring eventually. The house should stay standing. Resist the temptation to reward the man with catastrophe.

He is capable of generating it himself.

Allow the man a notebook. He will fill it with futures. House fires. Car wrecks. Tumours. Small apocalypses. By the second act, he should mistake preparation for prevention.

Wait.

Nothing should happen.

The audience may begin to notice that every disaster enters through the same door.

The man.

By now, the room should contain two figures. The one anticipating the blow and the one delivering it. They may appear identical. This is intentional.

Continue until the distinction becomes impossible to maintain.

When the man finally calls his own name, ensure he answers immediately]

Blackout

The Horror of Being Seen

There is a phrase that circulates quietly among readers and reviewers of Monika Kim's debut novel: "Dead men don't catcall and eyeless men can't gaze." It is at once a joke, a threat, and a manifesto. It captures the essence of the novel because the male gaze is fundamentally violent, not just unsettling. For a woman who has been objectified by this gaze, the only truly radical reaction is to reclaim the tools of her own objectification and use them for her empowerment.

This essay examines The Eyes Are the Best Part as a work of social horror that operates on multiple, simultaneous registers. It is, first, a psychological novel about a young woman’s descent into violence and her attempts to hold her fractured family together. It is, second, a pointed critique of the intersecting oppressions that Asian American women — and Korean American women in particular — navigate in contemporary America. It is, third, a work rooted in specific Korean cultural traditions and superstitions, particularly the folk practice of eating fish eyes, which Kim transforms into one of the novel’s most resonant symbols. And it is, finally, a text that deliberately positions itself within the tradition of feminist horror, deploying the genre’s capacity for political commentary to argue something that more polite literary forms might struggle to voice: that the rage of the doubly marginalised woman is not aberrant — it is logical, cumulative, and wholly justified.

The Novel’s Architectonics: Plot, Voice, and Genre

The Eyes Are the Best Part centres on Ji-won, a Korean American college freshman living in a cramped Los Angeles apartment with her mother (referred to throughout only as Umma, the Korean word for mother) and her fifteen-year-old sister, Ji-Hyun. The novel opens in the aftermath of Ji-won’s father (Appa) having abandoned the family following an extramarital affair. The departure is catastrophic since Umma collapses emotionally, barely managing to maintain her job at a grocery store; Ji-won’s college grades are failing; and Ji-won herself has been saddled with the weight of the eldest-daughter role in a Korean immigrant household, a burden that is simultaneously deeply cultural and deeply gendered.

The narrative engine is set in motion by two developments. First, Umma begins dating George: a white man who ogles Asian waitresses, brags about his consulting career, drives a truck decorated with a political sticker that reads "I'm Republican Because We Can't All Be On Welfare," and treats Ji-won and Ji-Hyun with condescending presumption. He is a grotesque, almost satirically drawn figure, and this is intentional. Second, Ji-won begins having dreams or nightmares of rooms full of eyes. Blue eyes specifically. And then she starts eating them.

The cannibalism begins with fish eyes. Umma, in a moment of warmth that functions also as cultural transmission, offers Ji-won the eye of the fish at dinner, explaining that the eyes are the best part: a delicacy, bringing luck, passed down through generations. Ji-won eats it, and something unlocks. The hunger, initially metaphorical, becomes literal. Ji-won begins targeting the blue-eyed men around her, including Geoffrey, a fellow college student who presents as a progressive feminist but who is revealed to be a predatory voyeur interested in Ji-won not as a person but as an exotic object. George and Geoffrey, as the critic writing in Reactor magazine observed, are "two sides of the same coin": the overt and covert faces of white male entitlement toward Asian women.

The novel is narrated in Ji-won’s first person. We see the world as Ji-won sees it, which means we see the casual, normalised degradations she navigates every day, and we feel the cumulative weight of those degradations. Kim uses the unreliable narrator not to invalidate Ji-won’s perspective but to explore the distance between how Ji-won is perceived by the world and what she actually is. To the men around her, she is a type: an Asian girl, a sexual category, a cultural curiosity. To herself and to us, she is a person in terrible pain, loving her family with a ferocity that the world refuses to see, and fighting to survive in a society that has already decided what she is.

Double Marginalisation: Race, Gender, and the Intersection of Oppressions

The theoretical framework most relevant to reading The Eyes Are the Best Part is the concept of double marginalisation, or, more precisely, what scholars of intersectionality (following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational 1989 essay) call compounded oppression experienced by women occupying multiple subordinate subject positions simultaneously.

Asian American women face a distinct form of gendered racism that cannot be adequately understood by examining race and gender as separate variables. As documented in the American Psychological Association‘s landmark study, they are inseparably gendered: they include fetishisation, the ascription of submissiveness, hypersexualisation, and the presumption of sexual availability for white men.

This intersectional oppression has deep historical roots. The 1875 Page Act, which predated the more famous Chinese Exclusion Act by seven years, barred Chinese women from immigrating to the United States on the presumption that they were prostitutes — that their very bodies were inherently immoral and threatening. The War Bride Act of 1945 and subsequent legislation then repositioned Asian women as useful — but only insofar as they provided comfort and sexual availability to American military personnel returning from wars fought on Asian soil. The arc is consistent and devastating: Asian women are alternatively demonized or domesticated, never simply regarded as full human beings with independent desires, aspirations, and inner lives.

The cultural stereotypes that emerged from this history are known as the “Lotus Blossom” and “Dragon Lady” archetypes. The Lotus Blossom (also known as the China Doll or Geisha figure) is submissive, sexually eager to please white men, fragile, and possessed of an almost childlike docility. The Dragon Lady is her shadow-self: hypersexual, devious, using her sexuality as a weapon, ultimately a dangerous temptress deserving of punishment. Both stereotypes, as Edward Said’s foundational theory of Orientalism makes clear, are products of the Western imagination’s need to construct the East as its exotic, feminized, and controllable Other. Both reduce Asian women to objects defined entirely in relation to white male desire.

Kim places Ji-won in deliberate, pointed relationship to both archetypes and then systematically dismantles them. Ji-won does not conform to the Lotus Blossom: she is not submissive, not eager to please, not docile. She is furious, she lies, she manipulates, she refuses to perform gratitude for the attention of men who have decided she owes it to them. But she is not the Dragon Lady either, because the Dragon Lady archetype still defines the Asian woman entirely through the lens of male desire — she is dangerous because she is seductive. Ji-won's violence is not seductive. It is not organised around the logic of male desire at all. It is organised around hunger, rage, and a kind of grotesque reclamation of agency.

Cultural Anchors: Korean Folk Practice, Food, and the Symbolism

One of The Eyes Are the Best Part‘s most sophisticated achievements is its use of Korean cultural practices and superstitions as the novel’s symbolic and thematic architecture. Kim has spoken about the novel’s origins in a specific folk practice: in Korean (and more broadly East Asian) culture, the eyes of a whole fish are considered a delicacy, reserved for honoured guests, believed to bring luck, and thought to have homeopathic qualities. The fish eye is associated with wisdom, clarity of sight, and perception because fish are thought to have exceptional vision (navigating murky water that humans cannot see).

The phrase that gives the novel its title — “Umma tells me that the eyes are the best part” — introduces this practice in the novel’s opening lines, with Kim presenting it through Ji-won’s somewhat ambivalent perspective. Ji-won has grown up in America, and Asian food practices have been consistently marked by the dominant culture as strange, disgusting, or “exotic.” The fish eye sits at the intersection of cultural pride and cultural shame for a second-generation immigrant who has internalized enough Western norms to find her own heritage unsettling. When she eventually eats the fish eye and experiences a kind of awakening or hunger, it represents not just a psychological turn but a cultural reclamation, which is a return to the wisdom her mother carries and that the dominant culture has told her to discard.

The novel's deployment of the Korean word Umma throughout, rather than "mother" or "mom," is similarly deliberate. Kim's use of Korean language markers — Umma, Appa, palja (fate or destiny) — insists on the cultural specificity of the world she is describing.

The palja that Ji-won acknowledges — the fate of the eldest daughter, burdened with responsibility, expected to hold the family together — is a specifically Korean concept of destiny that has no exact equivalent in Western culture, and Kim's use of it without translation demands that readers enter her world rather than expecting her to translate herself for their comfort.

What We Taste When We Read

To read The Eyes Are the Best Part is to spend time inside a subjectivity that mainstream culture has consistently rendered invisible, to feel the specific textures of what it is to be a young Korean American woman navigating racism and sexism simultaneously, to understand from within why the rage that builds there is not pathological but logical.

The Reactor reviewer — herself a Korean American eldest daughter — ended her review with a phrase in Korean: jal meokkesseumnida. “I will eat well.” In Korean culture, the phrase is said before a meal — it is an expression of gratitude and anticipation. To address it to the author is to say: your book is a feast. This is a beautiful and precise response.

The eyes, Umma says, are the best part. And Ji-won, in the end, agrees. But she has decided for herself what eyes she will eat, and what kind of vision she will take into her body, and what kind of power she will make her own. That decision is messy, violent, unresolved, and human. And it is exactly that humanity which makes it the novel's greatest gift: to its readers, and to the tradition of feminist literature that it joins.

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A few days ago, someone asked me,

“If I were forced to wear a warning label, what would it say?”

And I ran all the possible answers through my head.

Would it read,

Approach with caution.

You are talking to a highly sensitive, intuitive writer who might just use everything you say in a write-up.

Or would it say,

Beware of self-destruction.

She just drank an alarming amount of coffee in two minutes and searched the daily caffeine limit only to learn that she might die.

(Don’t worry. She is probably just a little jittery.)

Will it say,

A fluctuating mind in progress.

Because she has the personality of every character from every book she has ever read, which causes severe mood swings.

Or will it come with a tag sign that says:

Trespassers will be shot, and survivors will be shot again.

Please maintain a six-metre distance for your safety and mental well-being.

But even if my label read

Broke. Trying. Lost. Insensitive.

it wouldn’t come as a jaw-dropper since that’s what my high school friends associate with me.

I guess what I am saying is,

I have been so many different versions of myself lately,

that somewhere between becoming and unbecoming,

I lost track of who I really am.

Your sandals were somewhere behind us,
and mine kept filling with sand.

You lit a cigarette
and held it between your fingers
as we watched the tide drag things back with it.

“Do you remember,” you said,
“how badly we wanted to grow up?”

I laughed, thinking about how
I would probably still have been running to the shore,
letting the waves touch my ankles
before running breathless back to the mat,
if it hadn’t been for the exhaustion.

I told you
I had used to think adulthood would feel taller,
and you dug your thumb into the neck of the beer bottle,
peeling at the damp label slowly.

The sky had already begun losing its colour
as we watched a father lift his sleeping son
from the sand without waking him.
We smiled at how easily children trusted gravity around adults.

For a moment,
I thought about every version of myself that I had lost at once.
No more school shoes drying near the balcony.
No more coins pressed into my palm for ice cream.
No longer the certainty that I would be looked after without ever asking for it.

The cigarette ash fell unnoticed onto your jeans.
I leaned back on my elbows
as we briefly caught the moon
in the silver ring near my thumb.