Author of Heart Eater
By Sarah Kloth
Heart Eater explores immigration, identity, and language through a deeply personal lens. What made this the right moment to tell this story in memoir form?
SS: I have edited and written a number of other books, all of which center on intersecting issues of migration, race, nation, culture, identity, kinship, and I felt that there were still a lot of things I wanted to say in a rather straightforward way in prose. I’ve always loved to read personal essays and memoirs, so that ongoing interest combined with the (re)surge in violent rhetoric and politics against immigrants and refugees in this country, and around the world, made it feel like the right time.
The subtitle references “how we find ourselves in language.” How has language shaped your understanding of self, belonging, and memory throughout your life?
SS: Language has been so influential for me because of how language carries attitudes, assumptions, values, and history. Because Korean and English are two totally different languages in different writing systems, it’s been an intricate ongoing puzzle to understand how the U.S. historically has “languaged” Asia and Asians, aka “the Orient.” The history of Western language and discourse is so all-encompassing when you are brought to the US as a child. Language has profoundly shaped my self-concept, and my concept of the world and my place in it.
English, being a colonial language in the U.S. and in the rest of the former British Empire, is a culturally and economically dominant global language (for the time being), and I think making that web of meaning visible, at least in some small ways, has been essential to understanding myself (and others) as a complex subject, and not just an object through the Western gaze.
To be named is to be defined, and to be more concrete and personal, the most daily way language has shaped how I move through the world is through my name(s). Like most Asian adoptees to the US—throughout the 20th century after WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and ongoing—my adoptive American parents gave me their last name and a new American first and middle name. I changed my name legally back to my Korean name shortly after I graduated from college, which has all kinds of implications for how I’m perceived, mis/pronounced, etc.
Much of your work interrogates inherited history and cultural displacement. How did writing memoir differ emotionally from your poetry and other creative work?
SS: I felt I had to be much more careful because I was often writing about other people, mostly my adoptive family, but also about the other 200,000 Korean adoptees that have been socially and legally constructed since 1954. I never want anyone to think I’m trying to speak for anyone else, and so I examined every emotion and its context that I put on the page. I wanted to be as precise as possible, because I know that every person from any minority group carries the pressure of being seen as a representative, whether we want to or not. It’s just a fact of being from a lesser known group or subgroup. In poetry, I feel I can be more fluid with emotions because images, symbols, allusions, and other oblique gestures in lyric poetry can carry or evoke a great deal of feeling, affect, mood, atmosphere.
The book wrestles with the idea of belonging across multiple identities and cultural realities. Do you feel belonging is something we discover, construct, or continually negotiate?
SS: It seems that belonging is something that is continually negotiated, in the human world and the whole living world. It feels, and I believe is, ecological.
Food, language, and memory often become intertwined in immigrant narratives. Were there sensory memories that became especially important while writing this book?
SS: Although sensory memories are so priceless, I didn’t include a great deal of sensory description of my familial and social memories that I used as launching pads for what I wanted to explore about my Korean American adoptee experience, and why I have become the kind of writer I am. I think because I was writing about a lot of Americana, I hoped I could get away with just enough description to set the scene, e.g. saying The Pledge of Allegiance in public school. I think I wrote about food only once or maybe twice, briefly, in this memoir, but I love to think about the role of food, and edited a whole anthology with wonderful contributors titled What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family. If I were writing more about South Korea, which I hope to do, I think I would weave in more sensory description for certain scenes and settings.
The memoir engages with both personal history and larger systems surrounding immigration and assimilation. How did you balance the intimate with the political on the page?
SS: I tried to ground each chapter in something personal, because the whole premise of the book is that I’m a creative writer and not a historian, political scientist, or professional journalist. I gave myself permission to be idiosyncratic and follow my own trains of thought, while also giving enough context to show that the personal is political, or that the specific can illuminate something universal that we all share, such as, we all come from somewhere, we all have lineages, we all come from kinship structures, we are all living bound by the laws of nations and so many forces much larger than ourselves.
You write with remarkable attention to sound and rhythm. Did your background as a poet influence the structure or voice of the memoir?
SS: That’s generous, thank you. Yes, my background as a poet and my reading of a wide variety of lyric memoirs and prose poetry influences my sense of freedom to engage in some language play here and there. I was hoping that my poet-ness would help me stay with emotions as well as the mystery of certain images when and where possible.
How did your understanding of family evolve while writing Heart Eater?
SS: I learned more about my U.S. adoptive family and their immigrant history, which made me feel like I knew them a little bit more. I was also able to receive some photographs of one of my maternal great uncles of his time as a U.S. Army soldier in South Korea. That made his time there more real to me.
The title itself is striking and visceral. What does “Heart Eater” represent to you emotionally or symbolically?
SS: Because I can tend to be (overly?) abstract in my writing, I wanted a title that was embodied, and reminded me that I’m writing out of lifelong hungers that will remain ambiguous losses as well as opportunities for revelation, recognition, and healing.
Throughout the memoir, language feels both connective and alienating. Have there been moments in your life where language created distance rather than belonging?
SS: Yes, I think the memoir is so much about that, about situations that were made by and for white Americans, while being told that “America is a melting pot,” but to melt means to merge, but it’s impossible to truly “merge” because the U.S. and the postcolonial world is built on historical racial hierarchies, masculinist patriotism, etc. So the overarching pattern has been that certain encounters began as alienating, whether deliberately or not, but understanding the context has helped me in so many ways. Also, I really try to use language as a way to bring people together, because solidarity is the only answer to our collective challenges.
How did you approach writing about cultural inheritance, especially the parts that are fragmented, inaccessible, or lost?
SS: I’ve been working on this throughout all my poetry work and in my teaching and community work as well. I think there’s the inside out part, which is getting in touch with the feelings related to the absence, and then there’s the outside in part, which is research and information and context and working one’s way back toward that absence. I also have affirmed, over the last several decades, that community is truly the way regardless of what information can be found or not found. There’s a long answer here about that but I’ll leave it there, that cultural inheritance is dynamic.
The memoir examines the emotional complexity of immigration beyond the standard narratives of success or assimilation. What stories did you feel were missing from those conversations?
SS: Stories about reunion dominate adoption narratives, which makes complete sense, but that’s not part of my story and probably won’t ever be, so I wanted to explore that dimension. I also have discovered that there were a few unique things about my childhood and my adoptive parents and I wanted to look at those differences in the hopes that I could say something useful about the U.S.
Memory in the book feels layered and nonlinear, almost associative. How did you decide on the memoir’s structure and movement through time?
SS: It is definitely associative and also I tried to use an overall chronological structure that would end with college. A lot of essays touch on topics that don’t necessarily need to be in a specific order, so I mostly thought about, and asked early readers, what kinds of historical information a reader might need first. I also thought about the themes and motifs I wanted in the front of the book that I hoped would color a reader’s experience of the rest of the chapters.
Was there a chapter or moment in the book that proved especially difficult—or unexpectedly healing—to write?
SS: Discovering my adoptive mother’s father was on a ship at Normandy was surreal, and it helped me feel a little bit closer to him, which was unexpected and welcome. It makes me want to learn more about the Great Depression and how that generation of Chicago immigrants worked hard to live through it.
What conversations do you hope Heart Eater opens for readers navigating questions of identity, language, family, and home?
SS: I hope that my work helps readers understand, in general, how important language can be to shaping our sense of belonging, and specifically, that being a transnational adoptee is an ever-unfolding lifelong existential experience.
Heart Eater
Sun Yung Shin
Inaugural Selection of the Immigrant Writers on Immigrant Writing Series
Comprised of short essays, or field notes, Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language traces Sun Yung Shin’s journey from her childhood as a nameless, abandoned nine-month-old baby in Seoul, South Korea to an award-winning author.
Raised as a Korean immigrant by a white Christian family in the American Midwest, Sun Yung Shin paid close attention to the power of words—especially those related to race, nation, and kinship. Through these meaningful encounters, Shin developed into a writer enthralled with language’s capacity to imagine, manifest, connect, and even heal.
Through the lens of language and immigration, Heart Eater explores the question that has obsessed Shin since childhood: “What does it mean to be American?”
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Article originally Published in the Summer 2026 Issue.