Olivia Hyunsin Kim, arbeitet international als Choreografin und Kuratorin. Sie gewann den ersten Platz des Amadeu Antonio Kunstpreises 2019 und schloss ihren MA in Choreografie und Performance am Institut für ATW Gießen mit Auszeichnung ab. Sie war u. a. Stipendiatin bei Impulstanz 2017, beim Goethe-Institut Montréal 2022, in der Kulturakademie Tarabya 2021–23. 2022–23 ist sie als Composer-in-Residence an der Staatsoper Hannover. Ihre Arbeiten wurden u. a. in den Sophiensælen Berlin, im Art Sonje Center Seoul und im Museo Universitario del Chopo Mexiko City gezeigt. www.ddanddarakim.net
Inspirationsquellen:
I say this because until a few years ago I have been an Asian American woman working among non-Asians in an educational institution where most of the decision-makers were men*; an Asian American woman thriving under the smug illusion that I was not the stereotypic image of the Asian woman because I had a career teaching English in a community college. I did not think anything assertive was necessary to make my point. People who know me, I reasoned, the ones who count, know who I am and what I think. Thus, even when what I considered a veiled racist remark was made in a casual social setting, I would "let it go" because it was pointless to argue with people who didn't even know their remark was racist. I had supposed that I was practicing passive resistance while being stereotyped, but it was so passive no one noticed I was resisting; it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible.
My experience leads me to believe that contrary to what I thought, I had actually been contributing to my own stereotyping. Like the hero in Ralph Ellison's novel The Invisible Man, I had become invisible to white Americans, and it clung to me like a bad habit. Like most bad habits, this one crept up on me because I took it in minute doses like Mithradates' poison and my mind and body adapted so well to it I hardly noticed it was there.
For the past eleven years I have busied myself with the usual chores of an English teacher, a wife of a research chemist, and a mother of four rapidly growing children. I hadn't even done much to shatter this particular stereotype: the middle class woman happy to be bringing home the extra income and quietly fitting into the man's world of work. When the Asian American woman is lulled into believing that people perceive her as being different from other Asian women (the submissive, subservient, ready-to-please, easy-to-get-along-with Asian woman), she is kept comfortably content with the state of things. She becomes ineffectual in the milieu in which she moves. The seemingly apolitical middle class woman and the apolitical Asian woman constituted a double invisibility.
Min Jin Lee: “History has failed us, but no matter” serves as my thesis statement. I believe history has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world, not just the Korean-Japanese, who are the subject of Pachinko. I am also arguing that the discipline of history has failed. It is not that historians aren’t doing their jobs but rather that the memory of history has been reconstructed by the elite, because the overwhelming majority of ordinary people rarely leave sufficient primary documents; they do not have others recording their lives in real time.
The phrase “but no matter” is a statement of defiance. It doesn’t matter that history has failed us because ordinary people have persisted anyway. This idea gives me an enormous amount of strength and hope as a writer because I am an ordinary person. Those of us who may be women of color, immigrants, or working class aren’t often meant to be people who write novels about ideas, but no matter.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha