Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique. In her new book, Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun, she blends different genres, from narrative prose to epistles to ancestral mourning rites, to offer an intimate cultural history of war, illness, and estrangement through the experiential lens of her family.

Your book features your family’s lives heavily, demonstrating how they are “enmeshed [in] arcs of Japanese colonialism, war, division, and transoceanic migration.” How did your own experiences bring you to writing this book? What was it like to craft such a personal narrative?

While my father’s death and mother’s hospitalization provided the initial impetus to write this book, this text is one I have long been wanting to write but felt as if I couldn’t (for various reasons). It is deeply personal, but the personal isn’t synonymous with the autobiographical, so I hesitate in describing this book as a memoir. Rather, I understand Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun as an intimate cultural history that narrates how the mundane and minute details of our lives cohere as the patterned marks of social history. I honor my parents and ancestors, including place and land, as historical subjects whose trajectories—even if not immediately sensed or legible to others—have been conditioned by the fraught histories of colonialism, war, racial capitalism, and migration.

When your family history provides the foundational questions for your writing in academe, there is a degree of (personal and professional) vulnerability that lands differently from when you write about other matters. Relatedly, I had to ask a very different set of questions when it came to the ethics of writing because my familial histories are shaped by estrangement and entanglement. The topics that form the heart of this book—addiction, mental illness and disability, patriarchal erasure, and colonial complicity—are hairy topics that I have never broached with my extended family. At the same time, I felt that it was necessary to write carefully and intentionally about these histories without shame or embarrassment because they have impacted my own becoming in the world. Additionally, despite the ethical, methodological, and discursive conundrums I contended with in this book, there is still an entrenched sense in academia that writing about and through the personal is somehow devoid of intellectual rigor and/or is a form of “navel-gazing” (something that Toni Morrison and Christina Sharpe discuss in “The Site of Memory” and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, respectively).

But even with these challenges, I felt fortunate to have had such wonderful examples and writing to draw from that teach us how vitally important it is to push back against these assumptions. It’s no secret that feminist and queer scholars, writers, artists, and thinkers, from Audre Lorde and members of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) to Christina Sharpe, Vinh Nguyen, Gil Hochberg, Hazel Carby, and Grace Cho (among others), have long destabilized the boundary that separates the “personal” from the “public” in intellectually rigorous, imaginative, and lyrical ways. In this way, the experiences I bring into Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun are not only connected to family and Korea; I also draw on my intellectual training as a critical feminist scholar and memory worker.

In your book, you grapple with writing about diasporic family histories, especially within the confines of academia’s institutionalized language. You suggest the necessity and potentiality of a new vocabulary. How does the book reflect this project?

When I began this project, I wasn’t planning to write a second book; I am explicit about this in the introduction of Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun. After several months of existing in emergency mode following winter 2022, I finally sat down in front of my computer in my home office one early morning. I still remember that day. Everything was quiet and still, and the keyboard felt cool beneath my fingertips. At this time, I was still deep in my grief, but I also had these pressing questions I needed to ask my father and his family, whom I remain estranged from. I never asked him these questions when he was alive and may never have the chance to meet his family in this lifetime. This place of unanswered—perhaps, unanswerable—questions became my entry-point into writing again.

As paradoxical as this may seem, the acknowledgement that these questions were likely unanswerable—but were, nevertheless, important to put onto paper—felt liberating. I began to explore unfamiliar methods and forms of writing that departed from how I had been trained to research and write—because as scholars, we are trained to craft “good” questions and to answer them to the best of our ability (which, of course, is important to scholarship). For this project, just being able to say out loud a constellation of questions that I had never dared to ask before (at least in my writing) permitted me to sit with the profound scale of uncertainties, ruptures, and divisions that have molded my familial lines for over a century. Unexpectedly, it also provided imaginative approaches to encountering and writing about grief, living and dying, and estrangement within the Korean diaspora.

To give an example: when I first began to write about my father, I was frustrated with the dearth of family records (e.g., photographs, letters, birth certificates, etc.) in my sisters’ and my possession, as well as the constraints affixed to my limited Korean and the separation from my paternal family. But these “limitations” compelled me to delve into and learn more about Korean cosmologies of grief, mourning, and ancestral relationality, such as shamanic traditions and Confucian-based rituals like jesa. By working with and through paradigms of grief, loss, and mourning beyond Western models (i.e., Freudian notions of mourning and melancholia), I came to understand that we are always in communion and building relations with our dead as ancestors. Thus, family records are not only preserved materials that tell us about the past; they are also created in the present and gesture to the future. This gave way to a practice of writing letters to my grandfather and my father for over a year as an integral part of the family memory archive.

You experiment with many forms of speculative writing in this book. What inspired this choice and how did you go about putting these varied forms together?

When I started to write this book, my initial goal wasn’t to experiment with or write in different genres. Rather, these forms—storytelling, epistles, the visual essay, grief rituals, the spell-poem (written by my twin sister)—came to me out of necessity.

A part of this is because of the systemic erasures in my family memory archive. While my paternal and maternal grandfathers’ histories are well-documented within family and public archives (my paternal grandfather was a prominent literary critic and scholar in south Korea, and my maternal grandfather was one of the first people to pass the national medical board exam in Korea without a formal education), my grandmothers’ histories are spotty and largely missing from shared family memories and public records. Especially with my maternal grandmother, Bok Nam, it was imperative to center her personhood as much as possible in this book, even though I knew so little about her life. My mother also knew very little about my grandmother’s family and life in Hamhŭng (where Bok Nam was raised in present-day north Korea) and to the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never shared her history of family division with her own children.

But as I’ve shared in other writing, I approach absences as forms of presence in their own right. In my attempt to better understand the erasure of my grandmother’s histories, other knowledges, feelings, and forms of sensing crystallize. These include conjured memories of what Bok Nam’s life might have been like in Korea under Japanese rule and US military occupation, as well as a desire to engage my maternal family photo archive through different means. When I began to sort through hundreds of photographs that my Uncle Sukyoon passed down to me in January 2020, I did not encounter these images as “visual evidence” per se; instead, I interacted with them as embodied forms of relational connection that demonstrated how my grandparents, mother, and relatives survived war, upheaval, and migration. I imagined my grandmother safeguarding these photographs as her family and she were violently displaced during the Korean War—it’s remarkable when you think about it! For me, this mark of survival became the most important characteristic of the diasporic family album. It guided me to respect the myriad stories held within their bodies, some which are not ready to be told right now. I also began to understand these photographs as images that are happening right now rather than as inert artifacts of the past. As I am holding these images at this moment, what are they telling me or gesturing to about family, loss, and history? Today, the affective attachment I have to these photographs feels even more urgent because my Uncle Sukyoon—the baby of his family and their memory keeper—unexpectedly passed away in 2024.

More and more, I understand writing as an enlivened way to practice, play, and experiment with theory, rather than as a medium to name and analyze theory (as important as this can be). What does it mean to understand diasporic grief as a felt form of thinking and writing, rather than as an object of study? When I was grappling with this question, I found it generative to turn to the work of poets, especially the writing of Solmaz Sharif. When I was re-reading her first collection of poems, Look, I studied her lyrical and strategic use of words, white space, line arrangement, and punctuation. Somehow, her poetry manages to be direct, capacious, and deeply visceral all at the same time. In some ways, I think this is because poets understand that reading, at its very best, can be a profound experience where intellectual engagement is inseparable from feeling, sensing, and holding text.

Your first book, Reencounters (2019), was on the Korean War and “diasporic memory.” How do you see concepts of diasporic memory and diasporic grief building off of each other and/or being in tension with each other?

I appreciate this question because, in some ways, I use “diaspora” as a temporary bookmarker in my scholarship. I find “diaspora” to be a perplexing and at times, a problematic term. More often than not, diaspora seems to inevitably give way to stagnant binaries, like nation/dispersal, authentic/reproduction, birth family/adoptive family (there is a rich history of queer and feminist scholarship that explores and critiques the term diaspora, especially within Asian/American studies). Yet, even with these imperfections, “diaspora” has allowed me to grapple more rigorously with the differences and structural conditions that generate social relations, political orientations, and interspecies communities beyond nation-state boundaries.

In Reencounters, I use diasporic memory as a theoretical framework to unpack how Korean diasporic artists, performers, and other cultural workers, examine the ongoing material, psychic, and emotional effects of the Korean War fromtheir specific locations across geographies, temporalities, and cultural contexts. While diasporic memory and diasporic grief are very much in conversation with one another, I understand the latter more as an improvised practice and felt form of writing that contend with losses which are simultaneously personal and historical. In other words, diasporic grief, as a practice and form of writing, allowed me to explore how death, grieving, and loss are never about a single person, place, or moment in time. Rather, they are indicative of an accrual of conditions that stretch across longer arcs of time and space.  

Read the introduction to Before the Fire Dogs Steal the Sun for free, and save 40% on the paperback through May 19 with the coupon code SPRING26. (After 19 May, you can save 30% with coupon E26BAIK.)