Author Photo: Jack Sorokin

“Docile is the rarest of things: a scorchingly honest, beautiful, hugely evocative memoir that’s also a proper pageturner: I read it breathlessly in a single sitting, transported and deeply moved. It's at one and the same time the story of a life and a meditation on identity, family, trauma, illness, and the nature of love, art, and success. It’s wonderful.” — Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H is for Hawk

A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than for love. When the family’s fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: “Can she speak English?”

Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.” Years of self-erasure take a toll and Song experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania.

So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything. In her extraordinary debut memoir Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, Song expertly weaves together the beauty and complexity of her experience. It is an immigrant story, but also a mother-daughter story, a mental health story, and ultimately a redemption story. Poetic and unflinching, Docile is a lesson in the power of love and legacy to shape us and finding the bravery to be our authentic selves in spite of the expectations we carry.

In a conversation with Emma Eun-joo Choi, Song discusses her memoir.

Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl will be available for purchase.

Hyeseung Song: Docile with Emma Eun-joo Choi

Thursday, July 18, 2024 6:30 PM (EDT)

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Speaker:

About the Moderator:

Emma Eun-joo Choi is a writer, comic, and “journalist.” She is a producer, writer, social media head, and New York City correspondent at NPR’s flagship trivia/comedy/news show Wait… Wait… Don’t Tell Me! From 2022 to 2023, she was the host of its spinoff podcast Everyone & Their Mom, where she interviewed everybody from celebrities to asparagus psychics to her own mother, and regularly records segmented out in the field. She is the youngest ever NPR program host. Equal parts comedian and fiction writer, her short stories have appeared both online and in print and her plays have been produced professionally at DC Fringe. Her fiction falls between the genres of horror and magical realism and is often deeply sad. She is currently working on a novel about a haunted house.

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