This Part Is Silent Audiobook

A searing essay collection that explores displacement and loss creativity and change institutional power and progress

Born in Korea raised in the American South and trying her best to survive British academia SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer a scholar and a daughter to confront the silences she finds in the world With curiosity and sensitivity she writes letters to the institutions that simultaneously support and fail her intimate accounts of immigration and interrogations of rising antiBlack and antiAsian racism She considers the silences between generationsespecially within the Asian diaspora in the Westas she finds her way back to her own family during the pandemic lockdown

Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean her mother tongue and draws inspiration from Kdramas and writers across cultures who sustain her As borders close in and nations enter lockdown the journey that Kim traces is fraughtand at once illuminates that the act of remaining present has its own power allowing boundless hope