SJ Kim
This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures
Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Longlisted for the 2026 Gordon Burn Prize
Born in Korea, raised in the American South, and trying her best to survive British academia, SJ Kim probes her experiences as a writer, scholar, and 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 anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. She considers the silences between generations―especially within the Asian diaspora in the West―as 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 K-dramas and writers who sustain her, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Toni Morrison, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
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More Info
Author: SJ Kim
Original language: English
Format: B format paperback
Publication date: 9 May 2025
ISBN: 9781916751262
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751279
Reviews
Don Mee Choi
'SJ Kim is an exquisite cartographer who maps wounds across a diasporic map. Every mark, every stitch sewn across her fractured map is saturated with pain as well as love—정. Kim unravels and relives 정, its broken emotions, thoughts, and attachments. This Part Is Silent is unbearably tender, yet it courageously speaks truth to power.'
Kirkus (starred review)
‘Rather than drawing readers into the discrete and measured intimacy of many memoirs, Kim leans into the inaccessibility of one’s full experience as interpreted by another. The author’s quiet absences sharpen the edges of her inspection of entrenched, implied superiority and easy erasure in discussions of race and in the expectations of immigrants…Kim materialises as a teacher who takes her role seriously as she calls herself and her readers to action.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Throughout, Kim’s astute observations reveal the varied meanings of silence, whether she’s discussing her struggle to connect with her parents or holding her tongue after a white interlocutor’s racially insensitive comment. Probing and deeply felt, this entrances.’
Neel Mukherjee
‘SJ Kim’s pellucid lyricism hides a razorblade: I haven’t read a more beautiful, more raging and anguished account of racism and female erasure. It’s a book about finding a toehold in a world that would rather you slipped and fell. It's a book about survival and unbelonging. It is necessary reading.’
Erna Brodber
‘I stopped reading This Part Is Silent at first, because I was frightened: I recognised myself to have become what spiritual workers call “open”. Should any combination of words destabilise me like this? Had I been entered by a spirit? Little by little, words became sculptured pieces. We are let into a Korean American family operating in an English environment. The craziness that this kind of life brings to other perceptions and self-perception is beautifully demonstrated. The words no longer hit: they are music. No alien spirit, the spirit is no stranger. It is us.’
Victoria Chang
‘SJ Kim so aptly captures the constant feelings of displacement, the way displacement becomes air to breathe in and out, air that can suffocate. Kim’s speaker is displaced again and again, and the fragmented language and structure of this book beautifully reflects that displacement. This Part Is Silent is lyrical, heartrending, and important.’
Ken Chen
‘This Part Is Silent is a testament—a wounded work that explores academic precarity, microaggressions, and the works of Yusef Komunyakaa and Kim Hyesoon, written by a young Korean American writer trying to survive in Manchester’s Chinatown, higher education, and contemporary racial discourse. Kim’s vulnerable text takes autofiction in a turn that’s at once multicultural, metatextual, and multilingual.’